portugal, spain, those are the two leaders, are followed in rapid succession by the netherlands, denmark, france, england, and the united states. there is really a mad rush for the wealth to be gained in the slave trade and in the building of these systems of slavery in the americas. this is really critical. now, we want to talk about numbers. numbers are important, and numbers when it comes to the slave trade are very controversial. over many years, there have been wildly varying estimates of how many people were carried out of west africa, really from senegambia down to the coast to southern angola, then eventually, later on, into south and east africa. how many people were carried to the new world? well, it turns out that we know quite a bit about the slave trade because the slave trade was a big business and we have an abundance of business records. those business records, and indeed practically every kind of conceivable record, has now been mined and put together in something called the transatlantic slave trade database, and i would recommend it to all of you. this is a really magnificent scholarly