Évariste-Vital Luminais

Returning to the work of the artist Évariste Vital Luminais, his depiction of involuntary abduction and migration in the painting Les pirates normands au IXe siècle has its frisson, but the commodification of people in the context of international trade reflects a XIXe siècle modernity more than this particular but distant epoch of European history. Luminais was one of five artists who collaborated between 1886 and 1889 on a monumental fresco, more than 1,500 square metres (16,000 sq ft) in area, for the interior of the dome of the Paris Commercial Bourse, representing the history of intercontinental trade.

It includes a scene representing America which features Indians, slaves, labourers, cowboys, and a steam train representing the modern world.

The brutality of a medieval world capable of accommodating slavery as the necessary engine for productive development, might be seen to be the viable and natural successor to the Mediterranean empires of Greece and Rome, that were slave driven cultures, even though in Ireland it was happening at "the edge of the world", a periphery to the European centre. Modernity and slavery, these antinomies come later, as we shall see on this timeline.