What causes us today to view the transatlantic slave trade as the most important, widespread and awful trafficking in slaves that the world has ever seen?

The Roman trade in European slaves was ten times as extensive as the transatlantic slave trade, a fact which has today been wholly forgotten

Fifty years ago, in Britain, 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’. Familiarity with the Bible was far more common in those days than now, and everybody knew about the stories of slavery found in the Old Testament.