I continue to marvel at this. We got incredibly angry when the city of Palmyra, Syria, was destroyed by IS because the city was reminiscent of pre-Mu… - Piet Emmer

My argument in my book is that except for the slave revolt in Haiti, slave revolts did not contribute to slave liberation, but the decision to end it was made in capitals in Europe. Again, I think thinking fundamentally about slavery is really a Western thing. And slave revolts did not contribute to that.

Incidentally, it was Europeans living in Europe who wanted to abolish the slave trade. They wanted to end it all over the world. So also ín Africa and also in the Middle East. It was just important to come up with arguments to justify such an abolition. One of the arguments devised at the time was that our slave trade threatened to deform entire countries. But that argument, as it now turns out, is historically incorrect. If you look at the quantities and the fact that slavery existed long before the Europeans appeared on the coast there, and that it continued even after the Europeans stopped doing it, I see no scientific arguments at present to attribute primary responsibility to the slave trade for Africa's current economic position in the world.

I think it is important that when water boils at 100 degrees, whether someone is white or black, that someone sees that it boils at 100 degrees.