ABSTRACT
Regardless of the mixed motives or reasons for abolishing the slave trade, however, in the end the record of the burden of the past spoke for itself. The black slave trade lasted for more than four centuries; involved the people of Europe, Africa, the United States, the Caribbean, and South America; seared itself into the historical consciousness of those who lived on several continents. It is counted among its immediate victims perhaps as many as twenty million human beings. The abolition of slavery ended the institution but not the ideology that subjected one race to another. Prior to the era of explicit racial ideology, immigration had never emerged as a serious problem of international relations. Europeans, it is true, had been excluded from Japan in the seventeenth century, as had Jews from Russia, Muslims from old and new Spain, and Protestants sometimes from French colonies; but these instances never involved massive numbers of people.
