The Modern Slavery

Slavery existed in Morocco since antiquity. Morocco was a center of the Trans-Saharan slave trade route of enslaved Black Africans from sub-Saharan Africa, as well as a center of the slave trade of Barbary slave trade of Europeans captured by the barbary pirates. The slave trade was suppressed in Morocco in the 1920s.

Slave trade
African slave trade
Between the 7th-century during the Middle ages until the early 20th-century, Morocco was a center of the Trans-Saharan slave trade of enslaved Africans along the route from Timbuktu to the slave market in Marrakesh, from which they were transported to the rest of Morocco and the Mediterranean world as a whole.[2]

In accordance with the Islamic law that Muslims were free to enslave non-Muslims, African tribes who converted to Islam captured non-Muslim people and exported them along the trade route along the coast north toward Morocco.

During the Almoravid dynasty (1040-1147) the trade route exported weapons and textiles from Spain in the north to Senegal south of the Sahara, in exchange for gold, ivory, salt and slaves from the non-Islamic areas south of Senegal to Morocco, al-Andalus in Spain and the Mediterranean world.[3]

As a spoil of war after defeating the Songhai Empire, sultan Isma‘il ibn Sharif of Morocco was sent thousands of Sub-Saharan slaves from Timbuktu every year, which he then added to his massive army of black-African slaves and Haratin slave-soldiers named the Black Guard (or Abid al-Bukhari).

The Trans-Saharan slave route from the city of Timbuktu mainly went to the city of Marrakesh in Morocco, which was known as a big center of the Mediterranean market of African slaves from the 7th-century onward, and kept being so for over thousand years, until Morocco became a French protectorate in the 20th-century.[2]

European slave trade
See also: Barbary slave trade
There is historical evidence of North African Muslim slave raids all along the Mediterranean coasts across Christian Europe.[4] The majority of slaves traded across the Mediterranean region were predominantly of European origin from the 7th to 15th centuries.[5] In the 15th century, Ethiopians sold slaves from western borderland areas (usually just outside the realm of the Emperor of Ethiopia) or Ennarea.[6]

Between the 16th-century until the early 19th-century, Morocco was also a center of the Barbary slave trade of Europeans captured by barbary pirates in the Atlantic and Mediterranean Sea.

Barbary corsairs and crews from the quasi-independent[7] North African Ottoman provinces of Algiers, Tunis, Tripoli, and the independent Sultanate of Morocco under the Alaouite dynasty (the Barbary Coast) were the scourge of the Mediterranean.[8] Capturing merchant ships and enslaving or ransoming their crews provided the rulers of these nations with wealth and naval power. The Trinitarian Order, or order of "Mathurins", had operated from France for centuries with the special mission of collecting and disbursing funds for the relief and ransom of prisoners of Mediterranean pirates.