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Ralph Austen made a valiant effort to produce an estimate, but it is almost impost impossible to achieve any level of precision, particularly for periods before 1500. He has done a number of important articles. One is in Elizabeth Savage (ed.), The Human Commodity. I am not sure who produced the estimate Geshekter cites, but it is within the realm of possibility. As for what happened to them, the answer is fairly simple. Most of those carried across were in three groups: women, who were absorbed into harems; soldiers and eunuchs. Women in harems produce few offspring, and the children they produce are members of elite families. Eunuchs don't reproduce. Soldiers have a high mortality rate and are sometimes freed. There are African communities in some areas, for example, southern Morocco. In many areas, they simply blended into the general population. There has also been a lot of mixing in areas like the Arabian peninsula, the Maghreb, upper Egypt, southern Iran, etc. In our own times, many prominent Arabs have been the product of either black wives or concubines (the late King Hassan of Morocco) or marriage in desert-side areas ( Anwar Sadat). You have to realize that race is an artifical construct and different peoples construct it in different ways. It is probable that most people in the Mediterranean or the Middle East have some sub-saharan African ancestry. That ancestry is simply not relevant to the way people see themselves or are seen by others. I doubt if anyone saw Sadat as a mulatto. His father was an Arab army officer. That is what counted. Martin Klein
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