Between that moment in 1618, when Richard Jobson recoiled at the mere suggestion that he or any Englishman would engage in the buying and selling of other human beings, and the passing, in 1807, of the Act for the Abolition of the Slave Trade, Britain became the dominant slave-trading nation in the North Atlantic. Half of all the Africans who were carried into slavery over the course of the eighteenth century were transported in the holds of British ships. Some estimates put the total shipped by the British at around three and a half million.
