Resurfacing from work to mention a really great post over at legalhistoryblog....
At some point I need to talk about Mark Weiner's great books (like Black Trials) on race and law in American history (and great articles, too, like the one we mentioned last year on Ollie's Barbeque). But right now I want to mention his blogging about his Fulbright in Iceland. (I'm green with envy, of course). What interests me the most is a vignette about Iceland's history, about which i knew absolutely nothing: a 1627 raid by Algerian pirates in which they captured several hundred Icelanders and carried them off for slavery in North Africa. There's some literature on the enslavement of Europeans by the Muslim world in the early modern era, but I haven't followed that literature. And, of course, I now learn (via our friend wikipedia) that there's a literature on this tragedy.
This calls to mind Francis Daniel Pastorius' protest against slavery in Pennsylvania, in which he invokes both the Golden Rule and the fear that Europeans might be enslaved. Talk about behind the veil of ignorance! "This might happen to you, so you should outlaw it." Or, to quote Pastorius:
Is there any that would be done or handled at this manner? viz., to be sold or made a slave for all the time of this life? How fearful and faint-hearted are many on sea, when they see a strange vessel, -- being afraid it should be a Turk, and they should be taken, and sold for slaves into Turkey. Now what is this better done, as Turks doe?
Finally, all of this talk of Iceland reminds me of Haldor Laxness and one of the strangest books I've ever read, Paradise Reclaimed. Perhaps I'll talk about that and why I happened to read it another time.
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