Traders in the Atlantic slave system included Arabs, Africans, Italians, Portuguese, Spanish, Dutch, Jews, Germans, Swedes, French, English, White Americans, Indians, and even thousands of blacks in the New World who had been freed and became slave-owning farmers or planters themselves. The responsibility, then, rests with peoples of all kinds who shared in the enormous profits made by the first multinational mass-market production system—the production of sugar, tobacco, coffee, dyes, spices, cotton, and so on.
It is both remarkable and disturbing that before the end of the eighteenth century this Atlantic slave system hardly aroused serious protest.