In the twenty-first century the shadowy figures whose plight plays on our collective conscience are the millions who toil in factories and sweat shops making our clothes and mobile phones and the impoverished Indians who construct football stadiums and fantasy towers in desert kingdoms that we visit on our holidays. In the eighteenth century the invisible enablers of everyday luxury were Africans, slaves who produced the tobacco that millions smoked in little clay pipes and snorted as snuff, and the cane sugar that in two generations went from a frivolous extravagance – added to the food of
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