The slave trade represents a dramatic encounter of history and geography. This four century long
tragedy has been one of the greatest dehumanizing enterprises in human history. It constitutes one of
the first forms of globalization. The resultant slavery system, an economic and commercial type
of venture organization, linked different regions and continents: Europe, Africa, the Indian Ocean, the
Caribbean and the Americas. It was based on an ideology: a conceptual structure founded on
contempt for the black man and set up in order to justify the sale of human beings (black Africans
in this case) as a mobile asset: For this is how they were regarded in the "black codes", which
constituted the legal framework of slavery.
