Fifty years ago, the idea that any discussion of slavery should be inextricably linked to the transportation of black Africans across the Atlantic to the New World would have struck most people as bizarre. Mention of slavery would, in the 1960s, have been as likely to evoke thoughts of Joseph being sold into slavery by his brothers or the ancient Israelites labouring in Egypt as it would the so-called ‘triangular trade’. Illustration 5 shows the sort of scene which the word ‘slavery’ might have conjured up for a British schoolchild in the 1960s, with ancient Israelites in bondage before they
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