In his History of Jamaica, published in 1774, Edward Long reminded his readers of how vital the slavery business was to the wealth of Great Britain. ‘If,’ he wrote, ‘we revolve in our minds, what an amazing variety of trades receive their daily support, as many of them did originally their being, from the calls of the Africa and West India markets,’ if we reflected, he continued on the numbers of artisans, tradespeople, merchants, sailors and seamen whose livelihood was connected with those markets, ‘we may from thence form a competent idea of the prodigious value of our sugar colonies, and a just conception of their immense importance to the grandeur and prosperity of their mother country.’1 Britain was a major colonial power, the slavery business a vital source of wealth. For the German hinterlands, and Denmark, a minor player, yet significant, in the colonial world, the scale of interest was very different. But the tentacles of the slavery business were very long and permeated deep into the continent. As we now know, both from the recent research that has been done and the new work collected in this volume, investors and bankers, ship-owners and merchants, textile workers and glass-blowers, sailors and seamen, surgeons, scientists and writers, serfs and slaves were all part of the extensive filaments associated with the so-called ‘triangular trade’. This was a global business, never confined to the triangle of the New World, Britain and France, and Africa: it stretched from Italy to Latin America, from the Baltic to the Mediterranean, from Russia to Haiti. Sugar and slavery were not foundational to the economies and societies of these hinterlands, yet the profits to be gained and the opportunities to be exploited had left their mark. The new scholarship demonstrates that it is not only metropole and colony that need to be understood in one analytic frame: Prussia had no colonies, yet sections of its mercantile community and sectors of its economy were heavily invested in the slavery business, and while few enslaved people are to be traced in Central Europe ideas of racial difference and African inferiority were circulating from the early modern period. This was a global world before the globalisation of the twentieth century.

The forgetting of these connections, we discover, has been both a conscious and an unconscious process.