re: #32 sagehen

Pretty sure the Spanish/Portuguese/Dutch slavers who did that were Catholic. And it was the Pope who divvied up which parts of the Western Hemisphere were for which European countries to do as they pleased.

The British and the USians got in on the action. Slaving was an entrepreneurial opportunity with no national boundaries.

Weirdly, I’m listening to a book tape on the Underground Railroad at this very instant, and one of the arguments made by Quakers for abolitionism was precisely that slavery led one away from the do-it-yourself ethic of Protestantism.