Colonisation and slavery were the cornerstones of the Industrial Revolution. European industrialisation and Atlantic-American slavery as two structural global transformations must be understood as an integral whole. Industrialisation in the 19th century was enough to bring Europe out of a backwater in terms of global wealth and power. The processes of industrialisation have been written about in detail by scholars, and students of economic history will be deeply aware of industrialisation.

Racial chattel slavery, as practised in the North and South Americas over four centuries, represented bondage not seen before at new levels of human inferiority and violence. European chattel slavery required two elements which on the whole was not present in earlier forms of slavery; private ownership and racism. Only under the ideology of European racism could chattel slavery exist in the extreme from that it took. Chattel slavery was the ownership of one person by another as a form of property; it became prerequisite for plantation settlement for sugar and coffee - the beginnings of industrial capitalism.