"It is not within the limits of this thesis to fully account for how much of the preoccupation with slavery that came to dominate European thought was directly tied to reflection on and opposition to the trans-Atlantic slave trade, and how much was residual from the common knowledge that the history of Western civilization was (and is still) largely a history of enslavement. However, according to Graeber, slavery as a concept was widely looked down upon across Europe prior to the establishment of the Atlantic slave trade; the church opposed it; and by the time Portuguese and Dutch merchants found the opportunity to kick-start a modern human slave trade on the western coast of the continent of Africa, slavery proper had otherwise vanished from European culture, save the persistence of wage labor and indentured servitude, often indistinguishable from more explicit forms of slavery (Graeber, 250, 346). There was also opposition to the enslavement of Africans, resulting in the prohibition of slavery within certain European national borders. But we can at least see that anxieties about the enslavement of the modern self were grounded in material realities. If one could not pay one‟s debts, one could be rounded up and shipped off to the New World in indentured servitude (Graeber, 2011). An enslaved man was a man who was “dead to world.” Lost to society."