White Gold: The Extraordinary Story of Thomas Pellow and Islam's One…

Little know nor recognized history, likely very true but poorly written and repetitive un-sensational sensationalist propaganda. Truly wish the author had done better sportive research, can't get much more than half of it read and quit. ( )

This story, through contemporary writing of the slave, Cornishman Thomas Pellow, describes the period of the original religious fundamentalism, and the Jihad of the Muslim against the Christian religions, with the corruption and avarice of the Moroccan Sultan Moulay Ismail and the Barbary Corsairs, in raiding, capturing and enslaving their ’white gold’. It was estimated that over a million Europeans were enslaved throughout the Islamic regions with newly kidnapped victims being required at annual rates of twenty of thousands because of attrition through ill treatment, starvation, murder and disease.

This then, is the other side of the coin, the enslavers enslaved. But with incredible brutality, mindless bestiality, torture casual deaths, beheadings and driven by work so hard and unremitting that constant raiding and enslavement of more peoples from the European coast were required. Little intelligence here, none of the, sometimes self-interested and reluctant, care of their investment that modified the treatment of black slaves in the cruel plantations of the Americas. Beheadings by the Sultan himself were common, on his whim, whimsy and humour as he drove his millions of captured English, French, Portuguese and even American crews and villagers in constructing his huge city-of-palaces, Meknès-Tafilalet.

Having enjoyed Milton’s earlier work of scholarly research Nathaniel's Nutmeg it was no surprise to find such a detailed history of Pellow’s twenty three years of slavery. Towards the end of the book a thirst for revenge was satisfied in an ironic connection … it was a relative Sir Edward Pellew who, in 1816, destroyed the power of the Muslim slavers, releasing the slaves and bringing the ’white gold’ trade to an end.

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http://tamaranth.blogspot.com/2005/05/44-white-gold-giles-milton.html ( )