Chapter 14 Atlantic Slave Trade and TODAY

How should we distribute the moral responsibility for the Atlantic slave trade? Is this an appropriate task for historians?

I'd like to start this post by saying that there is still clearly effects of the Atlantic slave trade to this very day. Similarly to today, trafficking of slaves of all ages was extremely profitable to the elites. As we know today from people like Jeffrey Epstein and his many famous associates, elite child and human trafficking is the most lucrative business in the world. This is modern day slavery, which surprisingly gets very little attention, when it really should. At the end of this post I will leave links for multiple news stories regarding the disturbing modern day trafficking issues which go extremely unnoticed. 

In my opinion, the elite Europeans who clearly profited from slavery are the ones who should hold the extremely poor moral responsibility for the Atlantic slave trade, along with those they leverage in African to turn on their own people. They reaped the rewards while slaves endured physical, mental, emotional oppression and torture for hundreds of years. Taking Africans away from their native lands was bad enough. Poor living conditions, demand of physical labor, and a list of crimes I don't even want to type out, were all things that these elite Euro and Euro-Americans had control over. They could have built up strong, equal societies. Instead we are still protesting hate crimes, literally at the moment I type this, and most likely at the moment anyone happens to read this. Per Strayer (p. 623) this seems to date back to 1452 when the pope gave the kings of Spain and Portugal permission to put believers of Islam and other religions into perpetual slavery. These invaders quickly changed their tactics as they learned about tropical diseases and were killed off quickly. This then brought corruption among African political elites and African merchants who than began human trafficking Africans for the use of slavery in Europe and America, via these European slave traders. This was a huge problem back when it started and this problem still exists today with little to no mainstream media attention. Some links are listed below...





These are just a few among many stories which go unnoticed and this is truly modern day slavery.

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