If we're going to understand the tragedy of slavery, we need to understand the economics of it. We need to get inside what Mark Twain famously called a deformed conscience. We have to see slaves both as they were, as human beings, and as they were viewed as an economic commodity. Right, so you probably know about the horrendous conditions aboard slave ships, which at their largest could hold 400 people. But it's worth underscoring that each slave had an average of four square feet of space. That is four square feet. As one eyewitness testified before Parliament in 1791, they had not so much room as a man in his coffin.