Both the slave trade and slavery represented the epitome of unequal exchange at all levels and in that sense symbolised the earliest modern example of the inseparable connection between development and underdevelopment on a global scale. It was not only that bodies were exchanged for baubles; it was that baubles and such like impedimenta came to be regarded as fair exchange in the trade. Whether in cash or in kind, the standard of exchange was always the same: something for nothing... on the one hand, the purchase of labour power without which the sugar plantations could not be sustained and, on the other hand, the sale of trifles and commodities without which Africans would very often have been far better off... the development of the international capitalist economy was ineluctably connected to the trade in slaves and the profitable exploitation of slave labour on the plantations.