No one who studies the Atlantic slave trade (or the Indian Ocean slave trade for that matter) is going to deny that slavery existed in various forms in pre-colo

No one who studies the Atlantic slave trade (or the Indian Ocean slave trade for that matter) is going to deny that slavery existed in various forms in pre-colonial Africa. But there's an enormous difference between pre-colonial slavery and the system that began to emerge under the Portuguese, Spanish, and English in the 16th century - both in terms of sheer numbers, and (in many cases) in terms of the severity of conditions for slaves. It's analogous to constantly pointing out that Roman iron forges created air pollution in the 2nd century CE whenever people talk about 20th century environmental issues. I don't disagree that the general public should be educated about the multi-sited nature of slavery of course; as an historian of this period I just wanted to point out that the people who actually study and teach this stuff are not trying to portray it as a solely European phenomenon. However it is inarguably the case that the early modern European empires were responsible for upgrading both the scale and severity of a pre-existing slave system. Anyway, to add something substantive here, I figured I'd link to the Transatlantic Slave Trade Database, which is (from my point of view at least) one of the most significant achievements in historical scholarship in the last few decades: http://www.slavevoyages.org/tast/index.faces http://www.slavevoyages.org/tast/index.faces