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A disaster's long-range consquences depend on choices. Does one resist its sources and build better defenses, or succumb or even go along with the disaster's causes?
Fascinating paper by Charnysh and Lall on the Black Sea slave trade and why, surprisingly, eastern Europe emerged stronger from the Ottoman raids.
Via Marius Comper. Link to full paper in comment section. Summary:
Five million people were seized from villages across Poland, Ukraine and Russia between the fifteenth and eighteenth centuries, marched to Crimea in chains, and sold into Ottoman slave markets. The regions they were taken from went on to develop faster than those the raiders never touched. That counterintuitive finding, published in the American Political Science Review by Volha Charnysh of MIT and Ranjit Lall of Oxford, upends the standard picture of slavery's long-run consequences, which has been built almost entirely on the African experience.
After West Africa, Eastern Europe was the largest source of slaves in the early modern world, yet this history has largely vanished from global narratives of the era. Charnysh and Lall assembled the most comprehensive dataset ever compiled on the Black Sea slave trade, drawing on chronicles, treasury accounts, military records and diplomatic documents in six languages. Their minimum count is 3.64 million captives from 2,511 raids on 882 locations across 13 modern countries between 1453 and 1774; their best estimate, using statistical imputation for the roughly half of raids with no recorded yield, is 5 million. That figure amounts to about 27.5% of Eastern Europe's total population in 1400. By 1700, when 95% of those captives had already been taken, the number of Africans transported across the Atlantic stood at roughly 1.28 million.
The raids were anything but chaotic. Expeditions were planned three to four weeks in advance; raiding parties numbering from several hundred to tens of thousands traveled between major rivers along high ground to avoid detection, approached targets on moonless nights, built fortified field camps and fanned out up to 140 kilometres to seize captives and set buildings alight. Most captives were then marched to Crimea and sold on to markets across the Ottoman Empire: Constantinople, Cairo, Damascus, and scores of smaller towns. The slave trade became the "cornerstone" of the Crimean economy, with contemporaries estimating that slaves outnumbered native inhabitants by more than 2:1.
The crucial question is why the consequences in Eastern Europe ran so differently from those in Africa. In West Africa, European demand created incentives for rulers to specialise in slave production, generating extractive institutions, pervasive violence, low interpersonal trust and ethnic fragmentation whose effects researchers have traced to the present day. Russia and Poland-Lithuania had already centralised politically and tied their economies to agricultural exports westward. They neither participated in nor profited from the slave trade; they fought it. And that fight, Charnysh and Lall argue, set in motion a process of state-building that, over the long run, produced more favourable conditions for trade and settlement than it destroyed. As one scholar of the period puts it, "the capacity to stem the flow [of slaves]" became "the inescapable rationale for any power which sought to establish itself in Eastern Europe".
Russia erected a succession of defence lines along its southern frontier: the 1,000-kilometre Tula Line, the 800-kilometre Belgorod Line, the 530-kilometre Izium Line, each garrisoned with thousands of soldiers and sustained by granary networks, roads and coach stations. Financial obligations to the Russian state increased sixfold during the sixteenth century alone, eventually producing a national exchequer and the country's first state budget. Poland-Lithuania deployed a mercenary army to its southeastern border as early as 1479; its first poll tax, levied on clergy and nobility alike, was a direct response to raids; after a crushing defeat by a Tatar-Ottoman army in 1620, the Sejm raised a 60,000-strong standing army. The military presence attracted people, trade and investment. In the most exposed Polish-Lithuanian provinces, an average of 12,000 people per year joined military camps in the first half of the sixteenth century. Garrison towns became trading posts. Kyiv, left "practically empty" by repeated raids, was rebuilt through successive fortification efforts by Poland-Lithuania and then Muscovy, growing from fewer than 10,000 inhabitants to nearly a quarter of a million and becoming an "administrative, military, commercial, and cultural centre".
The data support this argument across multiple methods and time periods. Using population records from 550 urban settlements spanning 1100 to 1900, Charnysh and Lall find that raided settlements grew consistently faster than unraided ones from 1550 onwards, with a mean population gap that exceeded 50% by 1900. Exposure to raids is associated with a roughly 26% average increase in urban population; settlements raided more than ten times showed growth around 45% above comparable unraided places. In the Russian and Austrian Empires, more heavily raided districts had significantly more markets, factories, houses and people by the mid-nineteenth century. The sequence is traceable: in Russian urban communities, military presence came first, and commercial activity followed, with the relationship between raid intensity and trader populations shifting from negative in the seventeenth century to positive by the early eighteenth. The broader implication is that the developmental consequences of slavery are not fixed. They depend on whether targeted societies get absorbed into a slave trade or resist it, a distinction shaped by prior political centralisation and available economic alternatives. Where those conditions favoured resistance, raids appear to have built states rather than broken them.
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