daharākāśa

The Indian Ocean slave trade conducted by Arab merchants lasted twelve hundred years, moved an estimated seventeen million people from East Africa to Arabia, Persia, and India, castrated the majority of male slaves in transit, and has received less than one percent of the scholarly attention devoted to the Atlantic slave trade. The Indian Ocean slave trade — conducted primarily by Arab, Persian, and Swahili Coast merchants from approximately the 7th century AD through the early 20th century — operated across a longer time span and involved comparable numbers of enslaved people to the Atlantic trade, yet occupies a fraction of the space in global historical consciousness, public discourse, and museum representation. The reasons for this asymmetry are themselves historically significant — the Atlantic trade's direct connection to the economic foundations of Western Europe and North America, the survival of large descendant communities in the Americas, and the moral and political urgency of 20th-century American civil rights discourse all oriented historical attention toward the transatlantic system in ways that left the Indian Ocean trade relatively unstudied in Western scholarship until the late 20th century. The East African coastal peoples — primarily from the regions of present-day Mozambique, Tanzania, Kenya, Somalia, and Madagascar — were the primary source population for the Indian Ocean trade, captured through a combination of Arab-led slave raids, the operations of Swahili Coast intermediary merchants, and the inland expansion of slave-raiding networks that penetrated deep into the African continent. The castration of male enslaved people during the trade — documented in Arab, Persian, and European sources across multiple centuries — was practiced at rates that historians including John Lovejoy and Abdul Sheriff have estimated affected the majority of enslaved African men transported to Arab markets, creating a demographic pattern in which the descendant populations in receiving societies are far smaller relative to the number of people transported than in the Americas. The mortality rate during castration, performed without anesthesia or antiseptic technique, was estimated by contemporary observers at between 75-90%, meaning that the number of people who died in the castration process alone represented an enormous additional casualty figure beyond those who died during capture, transit, and enslavement. The trade was formally suppressed in Oman in 1970 — within living memory of people still alive today.

The US tech industry would be a shadow of itself without immigrants. First 10 examples that come to mind: 1. Elon Musk (South Africa) 2. Andrej Karpathy (Czechoslovakia) 3. Sergey Brin (Russia) 4. Jensen Huang (Taiwan) 5. Satya Nadella (India) 6. Ilya Sutskever (Russia) 7. Sundar Pichai (India) 8. Lisa Su (Taiwan) 9. Fei-Fei Li (China) 10. Sanjay Mehrotra (India)

Nearly half of the founders of billion-dollar tech startups are immigrants

Dairy Queen clerk to Indian founder of a billion dollar company: "What have you done to build America?"

Nearly half of the founders of billion-dollar tech startups are immigrants

They are irreplaceable.