Hunting for rents: the economics of slaving in pre-colonial Africa
Great wrong and unchristian thievery and robbery are committed all over the world by merchants. . . . Princes have become the companions of robbers. For they hang the thieves, who have stolen a gulden or half a gulden, but they associate with those, who rob all the world and steal with greater assurance than all others, so that the proverb remains true: big thieves hang little thieves; and as the Roman senator Cato said: mean thieves lie in prisons and stocks, but public thieves are clothed in gold and silks. (Martin Luther, 1524, cited in Marx, Capital, III, p. 326n)