In 1619 twenty Africans were brought to the English colony of Jamestown, Virginia. Historians are undecided if the legal practice of slavery began there, since at least some of them had the status of indentured servant. According to John K. Thornton, Europeans usually bought enslaved people who were captured in endemic warfare between African states. Some Africans had made a business out of capturing Africans from neighbouring ethnic groups or war captives and selling them.

Slavery has historically been widespread in Africa, and still continues today in some countries. Systems of servitude and slavery were common in parts of Africa, as they were in much of the ancient world. Britain abolished slavery throughout its empire by the Slavery Abolition Act 1833 (with the notable exception of India), the French colonies re-abolished it in 1848 and the U.S. abolished slavery in 1865 with the 13th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.

Just one month after writing this letter, Lincoln issued his preliminary Emancipation Proclamation, which announced that at the beginning of 1863, he would use his war powers to free all slaves in states still in rebellion as they came under Union control. Some historians assert that as many as 17 million people were sold into slavery on the coast of the Indian Ocean, the Middle East, and North Africa, and approximately 5 million African slaves were transported by Muslim slave traders via Red Sea, Indian Ocean, and Sahara desert to other parts of the world.

Among the last states to abolish slavery were Saudi Arabia and Yemen, which abolished slavery in 1962 under pressure from Britain; Oman in 1970; and Mauritania in 1905, 1981, becoming the last country in the world to abolish slavery, when a presidential decree abolished the practice. However, no criminal laws were passed to enforce the ban.

Slavery in the Muslim world first developed out of the slavery practices of pre- Islamic Arabia… Arab or Islamic slave trade lasted much longer than Atlantic or European slave trade: “It began in the middle of the seventh century and survives today.