British slavery followed Iberian and Dutch models in substituting human capital for commodities

Evidence

We may now have sufficient grounds for saying that in the New World, the British (and French) entrepreneurs—following the models provided by the Portuguese, Spanish, and the Dutch—substantially substituted human capital for commodities in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. We will follow this British trade for the moment because it seems the best documented, because it so firmly seats slavery in the movement from mercantile to industrial capitalism, and because many of the clearest tracings of a Black radical tradition lead back to it. — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 585