ABSTRACT
This chapter concerns about developments and arguments in the West European nations directly involved, with a focus on what was written about children and the image of children. Slavery was not alien to European nations; the existing power structure included forms of slavery that were later forgotten or denied. The American historian David Eltis regards the involvement of Europeans in the transatlantic slave trade as a significant development, a step that he analyzes as the result of a change within Europe, among Europeans. The majority of black African slaves lived in southern Europe: in Italy, Spain, and Portugal. From Portugal, slaves were brought to Seville, Valencia, and other cities. The Dutch East India Company and the West India Company were established in the early seventeenth century, when enslaving Asians and Africans was not taken on as a new pioneering activity, but rather a formalization and regulation of earlier practices of Dutch private slave traders.
