Justene Hill Edwards

And so we're talking about unilateral political relationships that were developed.

We're not talking about pillage and domination, especially in the first generations of contact and trade and political negotiations.

Yeah, I mean, absolutely.

If we are looking at...

the Atlantic world, as historians and scholars call it.

This kind of the clashing and colliding of empires, of labor, of explorers, of merchants, of diplomats, of politicians, of

And they are traveling back and forth from regions of Europe to, again, Atlantic Africa, to South America, Brazil in particular, to the Caribbean, the West Indies, to mainland North America.

That is what we are talking about.

And then if we are talking really about in terms of numbers, sheer numbers, we are really talking about Brazil with the Dutch and then the Portuguese.

We're talking about places like Barbados, which was at one point the crown jewel of the British Empire in this period of time, and we are talking about later on Jamaica.

For the French, really, we are talking about Saint-Domingue, modern-day Haiti that comes later in the 18th century.

But in terms of sheer numbers, the British colonies that would become the U.S.

actually received a small percentage, about 5% of the total population of enslaved Africans that were sold throughout the Atlantic world.

Yeah.

I mean, we are talking about massive economic enterprises that had massive amounts of capital investment there.

from merchants, from investors, from monarchs.

And they were looking to both expand their political power, but expand their economic power as well in tandem.

Those two things went hand in hand.

And so they were seeing their investments in the expansion of plantations as an expansion of their kind of colonial holdings.

And slavery was part and parcel of that colonial project.