We talk about slavery almost as if it was something that only happened in the United States. Slavery is treated as a distinctly American legacy and American shame—but that couldn’t possibly be farther from the truth.
Nearly every country in the world participated in the slave trade, and a lot of them took in far more slaves than the United States. Of the 12.5 million African slaves sent to the New World, only 388,000—or about three percent—of them ended up in the US.
We’ve all heard about Abraham Lincoln, the Civil War, and the Emancipation Proclamation, but that wasn’t the end of slavery around the world. Slaves were still battling for their freedom, and, outside their own countries, their stories have been almost completely ignored.
