In the Ancient World slaves were first brought to the European continent to work there. But were usually given some rights and were usually treated with some humanity. Slaves in Ancient Greece had some opportunities for emancipation; though all of these came at some cost to their masters. The law protected slaves, and though a slave's master had the right to beat him at will, a number of moral and cultural limitations existed prohibiting excessive use of force by masters. There is even mention by Plutarch that during the Battle of Salamis the Athenians did their best to save their "women, children and slaves".

The African slaves, who were brought over in New World Slavery to supply the labour shortage in America, had no rights. They were there to supply the European demand for luxury goods such as sugar, cotton, tobacco, indigo, coco, coffee and gold, which meant that more labour was needed to work the plantations and mines in America.

The Transatlantic Slave Trade was a certain era in the traffic of human flesh which was notorious for the brutal treatment of the slaves taken from Africa. The majority of slaves were beaten, starved, tortured, murdered at the owners discretion; had no name or tribe to which they belonged; they were dead in the sense that they had no recourse to justice; basically they had no rights, were without appeal and protection. They were treated like beasts, tamed by beatings and hunger with the object of making them instruments of labour for another's profit.

The Transatlantic Slave Trade was unprecedented, except by today’s forms of slavery, because its development has been associated with several of those processes that define modernity. The continued exploitation of the African labour developed alongside the growth of ideas such as rationality, the nation-state and national sentiment, race as a perception of others, capitalism, market relations, consumer societies and wage labour, administrative systems with bureaucracy and taxes, the publication of newspapers and press advertising and the individualistic approach to life. All these ideas were made possible by the exploited labour of others.

So is history repeating itself today?