Nathanael Davies explains his radical rethink of how to teach transatlantic slavery. He explains how he came to question his earlier approach of focusing on the causation of 'abolition' and 'emancipation' and, instead, allowed scholarship, sources and his own students' meaning-making to guide him to a different, and much more profound, analytic focus. He explains why a change--continuity angle emerged as more meaningful and sets out why and how he situated the events in a longer-time scale and much broader historical context.