Although acknowledging, as they must, that the Atlantic slave trade was an enormous crime, they tend to stress that in purely business and economic terms it was a highly advanced and complex form of international commerce that was rational in its operations and very modern in its management techniques.
Modern historians have tended to follow these eighteenth-century arguments closely. They seldom interrogated, however, the claims of proslavery advocates that the business of the slave trade was a major advance in developing the kinds of managerial and organizational skills that could be transferred to all sorts of other business activities. Opponents, of course, emphasized the immorality and inhumanity of the trade.
That complexity meant that slave traders had to master many skills, had to become skilled accountants, and needed to take what was in the eighteenth century a remarkably modern view as to future consequences of present actions. Defenders of the Atlantic slave trade in the eighteenth century celebrated it as a sophisticated global system, which was characterized by rational decision making and not only provided the Americas with the labor they needed to make plantations work but also improved business efficiency in Europe due to the complexity of trade relationships on three continents.
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