the.com/slave trade

means The historical system of capturing, transporting, and selling human beings as property for forced labor, centered on the transatlantic trafficking of Africans from roughly the 1500s to the 1800s.

from "Slave" traces back through Old French esclave to Medieval Latin sclavus, which originally just meant "Slav" — the ethnonym curdled into a common noun because so many Slavic peoples were captured and sold into bondage across medieval Europe. "Trade" is the older Germanic word for a path or course, worn down over centuries into "commerce" — a track beaten by repeated dealings. Fuse the two and the phrase names itself with brutal literalness: the well-worn commercial route by which human beings, once just a people's name, became cargo.