In the Slave Market

 In the course of the book I'm reading for review, Sir Samuel Baker, the English explorer who named Lake Albert, makes an appearance – and so does his travelling companion and presumed wife, Florence. Samuel, we are told, 'had found nineteen-year-old Florence in 1859 at an auction of white slaves in a Turkish-administered town in Bulgaria. Her parents had been killed in the 1848 uprising in Hungary, and Baker bought her, and subsequently fell in love with her...' An eyebrow-raising passage – and there was more to the story than this: Baker had been on a hunting trip in the Balkans with the Maharajah Duleep Singh when, to amuse the Maharajah, they visited the slave market in Vidin. There Baker spotted Florence, who was destined for the harem of the Ottoman Pasha of Vidin, and was instantly smitten. In the auction the Pasha outbid him, but the resourceful Baker bribed the girl's guards to release her, and they made off together in a carriage. They were inseparable ever after, and Florence accompanied her husband (they were properly married on their return to England) on even his most arduous travels, in Africa and elsewhere. 
  White slaves, eh, and in Europe in the mid-nineteenth century? Surely slavery was invented by the racist imperialist British to service their sugar plantations in the West Indies and enrich Britannia? Surely there was no slavery in the world but the wicked triangular trade? This is certainly the impression one would get from the BBC and from the kind of history teaching that goes on in schools. Of course it is entirely fallacious and ahistorical, but such is its traction that it has thoroughly permeated our 'woke' establishment culture, to the point where cringing apologies and even reparations are seriously entertained. I may be wrong, but I rather doubt that the Turkish government is intending to offer either apologies or reparations to anyone any time soon.