Answer:
Myth: Slavery is a product of capitalism.
Fact: Slavery is older than the first human records.
Myth: Slavery is a product of Western civilization.
Fact: Slavery is virtually a universal institution.
Myth: Slavery was an economically backward and inefficient institution.
Fact: Many of the most progressive societies in the world had slaves.
Myth: Slavery was always based on race.
Fact: Not until the fifteenth century was slavery associated primarily with people of African descent.
Myth: New World slaves came exclusively from West Africa.
Fact: Half of all New World slaves came from central Africa.
Myth: Europeans physically enslaved Africans or hired mercenaries who captured people for export or that African rulers were "Holocaust abettors" who were themselves to blame for the slave trade.
Fact: Europeans did engage in some slave raiding; the majority of people who were transported to the Americas were enslaved by Africans in Africa.
Myth: Many slaves were captured with nets.
Fact: There is no evidence that slaves were captured with nets; war was the most important source of enslavement.
Myth: Kidnapping was the usual means of enslavement.
Fact: War was the most important source of enslavement; it would be incorrect to reduce all of these wars to slave raids.
Myth: The Middle Passage stripped enslaved Africans of their cultural heritage and transformed them into docile, passive figures wholly receptive to the cultural inputs of their masters.
Fact: Slaves engaged in at least 250 shipboard rebellions.
Myth: Most slaves were imported into what is now the United States.
Fact: Well over 90 percent of slaves from Africa were imported into the Caribbean and South America.
Myth: Slavery played a marginal role in the history of the Americas.
Fact: Slave labor made it profitable to mine for precious metal and to harvest sugar, and indigo.; slaves taught whites how to raise such crops as rice and indigo.
Myth: Europeans arrived in the New World in far larger numbers than did Africans.
Fact: Before 1820, the number of Africans outstripped the combined total of European immigrants by a ratio of 3, 4, or 5 to 1.