When we talk about the slave trade, the African slave trade that took place between the 16th and 19th centuries is the talk of the table. However, more horrific slave trade was in action in the Mediterranean area at the same time, where more than 1.25 million Europeans were being brutally traded at the hands of the pirates. Their lives were sometimes even more pitiful than the slaves being traded in African regions. History marks this era as the Barbary Slave Era, where blacks and whites were being traded like the bodies of stones.

The history of slavery hasn’t started with Africans or Barbarians. It is much older than that. The code of Hammurabi in Babylon from the 18th century recorded the seedling of slavery when people were enslaved based on religion, civilization, culture, and status. Every period of slavery has been highlighted somewhere in history. Still, a slave trade carried out by pirates along the Barbary coast, including areas like Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, and Libya, was never highlighted nor reported. So, today when we open the book of the Barbary slave trade and see how cruel humans can be to each other.