By 1700, the two European nations generally regarded as having the most advanced capitalist culture, England and the Netherlands, had moved further away than any country in Europe from subjecting their citizens to overtly forced labor. Slave ships brought the occasional slave back to England and advertisements offering slaves for sale were seen in Liverpool and Bristol newspapers. It is nevertheless inconceivable that London, Liverpool, Nantes, or Amsterdam could have received complete cargoes of Africans on slave ships to be sold in public markets, as Lisbon and Cadiz did throughout the eighteenth century. Yet these northern European cities were in countries with the harshest and most closed systems of exploiting enslaved non-Europeans in the Americas. Further, England and the Netherlands came to dominate Europe's relations with the rest of the world: the Dutch specializing in Asia, and the English in the Americas.

The contrast between Europe's social institutions and values at home and their counterparts in European-controlled overseas territories became acute in the seventeenth century and forms the focus of the present work. The major issues are simply stated. First, why would Europeans revive slavery at the time of Columbian contact, when the institution had disappeared from large parts of Europe, and then, three centuries later, begin to suppress it? Second, why would that slavery be located almost exclusively in the Americas? Third, why would the slaves in this system be exclusively of non-European descent?