To Livingstone, the search for a way to open up Africa to Christianity and civilization was made still more… — Niall Ferguson
To Livingstone, the search for a way to open up Africa to Christianity and civilization was made still more urgent by the discovery that slavery was still thriving. Though the slave trade in the west of the continent had supposedly been suppressed following the British abolition law, slaves continue to be exported from Central and East Africa to Arabia, Persia and India. Perhaps as many as two million Africans fell victim to this eastward traffic in the course of the nineteenth century.
p. 131Source: Wikiquote · CC BY-SA 4.0
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