the interesting narrative of the life of olaudah

The Quakers were a potent example of a group vocally opposed to slavery, though, of course, slaves themselves had protested and revolted against their condition for hundreds of years. By the end of the eighteenth century, this “triangular trade” was thriving, and yet, for the first time, many more people than ever before began to object to slavery as a moral atrocity. Europeans would capture black people in Africa, or buy them from traders on the coast they would then ship them to the West Indies to be sold as slaves, trading them for raw goods cultivated on plantations, and would carry these raw materials back to Europe to be processed and then sold in Africa and elsewhere. Slavery, as Equiano’s description of his own African village implies, had existed in some form for thousands of years, but it was the age of exploration that institutionalized a particular kind of slavery, bolstered by a growing set of arguments among Europeans about the ethical and intellectual inferiority of non-white races. Within this framework, European powers-first the Portuguese and Spanish, and later the British, French, Dutch, and others-vied to “discover” lands abroad, but of course these lands were largely already inhabited. For the nearly 300 years that preceded Olaudah Equiano’s writing of his life, the international slave trade had shrunk the world like never before: “globalization” could already describe this interconnected relationship between humans, goods, and places.

The interesting narrative of the life of olaudah