White slavery predated and then was replaced by Black slavery in Western Europe.

Evidence

But the market was changing. Around the time the Portuguese opened their sea route to a new slave export area, the old slave export area started to close up. In Ibn Khaldun’s day, most of the captives sold in Western Europe were Eastern Europeans who had been seized by Turkish raiders from areas around the Black Sea. So many of the seized captives were “Slavs” that the ethnic term became the root word for “slave” in most Western European languages. By the mid-1400s, Slavic communities had built forts against slave raiders, causing the supply of Slavs in Western Europe’s slave market to plunge at around the same time that the supply of Africans was increasing. As a result, Western Europeans began to see the natural Slav(e) not as White, but Black. — Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning, 53

Categorization

• DEFINE: Explains that the English word ‘slave’ derives from ‘Slav,’ a key etymological origin underpinning the early form of racist mislabeling.
• SEED: Strong material for an essay or discussion on how the racialization of Blackness was market-driven rather than a pre-existing European belief.
• XREF: Directly evidences Kendi’s central thesis that policy/market forces precede racial ideas — the slave trade shifted supply, and the ‘natural slave’ became Black as a rationalization.