Ordinance - a law or rule made by a government or authority
depreciate - an accounting method of allocating the cost of a tangible asset over its useful life
The Middle Passage specific refers to the journey the Africans slaves made from Africa to the Americas. It is called that because it was 2nd trip made by European slaves ships during the Triangular Trade.
The Triangular trade refers to the entire process, and similar to what you described in your question. That is, the European ships traveled to Africa to sell manufactured products for slaves; then these ships took the slaves and continued on across the Atlantic to the Americas (the middle passage), and traded the slaves for raw materials (like cotton) from the colonies; and finally they took these raw materials back to Europe to make clothing and whatever.
Among the first settlers were the Mennonites, who founded Germantown in 1683, and the Amish, who established the Northkill Amish Settlement in 1740. Despite Quaker opposition to slavery, by 1730 colonists had brought about 4,000 slaves into Pennsylvania.
In 1856 Franco-Russian-British peace was signed at the Congress of Paris. Cavour succeeded in having one of the sessions expressly devoted to discussing the "Italian problem": He was able to publicly defend the idea that the repression of the reactionary governments and the The policies of the Austro-Hungarian Empire were the real culprits of the revolutionary anxieties that were forming throughout the peninsula and, above all, that these revolts in Italy could degenerate into a revolutionary threat to all the governments of Europe, thereby increasing the Franco-British concern in the "Italian problem".