Silvia Federici, Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body, and Primitive Accumulation pages 104-105

Did workers in Europe know that they were buying products resulting from slave labor and, if they did, did they object to it? This is a question I would like to ask them, but it is one which I cannot answer. What is certain is that the history of tea, sugar, rum, tobacco, and cotton is far more significant than we can deduce from the contribution which these commodities made, as raw materials or means of exchange in the slave trade, to the rise of the factory system. For what traveled with these "exports" was not only the blood of the slaves but the seeds of a new science of exploitation, and a new division of the working class by which waged-work, rather than providing an alternative to slavery, was made to depend on it for its existence, as a means (like female unpaid labor) for the expansion of the unpaid part of the waged working-day.