Hacker News Reader

Comment by bergoid | Hacker News Reader

> the Trans-Atlantic Trade was a sui generis world-historical event, at a whole new scale (by percentage perhaps the largest forced movement in human history)

Wrong. The Arab slave trade [1] exceeded the Western one both in scale [2] and in cruelty [3].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arab_slave_trade [2] https://www.quora.com/Who-did-most-of-the-slave-trade-Europe... [3] https://www.quora.com/Was-the-Arabic-slave-trade-more-humane...

View on HN

The Quora answers (your [2] and [3]) are biased and full of factual errors and misrepresentations, of course without references to sources. Stick with Wikipedia.

> The Quora answers (your [2] and [3]) are biased and full of factual errors and misrepresentations

Such as?

Unsourced Quora answers are not sources.

Quora is on the same level as reddit or even worse in my experience since most people seem to have an agenda.

So it seems. But the aggregate estimates are similar, about 10-20 million slaves. And the estimate for the Arab slave trade covers a much longer period, ~1300 years vs ~400 years for the trans-Atlantic slave trade. So the mean rate for that was correspondingly greater.

The Arab slave trade unfortunately persists even today.

It is difficult to compare aggregates also because you should take into account population density. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_population#Past_populati.... trans-Atlantic slave trade was very huge (it had an impact on demography). Arab slave trade was already huge and has been lenghty. Both are terrible.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com