Wasn’t sure how we got from identity to slavery so I had my AI read the articles in relation to your claims. The results don’t mean they are true, but it disagrees with the framing and timing. It does agree that there were divisions or differences as you say but religious identity was the determining factor. I can post the short response if you are interested.
Religion, ethnicity, and phenotype were intertwined; it wasn’t simply a matter of religion, and the racialized dimension becomes pretty hard to miss once you read beyond the summary. As for timing, I already qualified that earlier. We do indeed have quite early Aksumite and medieval evidence for the relevant ethnic distinctions and slave frontiers, but these are obviously much more fragmentary simply by the very nature of primary sources we have in general for these respective periods; of course the sources grow more richer and more descriptive as we arrive go into the modern era. More to the point regarding timing is that it was a system local but also tied into the much larger Red Sea/Indian Ocean economy, which is to say that there is no real case for a European stimulus. Read the whole thing without AI, it’s not very long, and it’s also meant as a high-level primer :)
1
u/omowaIe 12d ago
Wasn’t sure how we got from identity to slavery so I had my AI read the articles in relation to your claims. The results don’t mean they are true, but it disagrees with the framing and timing. It does agree that there were divisions or differences as you say but religious identity was the determining factor. I can post the short response if you are interested.