Slavery was an accepted element in human society for so long and reached its high point as an economic system so recently that the strong and continuing interest in the subject seems only proper. While the wrongs of slavery are among the few certainties in a postmodern world, in this, as in other areas of social activity, human behaviour and contradiction are inseparable. The aim of this work is to highlight the tensions that emerge as people pursue goals, moral or material, that cannot all be achieved at once or are at odds with some aspect of their individual and shared systems of belief. Chapter 1 begins with the puzzle of slavery and freedom emerging from the same roots in western society, and the volume ends with the morally ambiguous consequences of the abolition of coerced labor and the transportation system that supplied it. Historians should attempt to put some distance between scholarship and the values of the society in which he or she functions. We have more than enough evidence to condemn what happened in the past. No one who is aware of the below-deck conditions on a slave ship, how little these changed over three centuries, and how Europeans never subjected other Europeans to such an experience can fail to appreciate this point. Yet if condemn on the basis of modern values is all we do, then we are never likely to understand the past.