Industrial Revolution and Atlantic Slave Trade

Although I don't know much about the Industrial Revolution, I feel that I have a semi-accurate memory of the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade. I believe that ships traveled to Africa where they would take prisoners as slaves and ship them to plantations in America. The Americans would then trade supplies like cotton and sugar for the slaves, which would be taken to the British and French colonies on the Carribean islands. The money from the supplies would then be shipped back to Africa to be used to buy more slaves. I am not positive of the accuracey of this description, but I know that the slave trade formed a triangle stretching across the Atlantic Ocean which involved many countries and an exchange of human beings for money and goods.

This system, although profitable, could not have been good for the Enlightenment. By putting a price on the life of a human being, people imply that not all people are equal and that life is not as precious as we might believe. These thoughts definitely oppose most of the views of the Enlightenment thinkers we researched who believe in things like equal rights and power to the people. I don't know what the Industrial Revolution in Europe was like, but my guess is that it introduced many new ideas and helped move the Enlightenment along even more.