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If Africans were not forced by Europeans to sell other Africans, why did they do it? In some sense, the question is an example of “presentism”—the projection of contemporary beliefs onto the past. Few Europeans or Africans at this time viewed slavery as an institution that needed to be explained, still less as an evil to be decried. Slavery was part of the furniture of everyday life; in both Europe and Africa, depriving others of their liberty wasn’t morally problematic, though it was bad to enslave the wrong person. Christians, for example, were generally not supposed to enslave fellow
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Napoleon sent his army to seize Egypt. An African Napoleon would have sent his army to seize Egyptians.
Because labor was the main form of property in West Africa, rich West Africans almost by definition owned a lot of slaves.
