Word: slaving
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...until the middle of the 17th century, European interest in Africa was mostly peripheral. The dark continent was a mystery for daring explorers. Sailors enroute to Eastern riches navigated the coastline, and some areas occasionally supplied slave labor for the American colonies. But the developing global economy, Europe's continued and increasing infatuation with Far Eastern goods, and the birth of the plantation economy in the Americas indirectly led Europeans to Africa...
Once the North had won the Civil War, the direction of future expansion, both in the West and overseas, was set. Markets, outlets for investment and, secondarily, sources of raw materials were what the North wanted, not slave labor territories to support a landed upper class...
Sumner, firebrand senator from Massachusetts who took to the U.S. Senate floor to launch a direct onslaught on slave-holders, was judged unfit to be professor at the Harvard Law School. He recognized the reason and described it clearly in a letter to his brother: "I am too much...reformer...to be trusted...
There is a third person in the photo, however, who symbolizes perfectly the total insanity of the whole conflict. Seated between Washington's legs is his own slave boy, who is supposed to have followed him into battle. The black child is no more than nine or ten; he sits totally ignored by both white men--the one his owner, the other his emancipator...
...this late date, the yielding up of an imperial crown for the hand of Wallis Warfield Simpson cannot remotely claim the urgency and import that H.L. Mencken once assigned to it when he called it "the greatest story since the Resurrection." Ryton is a slave to the egalitarian fallacy-namely, that under the trappings of royalty lie simple everyday souls who have their ups and downs just like thee...