Yes, you read that correctly. There white slave women in Africa from the Mediterranean that borders Morocco, Tunisia, and Libya. This bordering is best known as the Barbary Coast, as named by Europeans. The article link attached at the end of this blog is suggests that around "1.5 million Europeans were enslaved by so-called Barbary corsairs..." Corsairs were of different ethnicity and religions--some were African, some were Muslim, some were English, some were Dutch. While the slaves that were abducted and transferred to Africa were of European decent. Like other slave history we have learned, many people died while being transported from one area to the next. Slaves were observed and taken note of to see what they would be worth.
These slaves lived off of barely any water and bread. Other slaves sometimes were "freed" if they were owned by Muslims and converted to Islam. The biggest difference to note about this form of slavery is that on both the corsairs and slaves sides, race and religion did not play any role. Circumstances are what determined whether a person was a corsair or a slave. Anyone including Africans, traveling in the Barbary Coast could easily have been taken and sold as slaves. Corsairs tended to be pirates already and just found another thing to profit off of.
