During this period, scholarship coalesced around a cultural-historical and transatlantic paradigm, treating slavery as a central, long-running European–American problem rather than a solely national issue. Scholars integrated philosophy, literature, law, and economics to trace slavery's moral, political, and economic legacies, expanding inquiry to include Black intellectual life and evolving white attitudes across extended timeframes. The resulting synthesis connected Afro-American experiences with global slave networks, creating a durable framework for later studies of race and memory.