Atrocitology - Matthew White

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usually gets the most blame: China

      AFTER A FEW CENTURIES OF DIVISION, CHINA WAS REUNITED UNDER THE Sui dynasty, but the northern Korean kingdom of Goguryeo decided to raid across the border one last time before the new rulers got organized. The Chinese emperor responsible for the reunification, Wendi,a was furious and retaliated in 598 with a massive invasion designed to conquer Korea all the way down to the tip. He sent an army of 300,000 across the Liao River, Goguryeo’s Manchurian border, and down the Korean peninsula toward the capital at Pyongyang. The invasion went very badly. The Chinese apparently forgot that July and August are the rainy season in Manchuria. The roads were muddy and the fleet that accompanied the army was battered by storms. Whenever the Chinese ships docked, Goguryean troops attacked them, until finally the Goguryeo navy sailed out and smashed the Chinese armada. Meanwhile, Korean guerrillas harassed the Chinese army all the way in, and then all the way out, and the Chinese lost most of their men along the way.2

      It took awhile for China to recover from the disaster, but Wendi’s son, Yangdi,b his successor and probable assassin, tried again in 612. He recruited a million soldiers and many times that number of support personnel. He repaired and expanded the Grand Canal that connected the Yellow and Yangtze Rivers in order to bring men and supplies from south to north. He established massive stockpiles and gathered coastal transportation to shadow the army as it moved over land. As long as his army stayed within an easy wagon ride of the coast, the Chinese navy could keep the forces supplied.

      The Chinese crossed the Liao River again with 305,000 troops, but when progress slowed, the fleet zipped ahead and landed a large force of marines to take Pyongyang castle. After scattering the defenders, the Chinese marines broke ranks to loot, which left them exposed to a Goguryeo ambush in which the marines were slaughtered and chased off. Only a couple of thousand made it safely back to the fleet.3

      The Chinese army, meanwhile, pushed onward. For a time, the Goguryeo and Sui commanders played mind games, trying to lure one another into negotiations in order to spring a trap or gather intelligence. Finally, the Goguryean commander Eulji closed this phase by sending a rude poem to his Sui counterpart, and the campaign resumed. After pushing south, the Chinese began crossing the Salsu River. The Goguryeans, however, had secretly dammed the river above the crossing, and when the Sui army was halfway across the deceptively shallow water, the Goguryeans released the flood. Thousands of Chinese drowned, and the rest fled. Of the 305,000 Chinese soldiers who had invaded Korea, only 2,700 returned.4

      The repeated defeats in Korea fatally weakened the Sui dynasty. It didn’t last much longer and would shortly be replaced by the Tang dynasty.

MIDEAST SLAVE TRADE

      Death toll: 18.5 million (18 million from Africa and 0.5 million from Europe)

      Rank: 8

      Type: commercial exploitation

      Broad dividing line: Arabs enslaving Africans, mostly

      Time frame: seventh to nineteenth centuries

      Location: Middle East

      Who usually gets the most blame: Arab slave traders, African middlemen, Barbary pirates

      Summarized in two words: Eunuchs . . . ick

      Economic factors: slaves, gold, salt

       Background: Slavery in General

      Throughout most of recorded history, almost every person was legally subordinate to someone else. Children were at the mercy of their father; husbands ruled over their wives; commoners cringed under the nobility. Most state-level societies have had formal hierarchies connecting all individuals. The Romans maintained complex patron-client relationships with interrelated obligations among all free persons—citizens, foreigners, and freedmen. European feudalism had many layers of lord and vassal, while serfs were bonded to the land.

      Slaves were the most extreme type of subordinate. While most members of a lord-peasant or patron-client relationship had reciprocal rights and duties, the master-slave relationship was simpler and entirely one-sided. A master could do anything he wanted to his slave, and a slave could do nothing without the permission of his master. It was totally legal for a master to beat a slave to death well into the eighteenth century, even among peoples we would normally consider civilized, such as Virginians.1 On the scale of personhood, running from serf to freeholder to lord, a slave was at the bottom, one step below mule.a On the plus side, slavery was not widely considered a permanent condition.

      Most societies didn’t go out of their way to get slaves; they merely acquired them accidentally, and they were often at a loss as to what to do with them. Usually, a person was enslaved only after a string of abnormally bad luck. Being captured in a war, convicted of a crime, abandoned as a child, and taken to pay a debt were the customary paths into bondage, and for the first three, the alternative to slavery was usually death.

      Everyday housework created the steadiest demand for slaves, but as the supply of slaves fluctuated with the fortunes of wars, there might sometimes be a glut. In those cases, three of the customary dumping grounds for surplus, expendable people were mines, prostitution, and human sacrifice, depending on the culture.

      In some societies, the economy got along fine with a minimum number of slaves. In medieval Europe, for example, there was no shortage of labor; land was the resource in short supply, so moving enslaved farm workers into a region didn’t boost output. On the other hand, in some slave-saturated societies, such as nineteenth-century Sudan, every household that rose above the barest poverty owned at least one slave girl to wash, sew, cook, and clean.

      Demand for slaves occasionally surged, sending slave traders out to the fringes of civilization, wherever large populations existed without strong armies to protect the people from being kidnapped. The most famous surge filled the labor shortage that followed the discovery of America, but I will discuss that later (see “Atlantic Slave Trade”). For much of history, the biggest markets for slaves—mostly girls needed for housework—were the wealthy kingdoms of the Middle East, and the deepest reservoir of available people was Africa. Over the centuries, millions of slaves were shipped out from seaports along the East African coast and on desert caravans crossing the Sahara.

       East Africa

      The slave trade along Africa’s east coast goes back as far as we have records. In the days of the Pharaohs, shipments of new slaves flowed steadily up the Red Sea to Egypt, most likely from Eritrea and Somalia. By the tenth century, Arab sailors had established a chain of trading posts down the African coast as far south as Kilwa (now in Tanzania). Many of these posts were offshore islands that had as little contact with the mainland as possible. By 1300, the southern reach of Arab traders had extended to Sofala (now in Mozambique).

      After the Portuguese found their way around the southern cape of Africa in 1493, they quickly used their superior firepower to bundle all of these slave stations into their rapidly expanding empire. However, in 1653, a fleet from the southern Arabian sultanate of Oman, armed with weaponry equal to anything the Europeans had, captured the northern slave ports. With one foot in Arabia and the other in Africa, Oman became a bipolar nation based on the slave trade, anchored at the island of Zanzibar in Tanzania.

      In 1780, the Omanis captured the rival slave market of Kilwa and diverted Kilwa’s trade to their own routes. By 1834, sixty-five hundred slaves per year were being exported from Zanzibar. By the 1840s, the number had doubled.2 In 1859, nineteen

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