Racism had many consequences for the indigenous peoples of invaded lands. The various strands of Christianity fed into the colonial mindset from the last decades of the 18th century when missionaries followed the invaders. For the churches, these were their ‘civilising missions’, bringing what they thought was the best of their own culture. The literature is full of chaplains seeing their missions as bringing light to the darkness of the heathen. Many of the invaded did not see it that way, viewing the Christian churches as an attempt to denigrate their cultures and ways of life.

Colonisation and slavery were the cornerstones of the Industrial Revolution. European industrialisation and Atlantic-American slavery as two structural global transformations must be understood as an integral whole. Industrialisation in the 19th century was enough to bring Europe out of a backwater in terms of global wealth and power. The processes of industrialisation have been written about in detail by scholars, and students of economic history will be deeply aware of industrialisation.

Racial chattel slavery, as practised in the North and South Americas over four centuries, represented bondage not seen before at new levels of human inferiority and violence. European chattel slavery required two elements which on the whole was not present in earlier forms of slavery; private ownership and racism. Only under the ideology of European racism could chattel slavery exist in the extreme from that it took. Chattel slavery was the ownership of one person by another as a form of property; it became prerequisite for plantation settlement for sugar and coffee - the beginnings of industrial capitalism.