this post was submitted on 02 Sep 2023
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Seriously though, the USA is virtually always bad.

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[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago

slave trade on a scale to rival the Atlantic trade

not really. we don't have good records but it was probably less than a million people, a proportion of whom were simply ransomed through state/private intervention. europeans made a really big deal about it because it was whites being enslaved by who they saw as an inferior race, but it wasn't on a very large scale and the period of 'unrestricted' piracy, inasmuch as it ever existed was quite brief and tied to a general state of warfare between the Ottomans and the Habsburgs (controlling Spain, Italy, & the land border with the Ottomans), after which it normalized and was conducted in state-based fashion. in the 18th century most states simply paid for free passage, and the USA even signed such treaties before Thomas Jefferson decided to send gunboats instead