The first real European slave trade began after the Fourth Crusade in 1204, the crusade that you will remember as the crazy one. Italian merchants imported thousands of Armenian, Circassian, and Georgian slaves to Italy. Most of them were women who worked as household servants, but many worked processing sugar. And sugar is of course a crop that African slaves later cultivated in the Caribbean. Camera 2 side note, none of the primary crops grown by slaves, sugar, tobacco, coffee, is necessary to sustain human life. So in a way, slavery is a very early byproduct of a consumer culture that revolves around the purchase of goods that bring us pleasure, but not sustenance. You are welcome to draw your own metaphorically resonant conclusions from this fact.