Black lives literally did not matter – other than to make their “owners” rich. It was cheaper, wrote one English planter on Antigua in 1751, “to work slaves to the utmost, and by the little fare and hard usage, to wear them out before they become useless and unable to do service, and then to buy new ones to fill up their places”. Most were then worked to death, the lifespan of trafficked people reckoned to be seven years or less. The scale of human suffering that followed Columbus’s crossing of the Atlantic is almost impossible to conceive, let alone describe: modern consensus is that around 12 million were put on slave ships in appalling conditions. As it turned out, the most important consequences were for the people of Africa. These experiences, mainly dating to the 1400s, were to prove instrumental not only in the settling of the Americas and the opening up of new trade routes to Europe.
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