The idea that the Atlantic slave trade might not have been the greatest or worst trafficking in slaves of which we know is a novel one for most people. Certainly, for a generation which has been raised on horror stories of what has come to be known as the slave trade, it will come as a shock to discover that there was nothing to distinguish that slave trade from any other. Neither the numbers involved nor the treatment of the slaves is remarkable when considered in a wider historical context. Some European slaves were certainly treated more leniently than those in America and the Caribbean,
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