The idea that you could take a kind of proto capitalism and inject human bondage as one of the commodities, it's bizarre. They seem to be from different eras. Like slavery should have already died out before we got to this level of ability for mercantile operations. And i mean, i'm sure an economist could write this history in a way that it makes total sense, as crazy as that sounds, right? If you take the human being part out of this and you just focus on numbers and trade and profit and loss and well, you can make all this kind of work. It's the moral part that screws up the whole slave trade thing.
The Atlantic Slave Trade mixes centuries of human bondage with violence, economics, commerce, geo-political competition, liberty, morality, injustice, revolution, tragedy and bloody reckonings. That sounds like a lot, yet this show merely scratches the surface of this enormous subject.