The transportation to the Americas and the enslavement of 12 million Africans in the course of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries has been called the greatest crime against humanity in the history of mankind. It was a crime in which all three countries whose history in film is discussed in this book were deeply complicit. The French and the British, along with the Portuguese, were the chief European powers involved in the Atlantic slave trade, and owned most of the territories in the New World in which slavery was established. The United States, despite the high-minded principles of the Declaration of Independence, accepted the existence of slavery in the Constitution of 1787, and the institution was consolidated even further at the turn of the nineteenth century when cotton to feed the British Industrial Revolution became the staple crop of the Southern states. So integral was slavery to the economy in the parts of the Americas in which it had become rooted that it proved difficult to end, however hard abolitionists inside and outside the establishment lobbied their respective governments. Britain outlawed the slave trade in 1807 and set up a permanent naval patrol to enforce the ban, but it was not until 1834, when agreement was reached with the slaveowners that they be handsomely compensated for their loss, that slavery was abolished in her Caribbean possessions. In the French colonies, though the practice had been initially abolished in 1793, slavery survived until 1848 and the advent of the short-lived Second Republic. In the United States, emancipation was only achieved after a bloody civil war which cost a minimum of 600,000, primarily, white lives, and the ratification of the thirteenth amendment in 1865.