happy or good.
This attitude would be brought to bear in antislavery campaigns as some Europeans fought against the institution, and ennobling the victims was one way of showing how pernicious the institution itself might be. As a consequence, two opposing conceptions developed in Europe:
Henceforward, Europeans would be increasingly divided into two opposed views: one, the traditional, tending to hold that Africa had never possessed cultures that were worthy of respect or even of serious investigation; the other, the scientific, tending to argue the reverse.
Davidson discusses the slave trade from the point of view of a European examining the damage done to Africa. He is not considering the effects on the slaves themselves so much as on the continent from which they were taken, and he finds that the consequences of the trade were devastating to Africa, in no small part because of the racist attitudes developed in white settlers there causing them to create as much devastation in the environment as they had done in the population. Indeed, there was actually some gain from contact with Europe, especially in agriculture as the ships from South America introduced new and useful crops that would become of importance to Africa. The slave trade itself drove European attitudes as they came to see the people of Africa not as people but as commodities to be capture, bought, and sold. Davidson says explicitly that the trade and the bitterness and contempt it brought laid the foundation for future legends
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