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Slavery is a recurring idea in the text. One of the elements common among members of the Black Atlantic is the joint experience of slavery and especially the experience of the "terror" of slavery. This terror ties together transnational racial identity. However, it is important to understand this common terror as an essential feature of modernity as the slave trade was perhaps the first case of international trade that enabled the West to achieve economic and cultural power over the entire world. Gilroy sees the very philosophical idea of modernity as rooted in the real, brutal practice of the enslavement of African peoples. Black intellectuals in the last one hundred and fifty years have often used the idea of slavery to understand the idea of modernity and criticize it for excluding the experiences of the oppressed and marginalized.