By then, the price of slaves delivered to Barbados had fallen by 35 percent from the highs of the 1640s, when roughly 10,000 fewer Africans were sold. Of far more lasting importance than any short-term fall in price, though, was the breaking of the Dutch stranglehold on this human traffic. This put Britain on a path to dominate the slave trade outright, as it would for the next century and a half, propelling its imperial expansion throughout the Caribbean, and its widening empire generally.
