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Essay: The slave trade

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The concept of skin color was the defining characteristic to slave owners, slave capturers, and, of course, slaves. Skin color played a determining factor in choosing who will be taken to the New World to be enslaved. The supremacy of white, fairer skin created a barrier among African Americans and the Europeans. Due to their darker complexity, the Europeans categorized them as worthless and to be taken, without the hesitation, and treating such individuals like animals. Africans were separated from their families and brought to the New World by ships such as the Clotide which, at one point, once carried over 110 captured slaves (http://www.blackpast.org/aah/clotilda). The ships, nonetheless, were not used to safely transport the newly enslaved individuals; despite the fact they were built for cargo, the ships continuously carried an excess number of individuals in the bottom. The Africans were positioned in order to fit an abundance of them due to the necessity and popularity of having a slave in the Americas. According to the International Slavery museum, “Conditions on board ship during the Middle Passage were appalling”; the Africans experienced disease, starvation, dehydration, and heat strokes. The number of fatalities rose as the ships were on their path to the Americas therefore, despite the number of fatalities, those who survived in the terrible conditions were beneficial to the financial need of the slave capturers. The ships used the Middle Passage to vigorously transport captive Africans and goods.  According to Reverse Sail, the transportation of Africans to the Americas is “one of the most extensive mass movements in history” (Gomez 63). 

            Despite the established social standing of the dark skin color during these times, questions of how the darker complexity of these Africans became a factor in determining their worth still stand. It is seen in the ancient Mediterranean world; the inferiority of the darker complexity was nonexistent. Gomez states “the Greeks were so taken with the pigmentation of Africans that they invented the term Ethiopian” (13). Nonetheless, the Greeks noticed the differences among complexity but did not use such differences as factors in determining the African’s worth as a human being. Not only did Greeks respect the Africans and their distinctive skin color, they admired the cultural diversity and customs. Gomez adds “their attitudes towards Africans can be deduced from their accounts of actual encounters, as well as from their literature” (64). It is noticeable that in this historic era and by these groups of individuals, the Africans were not brought to a lower-class due to a physical feature; instead, the Africans were a focus of curiosity and admiration of a foreign world.  

            The enslavement of Africans continued in the Islamic world; however, skin color did not play a determining factor to Muslims. In the commencement of Islamic slavery, all humans were eligible to be a slave despite their race. In Reverse Sail, Gomez states “Europeans were just as eligible as Africans, and Slavic and Caucasian populations were the largest source of slaves for the Islamic world” (35). However, race ultimately became a factor in the eighteenth and nineteenth century. Because of the abundance of black slaves, capturers noticed the connection of the concept of slavery with the darker complexity and aimed towards the direction of. The conditions of Africans did not cease and the sexual exploitation of women was, like Gomez states in Reverse sail, “erratic and unpredictable” (37). The men were largely used for agriculture needs and labor. Despite the differences in historic time periods, the work for both men and women slaves did not change. Men were mostly used as laborers while women kept for the children and were sexually abused by the male slave owners. Throughout the Islamic World, slavery continued on as captured Africans formed families and multiplied; it was also often seen that women slaves became child carriers of their owner’s children. 

            Due to the association of the darker complexity with the continuous slavery that occurred throughout different time periods, the evolution of modern day slavery in the America roses. The Transatlantic Slave Trade was ultimately inspired when Europeans realized how effectively the Muslim’s used slaves for their personal labor needs and desires. The Colonization of North and South Americas created a necessity of labor in order to create a substantial, effective world. Europeans negotiated firearms in exchange for slaves to African States who solely wished to gain materialistic items. The Europeans easily captured Africans who had been betrayed by their own rulers and people. Because of the necessity and demand for the labor workers, those who captured the Africans were influenced to bring as many as possible because of the financial outcome. The greediness of such individuals caused the additional exploitation and prejudice towards the Africans which was then influenced in the Americas. 

            In North America, skin color became the dividing factor among the individuals that populated the new colonized nation.

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Article contents

Atlantic slavery and the slave trade: history and historiography.

  • Daniel B. Domingues da Silva Daniel B. Domingues da Silva History Department, Rice University
  •  and  Philip Misevich Philip Misevich Department of History, St. John’s University
  • https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780190277734.013.371
  • Published online: 20 November 2018

Over the past six decades, the historiography of Atlantic slavery and the slave trade has shown remarkable growth and sophistication. Historians have marshalled a vast array of sources and offered rich and compelling explanations for these two great tragedies in human history. The survey of this vibrant scholarly tradition throws light on major theoretical and interpretive shifts over time and indicates potential new pathways for future research. While early scholarly efforts have assessed plantation slavery in particular on the antebellum United States South, new voices—those of Western women inspired by the feminist movement and non-Western men and women who began entering academia in larger numbers over the second half of the 20th century—revolutionized views of slavery across time and space. The introduction of new methodological approaches to the field, particularly through dialogue between scholars who engage in quantitative analysis and those who privilege social history sources that are more revealing of lived experiences, has conditioned the types of questions and arguments about slavery and the slave trade that the field has generated. Finally, digital approaches had a significant impact on the field, opening new possibilities to assess and share data from around the world and helping foster an increasingly global conversation about the causes, consequences, and integration of slave systems. No synthesis will ever cover all the details of these thriving subjects of study and, judging from the passionate debates that continue to unfold, interest in the history of slavery and the slave trade is unlikely to fade.

  • slave trade
  • historiography

From the 16th to the mid- 19th century , approximately 12.5 million enslaved Africans were forcibly embarked on slave ships, of whom only 10.7 million survived the notorious Middle Passage. 1 Captives were transported in vessels that flew the colors of several nations, mainly Portugal, Britain, France, Spain, and the Netherlands. Ships departed from ports located in these countries or their overseas possessions, loaded slaves at one or more points along the coast of Africa, and then transported them to one or more ports in the Americas. They sailed along established trade routes shaped by political forces, commercial partnerships, and environmental factors, such as the winds and sea currents. The triangular system is no doubt the most famous route but in fact nearly half of all slaves were embarked on vessels that traveled directly between the Americas and Africa. 2 Africans forced beneath the decks of slave vessels were captured in the continent’s interior through several means. Warfare was, perhaps, the commonest, yielding large numbers of captives for sale at a time. Other methods of enslavement included judicial proceedings, pawning, and kidnappings. 3 Depending on the routes captives traveled and the ways they were captured, Africans could sometimes find themselves in the holds of ships with people who belonged to their same cultures, were from their same villages, or were even close relatives. 4 None of this, however, attenuated the sufferings and appalling conditions under which they sailed. Slaves at sea were subjected to constant confinement, brutal violence, malnutrition, diseases, sexual violence, and many other abuses. 5

Upon arrival in the Americas, Africans often found themselves in equally hostile environments. Slavery in the mining industry and on cash crop plantations, especially those that produced sugar and rice, significantly reduced Africans’ life expectancies and required owners to replenish their labor force through the slave trade. 6 By contrast, slave systems centered on less intensive crops and the services industry, particularly in cities, ports, and towns, often offered enslaved Africans better chances of survival and even the possibility of achieving freedom through manumission by purchase, gift, or inheritance. 7 These apparent advantages did not necessarily mean that life was any less harsh. Neither did the prospect of freedom significantly change slaves’ material lives. Few individuals managed to obtain manumission and those who did encountered many other barriers that prevented them from fully enjoying their lives as free citizens. 8 In spite of those barriers, slaves challenged their status and conditions in many ways, ranging from “quiet” forms of resistance—slowdowns, breaking tools, and feigning illness at work—to bolder initiatives such as running away, plotting conspiracies, and launching rebellions. 9 Although slavery provided little room for autonomy, Africans strove to maintain or replicate aspects of their cultures in the Americas. Whenever possible, they married people with their same backgrounds, named their children in their own languages, cooked foods using techniques, styles, and ingredients similar to those found in their motherlands, composed songs in the beats of their homelands, and worshipped ancestral spirits, deities, and gods in the same fashion as their forbears. 10 At the same time, slave culture was subject to constant change, a process that over the long run enabled enslaved people to better navigate the dangerous world that slavery created. 11

This overview may seem rather free of controversy, but it is in fact the result of years of debates, some still raging, and research conducted by generations of historians of slavery and the slave trade. Perhaps no other historical fields have been so productive and transformative over such a short period of time. Since the 1950s, scholars have developed and refined new methods, created new theoretical models, brought previously untapped sources to light, and posed new questions that shine bright new light on the experiences of enslaved people and their owners as well as the social, political, economic, and cultural worlds that they created in the diaspora. Although debates about Atlantic slavery and the slave trade go back to the era of abolition, historians began grappling in earnest with these issues in the aftermath of World War II. Early scholarship focused on the United States and tended to articulate views of slavery that reflected elite sources and perspectives. 12 Inspired by the US civil rights movement, second-wave feminism, and wider global decolonization campaigns, the 1960s and 1970s witnessed the rise of approaches to the study of slavery rooted in new social history, which aimed to understand slaves as central historical actors rather than mere victims of exploitation. 13 Around the same time, a group of scholars trained in statistical analysis sparked passionate debates about the extent to which quantitative assessments of slavery and slave trading effectively represented slaves’ lived experiences. 14 To more vividly capture those experiences, some historians turned to new or underutilized tools, particularly biographies, family histories, and microhistories, which provided windows into local historical dynamics. 15 The significance of the penetrating questions that these fruitful debates raised has been amplified in recent decades in response to the growing influence of transnational and Atlantic approaches to slavery. Atlantic frameworks have required the gathering and analysis of new data on slavery and the slave trade around the world, encouraging scholars from previously underrepresented regions to challenge Anglo-American dominance in the field. Finally, the digital turn in the 21st century has provided new models for developing historical projects on slavery and the slave trade and helped democratize access to once inaccessible sources. 16 This article draws on this rich history of scholarship on slavery and the slave trade to illustrate major theoretical and interpretive shifts over time and raise questions about the future prospects for this dynamic field of study.

Models of Slavery and Resistance

While each country in the Americas has its own national historiography on slavery, from a 21st-century perspective, it is hard to overestimate the role that US-based scholars played in shaping the agenda of slavery studies. Analyses of American plantation records began around the turn of the 20th century . Early debates emerged in particular over the conditions of slavery in the American South and views of the relationship between slaves and owners. Setting the foundation for these debates in the early- 20th century , Ulrich Bonnell Phillips offered an extraordinarily romanticized vision of life on the plantation. 17 Steeped in open racism, his work compared slave plantations to benevolent schools that over time “civilized” enslaved peoples. Conditioned by the kinds of revisionist interpretations of Southern slavery that emerged in the era following Reconstruction, Phillips saw American slavery as a benign institution that persisted despite its economic inefficiency. His work trivialized the violence inherent in slave systems, a view some Americans were eager to accept and, given his standing among subsequent generations of slavery scholars, one that prevailed in the profession for half of a century.

Early challenges to this view had little immediate impact within academic circles. That primarily black intellectuals, working in or speaking to white-dominated academies, offered many of the most sophisticated objections helps explain the persistence of Phillips’ influence. In the face of looming institutional racism, several scholars offered bold and fresh interpretations that uprooted basic ideas about the slave system. Over his illustrious career, W. E. B. Du Bois highlighted the powerful structural impediments that restricted black lives and brought attention to the dynamic ways that African Americans confronted systematic exploitation. Eric Williams, a noted Trinidadian historian, took aim at the history of abolition, arguing that self-interest—rather than humanitarian concerns—led to the abolition of slavery throughout the British Empire. Melville Herskovitz, a prominent white American anthropologist, turned his attention to the connections between African and African American culture. 18 Though many of these works were marginalized at the time they were produced, this scholarship is rightfully credited with, among other things, shining light on the relationship between African and African American history. Turning their attention to Africa, scholars discovered a variety of cultural practices that, they argued, shaped the black experience under slavery and in its aftermath. Even those scholars who challenged or rejected this Africa-centered approach pushed enslaved people to the center of their analyses, representing a radical departure from previous studies. 19

Similarly, works focused on the history of slavery and the slave trade in other regions of the Americas, especially those colonized by France, Spain, and Portugal, were often overlooked. The economies of many of these regions had historically depended on slave labor. The size of the captive populations of some of them rivaled that of the United States. Moreover, they had been involved in the slave trade for much longer and far more extensively than any other region of what became the United States. Researchers in Brazil, Cuba, and other countries often noticed these points. 20 Some of them, like the Brazilian sociologist Gilberto Freyre, received training in the United States and produced significant research. However, because they published mainly in Portuguese and Spanish, and translations were hard to come by, their work had little initial impact on Anglo-American scholarship. The few scholars who did realize the importance of this work used it to draw comparisons between the Anglophone and non-Anglophone worlds of slavery, highlighting differences in their patterns of colonization and emphasizing the distinctive roles that Catholicism and colonial legal regimes played in shaping slave systems across parts of the Americas. A greater incidence of miscegenation and slaves’ relative accessibility to freedom through manumission led some scholars to argue that slavery in the non-Anglophone New World was milder than in antebellum America or the British colonies. 21

In the United States, the dominant narratives of American slavery continued to emphasize the absolute authority of slave owners. Even critics of Phillips, who emerged in larger numbers in the 1950s and vigorously challenged his conclusions, thought little of slaves’ abilities to effect meaningful change on plantations. Yet they did offer new interpretations of American slavery, as the metaphors scholars used in this decade to characterize the system attest. Far from Phillips’ training school, Kenneth Stampp argued that plantation slavery more appropriately resembled a prison in which enslaved people became completely dependent on their owners. 22 Going even further, Stanley M. Elkins compared American slavery to a concentration camp. 23 The experience of slavery was so traumatic that it stripped enslaved people of their identities and rendered them almost completely helpless. American slavery, in Elkins’ view, turned African Americans into infantilized “Sambos” whose minds and wills came to mirror those of their owners. While such studies drew much needed attention to the violence of plantation slavery, they all but closed the door on questions about slave agency and cultural production. Emphasizing slave autonomy ran the risk of minimizing the brutality of slave owners, and for those scholars trying to overturn Phillips’s vision of American slavery, that brutality was what defined the plantation enterprise.

It took the revolutionary spirit of the 1960s to move slavery studies in a significantly new direction. Driven by their hard-fought battles for political rights at home, African Americans and others whom the civil rights movement inspired added critical new voices and perspectives that required a rethinking of the American past. Scholars who emerged during this period largely rejected the overwhelming authority of the planter class and instead turned their attention to the activities of enslaved people. Slaves, they found, created spaces for themselves and exercised their autonomy on plantations in myriad ways. While they recognized the violence of the slave system, historians of this generation were more interested in assessing the development of black society and identifying resistance to plantation slavery. Far from the brainwashed prisoners of their owners, enslaved people were recast as producers of dynamic and enduring cultures. One key to this transformation was a more careful analysis of what occurred within slave quarters, where new research uncovered the existence of relatively stable—at least under the circumstances—family life. Another emphasized religion as a tool that slaves used to improve their conditions and forge new identities in the diaspora. The immediate post-civil rights period also saw scholars renew their interest in Africa, breathing new life into older debates about the origins and survival of cultural practices in the Americas. 24

What much of the scholarship in this period shared was the idea that no matter how vicious the system, planter power was always incomplete. Recognizing that reality, slaves and their owners established a set of ground rules that granted slaves a degree of autonomy in an attempt to minimize resistance. Beyond mere brutality, slavery thus rested on unwritten but widely understood slave “rights”—Sundays off from plantation labor, the cultivation of private garden plots, participation in an independent slave economy—that both sides negotiated and frequently challenged. This view was central to Eugene Genovese’s magisterial book, Roll Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made , which employed the concept of paternalism to help make sense of 19th-century Southern slavery. 25 Paternalist ideology provided owners with a theoretical justification for slavery’s continuation in the face of widespread criticism from Northern abolitionists. Unlike in the urban North, Southerners claimed, where free African Americans faced deplorable conditions and had little social support, slave owners claimed to take better care of their “black and white” families. Slaves also embraced paternalism, though toward a different end: doing so enabled them to use the idea of the “benevolent planter” to their own advantage and make claims for incremental improvements in slaves’ lives. Slavery, Genovese argued, was thus based on the mutual interdependence of owners and slaves.

The degree of intimacy between slaves and owners that paternalism implied spoke to another question that occupied scholars writing in the 1960s and 1970s: given the violence of the slave system, why had so few large-scale slave rebellions occurred? For Phillips and those whom he influenced, the benevolent nature of Southern slavery provided a sufficient explanation. But undeniable evidence of the violence of slavery required making sense of patterns—or the seeming lack—of slave resistance. Unlike on some Caribbean islands, where slaves far outnumbered free people and environmental and geographic factors tended to concentrate the location of plantations, conditions in the United States were less conducive to widespread rebellion. Yet slaves never passively accepted their captivity. The literature on resistance during this period deemphasized violent forms of rebellion, which occurred infrequently, and reoriented scholarship toward the variety of ways that enslaved people challenged the domination of slave owners over them. Having adjusted their lenses, historians found evidence of slave resistance seemingly everywhere. Enslaved people slowed the paces at which they worked, feigned illnesses, broke tools, and injured or let escape animals on plantations. Such “day-to-day” resistance did little to overturn slavery but it gave some control to captives over their work regimes. In some cases, slaves acted even more boldly, committing arson or poisoning those men and women responsible for upholding the system of bondage. Resistance also took the form of running away, a strategy that long preceded the famous Underground Railroad in North America and posed unique problems in territories with unsettled frontiers, unfriendly environmental terrain, and diverse indigenous populations into which fleeing captives could integrate. 26

This shift in scholarship toward slave agency and resistance was anchored in the creative use of sources that had previously been unknown or underappreciated. Although they had long recognized the shortcomings of Phillips’s reliance on records from a limited number of large plantations, historians struggled to find better options, particularly those that shed light on the experiences and perspectives of enslaved people. Slave biographies provided one alternative. In the 1970s, John Blassingame gathered an exhaustive collection of runaway slave accounts to examine the life experiences of American slaves. 27 Whether such biographies spoke to the majority of slaves or represented a few exceptional black men became the subject of considerable disagreement. Scholars who were less trusting of biographies turned to the large collection of interviews that the Federal Writers’ Project of the Works Progress Administration conducted with former slaves. 28 Though far more numerous and representative of “typical” slave experiences, the WPA interviews had their own problems. Would former slaves have been comfortable speaking freely to primarily white interviewers about their lives in bondage? The question remains open. Equally pressing was the concern over the amount of time that had passed between the end of slavery and the period when the interviews were conducted. Indeed, some two-thirds of interviewees were octogenarians when federal employees recorded their stories. Despite such shortcomings, these sources and the new interpretations of slavery that they supported pushed scholarship in exciting new directions. Slaves could no longer be dismissed as passive victims of the plantation system. The new sources and approaches humanized them and reoriented scholarship toward the communities that slaves made.

Across the Atlantic, scholars of Africa began to grapple in earnest with questions about slavery, too. Early contributions to debates over the role of the institution in Africa and its impact on African societies came from historians and anthropologists. One strand of disagreement emerged over whether slavery existed there at all prior to the arrival of Europeans. This raised more fundamental questions about how to define slavery. The influential introduction to Suzanne Miers and Igor Kopytoff’s edited volume, Slavery in Africa: Historical and Anthropological Perspectives , took pains to distinguish African slavery from its American counterparts. It rooted slavery not in racial difference or the growth of plantation agriculture but rather in the context of Africa’s kin-based social organization. According to the coauthors, the institution’s primary function in Africa was to incorporate outsiders into new societies. 29 So distinctive was this form of captivity that Miers and Kopytoff famously deployed scare quotes each time they used the word “slavery” in order to underscore its uniqueness.

Given their emphasis on incorporation, the process by which enslaved people over time became accepted insiders in the societies into which they were forcibly introduced, and their limited treatment of the economically productive roles that slaves played, Miers and Kopytoff came in for swift criticism on several fronts. Neo-Marxists were particularly dissatisfied. Claude Meillassoux, the prominent French scholar, responded with an alternative vision of slavery in Africa that highlighted the violence that was at the core of enslavement. 30 That violence made slavery the very antithesis of kinship, which to many scholars invalidated Miers and Kopytoff’s interpretation. Meillassoux and others also pointed to the dynamic economic roles that slaves played in Africa. 31 Studies in various local settings—in the Sokoto Caliphate, the Western Sudan, and elsewhere—made clear that slavery was a central part of how African societies organized productive labor. 32 This reality led some scholars to articulate distinct slave, or African, modes of production that, they argued, better illuminated the role of slavery in the continent. 33

In addition to these deep theoretical differences, one factor that contributed to the debates was the lack of historical sources that spoke to the changing nature of slavery in Africa. Documentary evidence describing slave societies is heavily concentrated in the 19th century , the period when Europe’s presence in Africa became more widespread and when colonialism and abolitionism colored Western views of Africans and their social institutions. To overcome source limitations, academics cast their nets widely, drawing on methodological innovations from anthropology and comparative linguistics, among other disciplines. 34 Participant observation, through which Africanists immersed themselves in the communities they studied in order to understand local languages and cultures, proved particularly valuable. 35 Yet the enthusiasm for this approach, which for many offered a more authentic path to access African cultures and voices, led some scholars to ignore or paper over its limitations. 36 To what extent, for example, did oral sources or observations of social structures in the 20th century reveal historical realities from previous eras? Other historians projected back in time insights from the more numerous written sources from the 19th century , using them to consider slavery in earlier periods. 37 Those who uncritically accepted evidence from such sources—whether non-written or written—came away with a timeless view of the African past, including as it related to slavery. 38 It would take another decade, during which the field witnessed revolutionary changes to the collection and analysis of data, until scholars began to widely accept the fact that, as in the Americas, slavery differed across time and space.

The Cliometric Debates

Around the same time that some scholars in the Americas were pushing enslaved people to the center of slavery narratives, a separate group of academics trained in economics began steering the focus of studies of slavery and the slave trade in a different direction. While research on planter power and slave resistance allowed historians to infer broad patterns of transformation from a limited collection of local records, this new group of scholars turned this approach upside down. They proposed to assess the underlying forces that shaped slavery and the slave trade to better contextualize the individual experiences of enslaved people. This big-picture approach was rooted in the quantification of large amounts of data available in archival sources spread across multiple locations and led ultimately to the development of “cliometrics,” a radically new methodology in the field. Two works were particularly important to the establishment of this approach: Philip Curtin’s The Atlantic Slave Trade: A Census and Robert Fogel and Stanley Engerman’s Time on the Cross: The Economics of American Negro Slavery . 39

Philip Curtin’s “census” provided the first quantitative assessment of the size, evolution, and distribution of the transatlantic slave trade between the 15th and 19th centuries . Previous estimates of the magnitude of the transatlantic trade claimed that it involved somewhere between fifteen and twenty million enslaved Africans—or in some cases many times that amount. 40 However, upon careful examination, Curtin found that such estimates were “nothing but a vast inertia, as historians have copied over and over again the flimsy results of unsubstantial guesswork.” 41 He thus set out to provide a new figure based on a close reading of secondary works that themselves had been based on extensive archival research. To assist in this endeavor, Curtin enlisted a technology that had only recently become available to researchers: the mainframe computer. He collected data on the number of slaves that ships of every nation involved in the traffic had embarked and disembarked, recorded these data on punch cards, and used the computer to organize the information into time series that allowed him to make projections for the periods and branches of the traffic for which data were scarce or altogether unavailable. Curtin’s findings posed profound challenges to the most basic assumptions about the transatlantic traffic. They revealed that the number of Africans forcibly transported to the Americas was substantially lower than what historians had previously assumed. Curtin also demonstrated that while the British were the most active slave traders during the second half of the 18th century , when the trade had reached its height, the Portuguese (and, after independence, Brazilians as well) carried far more enslaved people during the entire period of the transatlantic trade. 42 Furthermore, while the United States boasted the largest slave population by the mid- 19th century , it was a comparatively minor destination for vessels engaged in the trade: the region received less than 5 percent of all captive Africans transported across the Atlantic. 43

Curtin’s assessment of the slave trade inspired researchers to flock to local archives and compile new statistical data on the number and carrying capacity of slaving vessels departing or entering particular ports or regions around the Atlantic basin. Building on Curtin’s solid foundation, these scholars produced dozens of studies on the volume of various branches of the transatlantic trade. Virtually every port that dispatched slaving vessels to Africa or at which enslaved Africans were disembarked in the Americas received scholarly attention. What emerged from this work was an increasingly clear picture of the volume and structure of the Atlantic slave trade at local, regional, and national levels, though the South Atlantic slave trade remained comparatively understudied. 44 Historians of Africa also joined in these discussions, providing tentative assessments of slave exports from regions along the coast of West and West Central Africa. 45 The deepening pool of data that such research generated enabled scholars to use quantitative methods to consider other aspects of the transatlantic trade. How did mortality rates differ on slave vessels from one national carrier to another? 46 Which ports dispatched larger or smaller vessels and what implications did vessel size have for participation in the slave trade? 47 Which types of European commodities were most highly sought after in exchange for African captives? 48 As these questions imply, scholars had for the first time approached the slave trade as its own distinctive topic for research, which had revolutionary consequences for the future of the field.

Time on the Cross had an effect on slavery scholarship that was similar to—indeed, perhaps even greater than—that of Curtin’s, especially among scholars focused on the antebellum US South. Inspired by studies that challenged the view of plantation slavery as unprofitable, Fogel and Engerman, with the help of a team of researchers, set out to quantify nearly every aspect of that institution in the US South, from slaves’ average daily food consumption to the amount of cotton produced in the US South during the antebellum era. 49 Consistent with the cliometricians’ approach, Fogel and Engerman listed ten findings that “contradicted many of the most important propositions in the traditional portrayal of the slave system.” 50 Their most important—and controversial—conclusions were that slavery was a rational system of labor exploitation maintained by planters to maximize their own economic interests; that it was growing on the eve of the Civil War; and that owners were optimistic rather than pessimistic about the future of the slave system during the decade that preceded the war. 51 Further, the authors noted that slave labor was productive. “On average,” the cliometricians argued, a slave was “harder-working and more efficient than his white counterpart.” 52

While cliometrics made important contributions to the study of slavery and the slave trade, the quantitative approach came in for swift and passionate criticism. Curtin’s significantly lower estimates for the number of enslaved Africans shipped across the Atlantic were met with skepticism; some respondents even charged that his figures trivialized the horrors of the trade. 53 Although praised for its revolutionary interpretation, which earned Fogel the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences in 1993 , Fogel and Engerman’s study of the economics of American slavery was almost immediately cast aside as deeply flawed and unworthy of serious scholarly attention. Critics pointed not only to carelessness in the authors’ data collection techniques but also to their mathematical errors, abusive assumptions, and insufficient contextualization of data. 54 Fogel and Engerman, for example, characterized lynching as a “disciplinary tool.” After counting the number of whippings slaves received at one plantation, they concluded that masters there rarely used the punishment. They failed to note, however, the powerful effect that such abuse had on slaves and free people who merely watched or heard the horrible spectacle. 55 More generally, and apart from these specific problems, critics offered a theoretical objection to the quantitative approach, which, they argued, conceived of history as an objective science, with strong persuasive appeal, but which silenced the voices of the individuals victimized by the history of slavery and the slave trade.

Nevertheless, the methodology found followers among historians studying the history of slavery in other parts of the Atlantic. B. W. Higman’s massive two-volume work, Slave Populations of the British Caribbean, 1807–1834 , remains an unparalleled quantitative analysis of slave communities on the islands under British control. 56 Robert Louis Stein’s The French Sugar Business in the Eighteenth Century also makes substantial use of cliometrics and remains a valuable reference for students of slavery in Martinique and Saint Domingue (present-day Haiti). 57 But outside of the United States, nowhere was cliometrics more popular than Brazil, where scholars of slavery, including Pedro Carvalho de Mello, Herbert Klein, Francisco Vidal Luna, Robert Slenes, and others, applied it to examine many of the same issues that their North American counterparts did: rates of profitability, demographic growth, and economic expansion of slave systems. 58 Africanists also found value in the methodology and employed it as their sources allowed. Patrick Manning, for instance, used demographic modeling to examine the impact of the slave trade on African societies. 59 Philip Curtin compiled quantitative archival sources to analyze the evolution of the economy of Senegambia in the era of the slave trade. 60 Jan Hogendorn and Marion Johnson traced the circulation of cowries, the shell money of the slave trade, noting that “of all the goods from overseas exchanged for slaves, the shell money touched individuals most widely and often in their day-to-day activities.” 61

In many ways, the gap between quantitative and social and cultural approaches to slavery and the slave trade that opened in the 1970s has continued to divide the field. Concerned that cliometrics sucked the dynamism out of interpretations of the slave community and reduced captives to figures on a spreadsheet, some scholars responded by deploying a variety of new tools to reclaim the humanity and individuality of enslaved actors. Microhistory, an approach that early modern Europeanists developed to recover peasant and other everyday people’s stories, offered one such opportunity. 62 Biography provided another. By reducing its scale of observation and focusing on individuals, families, households, or other small-scale units of analysis, such research underscored the messiness of lived experiences and the creative and often unexpected ways that slaves fashioned worlds for themselves. 63 But such approaches raised a separate set of questions: do biographical accounts reveal typical experiences? In an era when few slaves were literate and even fewer committed their stories to paper, any captives whose accounts survived—in full or in fragments, published or unpublished—were by definition exceptional. Moreover, given the clear overarching framework that decades of quantitative work on the slave trade had developed, one would be hard-pressed to ignore completely the cliometric turn. As two quantitatively minded scholars noted, “it is difficult to assess the significance or representativity of personal narratives or collective biographies, however detailed, without an understanding of the overall movements of slaves of which these individuals’ lives were a part.” 64 While an emphasis on what might be described as the quantitative “big picture” is not by nature antagonistic toward social and cultural historians’ concerns with enslaved people’s lived experiences, the two approaches offer different visions of slavery’s past and often feel as if they sit on opposite ends of the analytical spectrum.

Women, Gender, and Slavery

In the roughly two and a half decades that followed the major interpretive shifts that Kenneth Stampp and Stanley Elkins introduced into scholarship on slavery, the field remained an almost exclusively male one. With rare exceptions, men continued to dominate the profession during this period; their work rarely probed with any degree of sophistication the experiences of women in plantation societies. While second-wave feminism inspired women to enter graduate programs in history in larger numbers beginning in the 1960s, it took time for published work on women’s history, at least as it related to slavery, to appear in earnest. Revealingly, it was not until 1985 that the Library of Congress created a unique catalog heading for “women slaves.” Yet in the three decades since then, women’s (and later gendered) histories of slavery have been published at an ever-increasing pace. Scholars in the 21st century would struggle to take seriously books written about slavery that fail to show an appreciation for the distinctive experiences of men and women in captivity or more generally across plantation societies.

Several forces worked against the production of studies on enslaved women. If sources detailing slaves’ lives are in general sparse, evidence on women slaves is particularly spotty. Deborah Gray White’s pioneering work, Aren’t I a Woman: Female Slaves in the Plantation South , the first book-length study of enslaved women, triumphantly pieced together fragments of information from Federal Writers’ Project interviews with scattered plantation records to breathe life into the historiography of black women. It revealed the powerful structures that served to constrain enslaved women’s lives in the 19th century United States. As White famously concluded: “Black in a white society, slave in a free society, women in a society ruled by men, female slaves had the least formal power and were perhaps the most vulnerable group of Antebellum Americans.” 65 Yet publishers and academic peers did not immediately take seriously work focused on women slaves. White noted, for example, how colleagues in her department warned her that she would be unlikely to earn tenure writing about such a topic. This environment was hardly the type of nurturing one required for sustained research. 66

Though it was an uphill struggle, an influential group of scholars gradually developed a framework for understanding slavery’s realities for women. Early work focused on the foundational tasks of recovering female voices and using them to challenge standard narratives of the plantation system. It made clear the complex and multifaceted roles of women captives—as mothers, wives, fieldworkers, and domestics—and in the process reshaped scholarly understanding of the dynamics of the plantation enterprise. Social relations within plantation households commanded particular attention. Some scholars emphasized bonds between black and white women whose lives, they argued, were conditioned by a shared and oppressive patriarchal culture. Catherine Clinton, for example, characterized white mistresses as “trapped” within plantation society. “Cotton was King, white men ruled, and both white women and slaves served the same master,” she argued. 67 While she sympathized with the plight of plantation mistresses, Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, another leading figure of American women’s history, offered a contrary view of gendered relations within Southern households, one that highlighted division. Far from sharing common interests with enslaved women, mistresses clearly benefitted from slavery’s continuation. Their status as white and elite took priority over the bonds of womanhood. 68

The first sustained studies of women’s resistance to slavery also appeared in the 1980s. The historiographical pivot toward day-to-day resistance, which more effectively revealed the sophisticated ways that enslaved Africans and their descendants challenged their captivity, also opened a window of opportunity to view women as disruptors of the slave system in their own right. No longer dismissed as, at most, timid supporters of male-led revolts, women were in this period redefined as “natural rebels” who exploited white perceptions of female docility for their own benefit. Enslaved women, for example, were not generally chained onboard slave vessels, which gave them greater opportunities to organize revolts. Those few women who worked in privileged positions within plantation households took on responsibilities that gave them unique access to white families and exposed them to white vulnerabilities. Cooks could theoretically poison their owners, a threat that seemed all too real given the world of violence that underpinned the plantation. And while the coercive realities of slavery rooted every sexual relationship between white men and black women in violence, some scholars pointed to the possibility that women slaves who endured such abuse saw marginal improvements in their material circumstances or the prospects for their children. 69

Within a decade of the publication of Deborah White’s book, scholarship began to shift away from analyses of women and toward investigations of the worlds that men and women made together under slavery. Scholars of Africa brought valuable insights into this issue, drawing on decades of careful research into local constructions of gender and, in particular, the gendered division of labor within Africa. Women, Africanists illustrated, performed many of the most important tasks in agricultural regimes across the continent. 70 Some historians argued that it was their physical rather than biological roles that led slave owners in Africa to prefer and retain female captives, challenging earlier rigid emphases on women’s childbearing capacities. 71 These polarized debates eventually gave way to local and more nuanced analyses that revealed the complex range of contributions that enslaved women made to African societies: Women had children that increased the sizes of households; they cultivated and marketed crops that fed and enriched kingdoms and other less centralized societies; they served as bodyguards to local elites; and they even bought, retained, and traded their own captives. 72 If slavery in Africa was widespread, it was precisely because women had such wide-ranging productive and reproductive value.

These insights had wider implications for the study of the slave trade and the Atlantic World. African conceptions of gender conditioned the supply to Europeans of men and women captives along the coast, illustrating the close relationship between gender issues and economic concerns. 73 Gendered identities that emerged in Africa were adapted and transformed in the Americas depending on demographic, economic, or cultural concerns. 74 Whereas in low-density slave systems, African women and their descendants might follow work regimes that resembled those of their homelands, the gendered division of labor in large slave societies often more closely reflected European attitudes toward women and work. 75 Grappling with such complex realities required historians to dig into local records across a staggering variety of geographic settings. It was in that context that scholars began to broaden their horizons and embrace an increasingly Atlantic orientation—a trend that mirrored broader changes in studies on slavery and the slave trade in the 1990s. 76

The Atlanticization of Slavery Studies

It may seem redundant to identify a shift toward the Atlanticization of slavery studies. Enslaved Africans, after all, were brought to the Americas from across the Atlantic. How, then, could these studies be anything but Atlantic? The reality is that historians have generally looked at the institution through rather parochial eyes, as something limited by regional, national, or cultural boundaries. There were several early and noteworthy exceptions to this trend. Indeed, calls for studies to look at the societies surrounding the ocean as an integral unit of analysis date as far back as the late 1910s. Several scholars took up that call, the most notable perhaps being Fernand Braudel in his 1949 masterpiece, The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II . 77 However, in an increasingly polarized world, the idea faced significant resistance and obstacles. Following World War II, Atlanticization could be easily read as a stand-in for imperialism or westernization. It was only toward the end of the Cold War that historians were able to move past these ideological barriers and understand the value of looking at the Atlantic as “the scene of a vast interaction rather than merely the transfer of Europeans onto American shores,” an interaction that was the result of “a sudden and harsh encounter between two old worlds that transformed both and integrated them into a single New World.” 78

This realization deeply shaped subsequent studies of the history of slavery and the slave trade, some of them reviving earlier debates about cultural continuity and change in the African diaspora. One of the most successful examples to focus on the influence of Africans in shaping slavery on both sides of the ocean is John Thornton’s Africa and Africans in the Making of the Atlantic World . In it, Thornton argues that slavery was the only form of “private, revenue-producing property recognized in African law.” 79 Consequently, African political and economic elites had significant leverage over the institution, giving them some control over the transatlantic traffic. Thornton’s argument offered a new logic for African participation in the slave trade while also providing a new interpretation of African culture in Africa and the Americas. Although enslaved Africans came from several different regions and societies, Thornton stresses the similarities between their cultures and languages. Based on research on the traffic’s organization, he notes that slave ships rarely purchased captives in more than one port and that they normally sailed along very specific routes. 80 Such an organization favored the transmission of some of the cultural practices enslaved Africans brought with them to the Americas. Nevertheless, Thornton points out, “slaves were not militant cultural nationalists who sought to preserve everything African but rather showed great flexibility in adapting and changing their culture.” 81 His approach thus emphasized the systematic linkages that the transatlantic slave trade forged while leaving space for creolization within slave communities.

Another important contribution that emphasized cultural transformation was Ira Berlin’s Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in North America . 82 Looking to identify the first generations of blacks who chartered their descendants’ fate in mainland North America, Berlin located them among a group he called “Atlantic creoles,” people who traced their beginnings to the earliest encounters between Europeans and Africans on the west coast of Africa, but who ultimately emerged from the world that Europe, Africa, and the Americas collectively created. Cosmopolitan by experience or circumstance, familiar with the commerce of the Atlantic, and fluent in its languages and cultures, these individuals laid down the foundations for black life in the New World. 83 They arrived not as Africans desperate to replicate their culture, or flexible to adapt, but rather as profoundly changed individuals. Although they permeated most of the colonial societies of the Americas, Berlin claims that in mainland North America at least they were soon swept away by subsequent generations born under the expansion of large-scale commodity production, which ended the porous slave system of the early years of European and African settlement. 84

Although these were important contributions, the Atlanticization of slavery studies opened many more avenues to understand the experiences of Africans and their descendants during the years of bondage. It allowed for comparisons between Africans’ trajectories with those of other players in the formation of the Atlantic world. Paul Gilroy’s well-known Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness is in a way a precursor, expressing “a desire to transcend both the structures of the nation state and the constraints of ethnicity and national particularity.” 85 Jack P. Greene and Philip D. Morgan’s edited volume, Atlantic History: A Critical Appraisal , views a handful of European nations—Spain, Portugal, Britain, France, and the Netherlands—as creating this new world centered around the Atlantic, but it also places Africans as well as the indigenous populations of the Americas in comparative perspective. 86 One immediate problem with this approach is that it conflates several hundreds of groups, nations, or peoples into a single category, “Africans,” a term that gained traction only as the slave trade expanded and, consequently, recognized by just a fraction of the people it intended to describe.

A more adequate approach, favored by the Atlantic framework of analysis, would focus on specific African regions or peoples. Here historians have made some progress, mainly in the form of edited volumes. Linda M. Heywood’s edited book, Central Africans and Cultural Transformations in the American Diaspora , looks at how Kikongo and Mbundu speakers, often times grouped under designations such as Angola, Benguela, or Congo in places in the Americas as distant from one another as Havana, Montevideo, New Orleans, Recife, and Port au Prince, culturally shaped the African diaspora. 87 Rebecca Shumway and Trevor R. Getz’s volume attempts a similar approach, centered on the societies of precolonial Ghana, mainly the Asante and Fante. 88 Toyin Falola and Matt D. Childs’s book, by contrast, focuses on a single African people, the Yoruba. 89 Not only were they a sizable group forced into the Atlantic, but they also left an indelible mark in several regions of the Americas. Interestingly, the Yoruba started calling themselves as such, that is, through their language name, only years after the transatlantic slave trade had ended, probably as a result of religious encounters leading up to the colonization of Nigeria. 90 During the period of the slave trade, the Yoruba lived divided into a number of states like Oyo, Egba, Egbado, Ijebu, and Ijesa, located in Southwest Nigeria, and were called outside the region by different terms, such as Nagô in Bahia, Lucumí in Cuba, and Aku in Sierra Leone. 91

Not only did the Atlantic approach contribute to the development of new historical frameworks and perspectives, it also encouraged historians to use traditional sources and methods in more creative and interesting ways. In Freedom Papers: An Atlantic Odyssey in the Age of Emancipation , Rebecca J. Scott and Jean Hébrard trace the paper trail that members of the Tinchant family left behind to reconstruct over multiple generations the saga of an African woman and her family from slavery to freedom. 92 In addition to tracing individuals and families, historians have also paid greater attention to cultural practices embedded in traditions of agriculture, healing, and warfare, which were disseminated around the Atlantic during the period of the slave trade. Judith A. Carney, for example, looked at the African origins of rice cultivation in the Americas, connecting particular rice growing regions in Upper Guinea to their counterparts in places like South Carolina in the United States and Maranhão in Bazil; James H. Sweet examined the intellectual history of the Atlantic world by following the uses and appropriations of African healing practices from Dahomey to Bahia and Portugal; and Manuel Barcia explored the similarities and differences between warfare techniques employed by West African captives, especially from Oyo, in Bahia, and Cuba. 93 Although urban history has a long tradition among historians, most studies have focused on cities and ports in Europe and the Americas. 94 Historians, including Robin Law, Kristin Mann, Mariana Cândido, and Randy Sparks, however, are redressing that imbalance with studies focused on African ports—Ouidah, Lagos, Benguela, and Anomabu—that emerged or expanded during the slave trade era. 95

Finally, although removed from the Atlantic, the very effort of looking at slavery and the slave trade from a broader perspective has influenced studies on these issues in other parts of the world or even within a global framework. Research on the intra-American slave trade has gained a renewed interest with publications like Greg O’Malley’s Final Passages: The Intercolonial Slave Trade of British America, 1619–1807 . 96 The same could be said of the slave trade in the Indian Ocean with works like Richard Allen’s European Slave Trading in the Indian Ocean, 1500–1850 . 97 One central debate that has recently been revived concerns the relationship between capitalism and slavery. 98 Inspired by Eric Williams’s path-breaking work and, more recently, by Dale Tomich’s concept of “second slavery,” which highlights the creation of new zones of slavery in the United States and other parts of the continent during the 19th century , historians, including Sven Beckert, Edward Baptist, and Seth Rockman, are now enthusiastically assessing the connections between the expansion of slavery in that period and the formation of global financial markets and industrial economies in Europe and North America. 99 Clearly, the scholarly potential occasioned by the Atlanticization of slavery studies is still unfolding and should not be underestimated.

Into the Digital Era

The digital revolution sparked a radical change across the historical profession that has had particularly important ramifications for the study of slavery and the slave trade. Despite the major theoretical, methodological, and interpretive differences that divided scholars throughout the 20th century , the means of scholarly communication and dissemination of research during that period remained virtually unchanged: books, journal articles, and very occasionally interviews, opinion pieces, and documentary films enabled scholars to explain their work to each other and, to a much lesser extent, a wider public. The emergence of the internet and its rapid infiltration of academic and everyday life has disrupted this landscape, opening new and once inconceivable opportunities to engage in open-ended inquiry unencumbered by publication deadlines, and to share the fruits of that labor with anyone who has access to the web. The digital turn has also inspired scholars to offer creative visual interpretations of the history of both slavery and the slave trade. Perhaps most importantly, the web has provided a site for the presentation and preservation of digitized archival sources that would previously have been accessible to only those people with the means to visit the repositories that hold them. While the consequences of the digital turn are being actively discussed and debated, it is clear that digital history is here to stay.

Digital projects focusing on slavery and the slave trade emerged in the 1990s and tended to be somewhat rudimentary in both their aims and scope, reflecting the limited capacity of the internet itself and, perhaps more appropriately, scholars’ limited comfort using it. These projects had as their main purpose the collection and presentation of primary sources—scanning and loading onto a web page images of captives, owners, slave ships, and forts that teachers or students had collected for pedagogical purposes. Among the first large-scale initiatives to bring together these scattered materials was Jerome Handler and Michael A. Tuite’s website, The Atlantic Slave Trade and Slave Life in the Americas . 100 Created first as a portal to search through images that Handler had used in lectures, this website grew exponentially over time. From the roughly 200 images organized into ten categories with which the site first launched, it now provides access to 1,280 images arranged under eighteen topical headings. Other digital projects focused on the presentation of scanned archival documents. Libraries and historical societies used the web to advertise their holdings and entice interested viewers to further examine their collections. Many of these sites were free of charge, democratizing access to rare scholarly records—at least for those individuals who had access to the internet.

As the technology associated with digitization has improved, a number of organizations have dedicated vast resources to scaling up digital projects. Though its focus goes well beyond slavery and the slave trade, Google Books has been among the most prominent players in the field. 101 Beginning in the early 2000s, Google quietly began scanning published volumes held in major academic libraries. By 2015 , Google estimated that it had scanned 25 million books—nearly one-fifth of the total number of unique titles ever published. Though copyright laws limit full access to the collection, Google Books is nevertheless unparalleled in its scope and offers unrivaled access to published sources on slavery from the pre-copyright era. Other companies have taken more targeted approaches. The Slavery, Abolition and Social Justice portal, for example, offers access to original archival materials focused primarily, though not exclusively, on the Atlantic World that covers the period between 1490 and 2007 . The project enables users to interface with scans of primary sources and use keyword searches to find relevant materials. 102

As this implies, digitization initiatives have not been limited to the Western world, even if, at times controversially, Western institutions have funded the majority of them. Indeed, one of the enduring consequences of the Atlanticization of slavery scholarship has been the growing dialogue it helped generate between scholars living in or working on areas outside of the Anglo-American world. The British Library’s Endangered Archives Programme is one example: it has supported the digitization of entire archival collections in repositories situated in developing countries, where resources for preservation are extremely limited. 103 Local archivists have become valuable collaborators; young students with interests in digital preservation have gained important training and exposure to scanning methods and technologies. Since the early 2000s, major digital initiatives have been launched or completed in places as wide-ranging as Brazil, Cameroon, Cuba, The Gambia, Sierra Leone, and Saint Helena, with important implications for slavery scholarship. 104 One such example is the Slave Societies Digital Archive , directed by Jane Landers and hosted at Vanderbuilt University, which preserves endangered ecclesiastical and secular documents related to Africans and people of African descent. 105 Since 2007 or so, a truly global conversation about slavery and its long-term effects has been nurtured by more widespread access to relevant archival sources.

The growing sophistication of the internet and its users has transformed digital projects on slavery and the slave trade. Websites now go well beyond mere presentations of scanned primary sources. They tend to emphasize interactivity, encouraging site visitors to search through and manipulate data to generate new research insights. Some projects employ “crowdsourcing,” partnering with the public or soliciting data or assistance from site visitors to further a project’s reach. African Origins , for instance, provides to the public some 91,000 records of captives rescued from slave ships in the 19th century , including their indigenous African names. 106 Historians, with the help of other researchers, particularly those people familiar with African languages, have been identifying to which languages these names belong and thereby tracing the inland, linguistic origins of thousands of slaves forced into the Atlantic during the 19th century . 107 This has helped expand insights into slavery and the slave trade well beyond the limited confines of the ivory tower. Moreover, the internet has the added benefit of providing a space for individuals who are passionate about history but whose careers limit their abilities to publish books and articles to share their knowledge with a large pool of readers.

Few digital initiatives have done more for slavery scholarship than Voyages: The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database . The Voyages site is the product of decades of collaborative research into the transatlantic slave trade. Building on Curtin’s Census , it now provides access to information on nearly 36,000 unique slave voyages that operated between the 1510s and 1867 . The site is made possible by the basic reality that, given the vast amount of money they laid out, owners and operators of slave vessels carefully documented many aspects of slaving excursions. Some of the details captured in written records lend themselves to coding and quantification: the names of captains and owners; the places to which slave ships went; the numbers of enslaved people loaded onto and forced off of slave ships; the ratios of males to females and adults to children among captives; and the prices paid for enslaved people. The vast amount of data to which the site provides free access has enabled scholars focused on virtually any aspect of the slave trade or slavery to benefit from and contribute to the Voyages project. Among its most important features is the site’s capacity to expand or revise its records based on contributions from users who uncover new or contradictory evidence. 108

Based in part on the Voyages model—or, in some cases, as a critical response to it—since the 2000s, historical research has witnessed the creation and expansion of important digital projects about enslaved Africans and their descendants. Slave Biographies: Atlantic Database Network , a project spearheaded by Gwendolyn M. Hall and Walter Hawthorne from Michigan State University, offers an open access data repository of information on the identities of enslaved people in the Atlantic World. 109 Liberated Africans , developed by Henry Lovejoy at the University of Colorado, Boulder, brings together information about the lives of some 250,000 Africans rescued from slave ships between 1807 and 1896 . 110 Final Passages , a project under development by Greg O’Malley and Alex Borucki at the University of California system, plans to provide a database of the intra-American slave trade to be deployed on the same platform as Slave Voyages . 111 And what to say of Enslaved: People of the Historic Slave Trade , winner of a $1.5 million grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation? The project seeks to bring such digital resources together by focusing on individuals who were enslaved, owned slaves, or participated in slave trading at any time between the beginning and the end of the transatlantic slave trade. 112 It is no doubt the epitome in amassing and interconnecting historical data. Conversations about long-term institutional support for these sites and the data on which they are based—a central and underappreciated aspect of digital history—have also begun to take place in earnest. That they are happening at all is indicative of the revolutionary impact that the digital turn has had on the profession.

All in all, it is no easy task to synthesize decades of research on the history of Atlantic slavery and the slave trade. Although relatively new in comparison to more established fields of Western history, it has grown quickly, amassing a significant body of literature that incorporates some of the most sophisticated methodologies available. Historians have proven so adaptable in their approaches and uses of sources that it is nearly impossible to indicate the direction in which the field is moving. Moreover, in the wake of movements such as Black Lives Matter and Rhodes Must Fall, public interest has turned again to the complex and thorny issue of reparations. Consequently, historians have had an unprecedented opportunity to engage with the public on this question and related ones concerning how societies represent and memorialize the history of slavery. In 2013 , Laurent Dubois noticed in an opinion piece in The New York Times that calls for reparations for slavery and the slave trade in the Caribbean offered an important opportunity to face the multiple ways in which the past continues to shape the present. 113 In the following year, Ta-Nehisi Coates published a cover article in The Atlantic making a powerful case for reparations in the United States. According to him, “until we reckon with our compounding moral debts, America will never be whole.” 114 A leading advocate for public memorializing of slavery, Ana Lúcia Araújo, has recently published a book dedicated exclusively to the issue of reparations for slavery and the slave trade. 115 While the most recent iteration of this debate draws on fresh materials and perspectives, Araújo notes that “since the eighteenth century, enslaved and freed individuals started conceptualizing the idea of reparations in correspondence, pamphlets, public speeches, slave narratives, and judicial claims, written in English, French, Spanish, and Portuguese.” 116 That such issues continue to spark passionate debates and scholarship provides a strong indication of the enduring relevance of slavery’s past to the shaping of the present.

Acknowledgments

The authors would like to thank Alex Borucki, David Eltis, Greg O’Malley, and Nicholas Radburn for their comments on earlier versions of this article. All interpretations and conclusions reached here are, of course, the authors’ responsibility.

Further Reading

  • Allen, Richard Blair . European Slave Trading in the Indian Ocean, 1500–1850 . Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 2014.
  • Araújo, Ana Lúcia . Reparations for Slavery and the Slave Trade: A Transnational and Comparative History . New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2017.
  • Campbell, Gwyn , Suzanne Miers , and Joseph C. Miller , eds. Women and Slavery . 2 vols. Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 2007.
  • Cañizares-Esguerra, Jorge , Matt D. Childs , and James Sidbury , eds. The Black Urban Atlantic in the Age of the Slave Trade . Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013.
  • Cooper, Frederick . “The Problem of Slavery in African Studies.” Journal of African History 20, no. 1 (1979): 103–125.
  • Domingues da Silva, Daniel B. The Atlantic Slave Trade from West Central Africa, 1780–1867 . New York: Cambridge University Press, 2017.
  • Eltis, David . The Rise of African Slavery in the Americas . New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000.
  • Falola, Toyin , and Matt D. Childs , eds. The Yoruba Diaspora in the Atlantic World . Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2004.
  • Gilroy, Paul . The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness . London: Verso, 1993.
  • Green, Toby . The Rise of the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade in Western Africa, 1300–1589 . New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012.
  • Lindsay, Lisa A. , and John Wood Sweet , eds. Biography and the Black Atlantic . Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013.
  • Miers, Suzanne , and Igor Kopytoff , eds. Slavery in Africa: Historical and Anthropological Perspectives . Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1977.
  • Mintz, Sidney , and Richard Price . The Birth of African American Culture: An Anthropological Perspective (2nd ed.). Boston: Beacon Press, 1992.
  • Morgan, Jennifer L. Laboring Women: Reproduction and Gender in New World Slavery . Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004.
  • Mustakeem, Sowande’ M. Slavery at Sea: Terror, Sex, and Sickness in the Middle Passage . Urbana-Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2016.
  • Nwokeji, G. Ugo . The Slave Trade and Culture in the Bight of Biafra: An African Society in the Atlantic World . New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010.
  • O’Malley, Gregory E. Final Passages: The Intercolonial Slave Trade of British America, 1619–1807 . Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2014.
  • Rediker, Marcus . The Slave Ship: A Human History . New York: Penguin, 2007.
  • Scott, Rebecca J. , and Jean M. Hébrard . Freedom Papers: An Atlantic Odyssey in the Age of Emancipation . Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012.
  • Scully, Pamela , and Diana Paton , eds. Gender and Slave Emancipation in the Atlantic World . Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005.
  • Shumway, Rebecca , and Trevor R. Getz . Slavery and Its Legacy in Ghana and the Diaspora . London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2017.
  • Smallwood, Stephanie E. Saltwater Slavery: A Middle Passage from Africa to American Diaspora . Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007.
  • Stilwell, Sean . Slavery and Slaving in African History . New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014.
  • Thornton, John K. Africa and Africans in the Making of the Atlantic World, 1400–1800 (2nd ed.). New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998.
  • Wheat, David . Atlantic Africa and the Spanish Caribbean, 1570–1640 . Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2016.

1. David Eltis et al., “ Voyages: The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database ,” 2008.

2. Daniel B. Domingues da Silva, “Winds and Sea Currents of the Atlantic Slave Trade,” in The Rise and Demise of Slavery and the Slave Trade in the Atlantic World , ed. Philip Misevich and Kristin Mann (Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 2016), 152–167.

3. Mariana P. Cândido, An African Slaving Port and the Atlantic World: Benguela and Its Hinterland (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013); Daniel B. Domingues da Silva, The Atlantic Slave Trade from West Central Africa, 1780–1867 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2017) ; Walter Hawthorne, Planting Rice and Harvesting Slaves: Transformations along the Guinea-Bissau Coast, 1400–1900 (Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 2003); Paul E. Lovejoy, Transformations in Slavery: A History of Slavery in Africa , 2nd ed. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000); Kristin Mann, Slavery and the Birth of an African City: Lagos, 1760–1900 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2007); G. Ugo Nwokeji, The Slave Trade and Culture in the Bight of Biafra: An African Society in the Atlantic World (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010) ; Rebecca Shumway, The Fante and the Transatlantic Slave Trade (Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 2011); and Sean Stilwell, Slavery and Slaving in African History (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014) .

4. John K. Thornton, Africa and Africans in the Making of the Atlantic World, 1400–1800 , 2nd ed. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998) ; and Olatunji Ojo, “The Slave Ship Manuelita and the Story of a Yoruba Community, 1833–1834,” Tempo 23, no. 2 (2017): 361–382.

5. Stephanie E Smallwood, Saltwater Slavery: A Middle Passage from Africa to American Diaspora (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007) ; Marcus Rediker, The Slave Ship: A Human History (New York: Penguin, 2007) ; and Sowande’ M. Mustakeem, Slavery at Sea: Terror, Sex, and Sickness in the Middle Passage (Urbana-Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2016) .

6. B. W. Higman, Slave Populations of the British Caribbean, 1807–1834 , 2 vols. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1984); David Richardson, “Consuming Goods, Consuming People: Reflections on the Transatlantic Slave Trade,” in The Rise and Demise of Slavery and the Slave Trade in the Atlantic World , ed. Philip Misevich and Kristin Mann (Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 2016), 31–63; Michael Tadman, “The Demographic Cost of Sugar: Debates on Slave Societies and Natural Increase in the Americas,” American Historical Review 105, no. 5 (2000): 1534–1575; and J. R. Ward, British West Indian Slavery, 1750–1834: The Process of Amelioration (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988).

7. Camillia Cowling, Conceiving Freedom: Women of Color, Gender, and the Abolition of Slavery in Havana and Rio de Janeiro (Chapel Hill: University of Carolina Press, 2013); Kathleen J. Higgins, “Licentious Liberty” in a Brazilian Gold-Mining Region: Slavery, Gender, and Social Control in Eighteenth-Century Sabará, Minas Gerais (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1999); and Rebecca J. Scott and Jean M. Hébrard, Freedom Papers: An Atlantic Odyssey in the Age of Emancipation (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012) .

8. Cowling, Conceiving Freedom ; Higgins, “Licentious Liberty” in a Brazilian Gold-Mining Region ; and Scott and Hébrard, Freedom Papers .

9. Michael Craton, Testing the Chains: Resistance to Slavery in the British West Indies (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1982); João José Reis, Slave Rebellion in Brazil: The Muslim Uprising of 1835 in Bahia , trans. Arthur Brakel (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993); and Jason R. Young, Rituals of Resistance: African Atlantic Religion in Kongo and the Lowcountry South in the Era of Slavery (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2007).

10. John Blassingame, The Slave Family in America , 7th ed. (Gettysburg, PA: National Historical Society, 1972); Judith Ann Carney, Black Rice: The African Origins of Rice Cultivation in the Americas (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002); Emma Christopher, They Are We , Documentary (Icarus Films, 2013); Laurent Dubois, David K. Garner, and Mary Caton Lingold, “ Musical Passage: A Voyage to 1688 Jamaica ,” 2017; Walter Hawthorne, From Africa to Brazil: Culture, Identity, and an Atlantic Slave Trade, 1600–1830 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010); and Luis Nicolau Parés, The Formation of Candomblé: Vodun History and Ritual in Brazil , trans. Richard Vernon (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2013).

11. Alex Borucki, “From Shipmates to Soldiers: Emerging Black Identities in Montevideo, 1770–1850” (PhD diss., Emory University, 2011); Toby Green, The Rise of the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade in Western Africa, 1300–1589 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012) ; Sidney Mintz and Richard Price, The Birth of African American Culture: An Anthropological Perspective , 2nd ed. (Boston: Beacon Press, 1992) ; and David Wheat, Atlantic Africa and the Spanish Caribbean, 1570–1640 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2016) .

12. The classic example is Ulrich Bonnell Phillips, American Negro Slavery: Survey of the Supply, Employment and Control of Negro Labor as Determined by the Plantation Régime (New York: D. Appleton, 1918). For an outstanding historiographical overview of slavery scholarship in the United States, see Peter Kolchin, American Slavery, 1619–1877 (New York: Hill & Wang, 1993).

13. Kenneth M. Stampp, The Peculiar Institution: Slavery in the Ante-Bellum South (New York: Knopf, 1956); Herbert Aptheker, American Negro Slave Revolts (New York: International Publishers, 1974); and Eugene D. Genovese, From Rebellion to Revolution: Afro-American Slave Revolts in the Making of the Modern World (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1979).

14. Robert William Fogel and Stanley L. Engerman, Time on the Cross: The Economics of American Negro Slavery (Boston: Little Brown, 1974). For a broader reflection on the quantitative turn, see Robert William Fogel, The Slavery Debates, 1952–1990: A Retrospective (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2003).

15. John Blassingame, Slave Testimony: Two Centuries of Letters, Speeches, Interviews, and Autobiographies (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1977); Robert W. Harms, The Diligent: A Voyage through the Worlds of the Slave Trade (New York: Basic Books, 2002); and Lisa A. Lindsay and John Wood Sweet, eds., Biography and the Black Atlantic (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013) .

16. Jorge Felipe, “ Digital Resources for the Study of Global Slavery and the Slave Trade ,” H-Slavery (blog), 2016.

17. Phillips, American Negro Slavery .

18. See, among his many other books, W. E. B. Du Bois, The Negro (New York: Holt, 1915); John Hope Franklin, From Slavery to Freedom: A History of American Negroes (New York: Knopf, 1947); E. Franklin Frazier, The Negro Family in the United States (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1939); Melville J. Herskovits, The Myth of the Negro Past (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1941); Eric Williams, Capitalism & Slavery (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1944); and Carter G. Woodson, The Mis-Education of the Negro (Washington, DC: Associated Publishers, 1933).

19. E. Franking Frazier and several other scholars feared that connecting African Americans to Africa would further ostracize African American families and limit their ability to integrate and gain full rights in American society.

20. Gilberto Freyre, Casa Grande e Senzala: Formação da Família Brasileira sob o Regime de Economia Patriarcal , 10th ed. (Rio de Janeiro: José Olympio Editora, 1961); C.L.R. James, The Black Jacobins: Toussaint Louverture and the San Domingo Revolution (New York: Dial Press, 1938); Manuel Moreno Fraginals, El Ingenio: El Complejo Económico-Social Cubano del Azúcar , 3 vols. (Havana: Comisión Nacional Cubana de la UNESCO, 1964); Fernando Ortiz, Los Negros Esclavos (Havana: Editorial de Ciencias Sociales, 1975); and Arthur Ramos, O Negro Brasileiro , 2nd ed. (São Paulo: Companhia Editora Nacional, 1940); and Williams, Capitalism & Slavery .

21. James, The Black Jacobins ; Eugene Genovese, Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made (New York: Pantheon, 1972); and Frank Tannenbaum, Slave and Citizen: The Negro in the Americas (New York: Knopf, 1946).

22. Stampp, The Peculiar Institution .

23. Stanley M. Elkins, Slavery: A Problem in American Institutional and Intellectual Life (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1959).

24. John Blassingame, The Slave Community: Plantation Life in the Antebellum South (New York: Oxford University Press, 1972); Herbert G. Gutman, The Black Family in Slavery and Freedom, 1750–1925 (New York: Vintage, 1977); Peter H. Wood, Black Majority: Negroes in Colonial South Carolina from 1670 through the Stono Rebellion (New York: Knopf, 1974). Literature on African American religion took off in the 1970s. Representative works include E. Franklin Frazier, The Negro Church in America (New York: Schocken, 1974); Genovese, Roll, Jordan, Roll ; Milton C. Sernett, Black Religion and American Evangelicalism: White Protestants, Plantation Missions, and the Flowering of Negro Christianity, 1787–1865 (Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow Press, 1975); and Gayraud S. Wilmore, Black Religion and Black Radicalism (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1972).

25. Genovese, Roll, Jordan, Roll .

26. Aptheker, American Negro Slave Revolts ; Genovese, From Rebellion to Revolution ; Jane Landers, “Spanish Sanctuary: Fugitives in Florida, 1687–1790,” Florida Historical Quarterly 62, no. 3 (1984): 296–313. Scholars of the Caribbean were around this time also grappling with questions about the scale and frequency of slave revolts. See, for example, Craton, Testing the Chains .

27. Blassingame, The Slave Community .

28. George Rawick, for example, edited a 41-volume set of WPA interviews, in George Rawick, ed., The American Slave: A Composite Autobiography , 41 vols. (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1972). See also George Rawick, From Sundown to Sunup: The Making of the Black Community (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1972).

29. Suzanne Miers and Igor Kopytoff, “African ‘Slavery’ as an Institution of Marginality,” in Slavery in Africa: Historical and Anthropological Perspectives (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1977), 3–81 .

30. Claude Meillassoux, The Anthropology of Slavery: The Womb of Iron and Gold , trans. Alide Dasnois (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991).

31. Claude Meillassoux, ed., L’Esclavage en Afrique Précoloniale (Paris: François Maspero, 1975).

32. Frederick Cooper, Plantation Slavery on the East Coast of Africa (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1977); Martin A. Klein and Paul E. Lovejoy, “Slavery in West Africa,” in The Uncommon Market: Essays in the Economic History of the Atlantic Slave Trade , ed. Henry A. Gemery and Jan S. Hogendorn (New York: Academic Press, 1979), 181–212; Paul E. Lovejoy, “Slavery in the Sokoto Caliphate,” in The Ideology of Slavery in Africa , ed. Paul E. Lovejoy (Beverly Hills, CA: SAGE, 1981), 201–243; and Claude Meillassoux, “The Role of Slavery in the Economic and Social History of Sahelo-Sudanic Africa,” in Forced Migration: The Impact of the Export Slave Trade on African Societies , ed. Joseph E. Inikori, trans. R. J. Gavin (New York: Africana, 1982), 74–99.

33. Frederick Cooper, “The Problem of Slavery in African Studies,” Journal of African History 20, no. 1 (1979): 103–125 ; Catherine Coquery-Vidrovitch, “Recherches sur un Mode de Production Africain,” La Pensée , no. 144 (1969): 3–20; Martin A. Klein, “The Impact of the Atlantic Slave Trade on the Societies of the Western Sudan,” Social Science History 14, no. 2 (1990): 231–253; and Lovejoy, Transformations in Slavery .

34. Some examples are available in John Edward Philips, ed., Writing African History (Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 2005).

35. Sara Berry, Cocoa, Custom, and Socio-Economic Change in Rural Western Nigeria (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975); Philip D. Curtin, Economic Change in Precolonial Africa: Senegambia in the Era of the Slave Trade , 2 vols. (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1975); and David Northrup, Trade without Rulers: Pre-Colonial Economic Development in South-Eastern Nigeria (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978).

36. A candid reflection about this issue is available in Jan Vansina, “It Never Happened: Kinguri’s Exodus and Its Consequences,” History in Africa 25 (1998): 387–403.

37. David Henige, “Truths Yet Unborn? Oral Tradition as a Casualty of Culture Contact,” Journal of African History 23, no. 3 (1982): 395–412; and Elizabeth Tonkin, “Investigating Oral Tradition,” Journal of African History 27, no. 2 (1986): 203–213.

38. Adam Jones, “Some Reflections on the Oral Traditions of the Galinhas Country, Sierra Leone,” History in Africa 12 (1985): 151–165; and Donald R. Wright, “Uprooting Kunta Kinte: On the Perils of Relying on Encyclopedic Informants,” History in Africa 8 (1981): 205–217.

39. Philip D. Curtin, The Atlantic Slave Trade: A Census (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1969); and Fogel and Engerman, Time on the Cross .

40. Reginald Coupland, The British Anti-Slavery Movement (London: Cass, 1964), 21; Basil Davidson, Black Mother: The Years of the African Slave Trade (Boston: Little Brown, 1961), 89; David Brion Davis, The Problem of Slavery in Western Culture (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1966), 9; Daniel Pratt Mannix and Malcolm Cowley, Black Cargoes: A History of the Atlantic Slave Trade, 1518–1865 (New York: Viking Press, 1962), 32 and 71; and Tannenbaum, Slave and Citizen , 29–32.

41. Curtin, The Atlantic Slave Trade , 11.

42. Curtin, The Atlantic Slave Trade , 265–267.

43. Curtin, The Atlantic Slave Trade , 87–88 and 247–249.

44. Roger Anstey, The Atlantic Slave Trade and British Abolition, 1760–1810 (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1975); David Eltis, Economic Growth and the Ending of the Transatlantic Slave Trade (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987); Herbert S. Klein, The Middle Passage: Comparative Studies in the Atlantic Slave Trade (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1978); Robert Louis Stein, The French Slave Trade in the Eighteenth Century: An Old Regime Business (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1979); and Pierre Verger, Trade Relations between the Bight of Benin and Bahia from the 17th to the 19th Century (Ibadan, Nigeria: Ibadan University Press, 1976).

45. Ivana Elbl, “The Volume of the Early Atlantic Slave Trade, 1450–1521,” Journal of African History 38, no. 1 (1997): 31–75; David Eltis, “Slave Departures from Africa, 1811–1867: An Annual Time Series,” African Economic History no. 15 (1986): 143–171; J. E. Inikori, “Measuring the Atlantic Slave Trade: An Assessment of Curtin and Anstey,” Journal of African History 17, no. 2 (1976): 197–223; Paul E. Lovejoy, “The Volume of the Atlantic Slave Trade: A Synthesis,” Journal of African History 23, no. 4 (1982): 473–502; Patrick Manning, Slavery and African Life: Occidental, Oriental, and African Slave Trades (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990); Joseph C. Miller, “The Numbers, Origins, and Destinations of Slaves in the Eighteenth-Century Angolan Slave Trade,” Social Science History 13, no. 4 (1989): 381–419; and David Richardson, “Slave Exports from West and West-Central Africa, 1700–1810: New Estimates of Volume and Distribution,” Journal of African History 30, no. 1 (1989): 1–22.

46. Stephen D. Behrendt, “Crew Mortality in the Transatlantic Slave Trade in the Eighteenth Century,” Slavery and Abolition 18, no. 1 (1997): 49–71; Raymond L. Cohn and Richard A. Jense, “The Determinants of Slave Mortality Rates on the Middle Passage,” Explorations in Economic History 19, no. 3 (1982): 269–282; David Eltis, “Fluctuations in Mortality in the Last Half Century of the Transatlantic Slave Trade,” Social Science History 13, no. 3 (1989): 315–340; Stanley L. Engerman et al., “Transoceanic Mortality: The Slave Trade in Comparative Perspective,” William and Mary Quarterly 58, no. 1 (2001): 93–118; Herbert S. Klein, “The Trade in African Slaves to Rio de Janeiro, 1795–1811: Estimates of Mortality and Patterns of Voyages,” Journal of African History 10, no. 4 (1969): 533–549; and Joseph C. Miller, “Mortality in the Atlantic Slave Trade: Statistical Evidence on Causality,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 11, no. 3 (1981): 385–423.

47. Roger Anstey and P. E. H Hair, eds., Liverpool, the African Slave Trade, and Abolition: Essays to Illustrate Current Knowledge and Research (Liverpool, UK: Historic Society of Lancashire and Cheshire, 1976); David Eltis and David Richardson, eds., Atlas of the Transatlantic Slave Trade (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2010); Klein, The Middle Passage ; and Robin Law and Silke Strickrodt, eds., Ports of the Slave Trade (Bights of Benin and Biafra): Papers from a Conference of the Centre of Commonwealth Studies, University of Stirling, June 1998 (Stirling, Scotland: Centre of Commonwealth Studies, University of Stirling, 1999).

48. Richard Bean, “A Note on the Relative Importance of Slaves and Gold in West African Exports,” Journal of African History 15, no. 3 (1974): 351–356; José C. Curto, Enslaving Spirits: The Portuguese–Brazilian Alcohol Trade at Luanda and Its Hinterland, c.1550–1830 (Leiden, The Netherlands: Brill, 2004); David Eltis and Lawrence C. Jennings, “Trade between Western Africa and the Atlantic World in the Pre-Colonial Era,” American Historical Review 93, no. 4 (1988): 936–959; David Eltis, “Trade between Western Africa and the Atlantic World before 1870: Estimates of Trends in Value, Composition and Direction,” Research in Economic History 12 (1989): 197–239; David Eltis, “The Relative Importance of Slaves and Commodities in the Atlantic Trade of Seventeenth-Century Africa,” Journal of African History 35, no. 2 (1994): 237–249; Eltis and Jennings, “Trade between Western Africa and the Atlantic World in the Pre-Colonial Era”; George Metcalf, “A Microcosm of Why Africans Sold Slaves: Akan Consumption Patterns in the 1770s,” Journal of African History 28, no. 3 (1987): 377–394; Joseph C. Miller, “Imports at Luanda, Angola: 1785–1823,” in Figuring African Trade: Proceedings of the Symposium on the Quantification and Structure of the Import and Export and Long-Distance Trade of Africa in the Nineteenth Century, c.1800–1913 (St. Augustin, 3–6 January 1983) , ed. Gerhard Liesegang, Helma Pasch, and Adam Jones (Berlin: Dietrich Reimer Verlag, 1986), 162–244; and David Richardson, “West African Consumption Patterns and Their Influence on the Eighteenth Century English Slave Trade,” in The Uncommon Market: Essays in the Economic History of the Atlantic Slave Trade , ed. Henry A. Gemery and Jan S. Hogendorn (New York: Academic Press, 1979), 303–330.

49. Alfred H. Conrad and John R. Meyer, “The Economics of Slavery in the Ante Bellum South,” Journal of Political Economy 66, no. 2 (April 1958): 95–130; and Yasukichi Yasuba, “The Profitability and Viability of Plantation Slavery in the United States,” Economic Studies Quarterly 12 (1961): 6067. See also Fogel, The Slavery Debates , 18–23.

50. Fogel and Engerman, Time on the Cross , 4.

51. Fogel and Engerman, Time on the Cross , 4–5.

52. Fogel and Engerman, Time on the Cross , 5.

53. David Henige, “Measuring the Immeasurable: The Atlantic Slave Trade, West African Population and the Pyrrhonian Critic,” Journal of African History 27, no. 2 (1986): 295–313; and Inikori, “Measuring the Atlantic Slave Trade.”

54. Paul A. David et al., Reckoning with Slavery: Critical Essays in the Quantitative History of American Negro Slavery (New York: Oxford University Press, 1976); Thomas L. Haskell, “The True & Tragical History of ‘Time on the Cross,’” The New York Review of Books , October 2, 1975; and Herbert G. Gutman, Slavery and the Numbers Game: A Critique of “Time on the Cross” (Urbana-Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 1975).

55. Fogel and Engerman, Time on the Cross , 144–148.

56. Higman, Slave Populations of the British Caribbean, 1807–1834 .

57. Robert Louis Stein, The French Sugar Business in the Eighteenth Century (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1988).

58. Manolo Florentino, Em Costas Negras: Uma História do Tráfico Atlântico de Escravos entre a África e o Rio de Janeiro, Séculos XVIII e XIX (São Paulo, Brazil: Companhia das Letras, 1997); Manolo Florentino and José Roberto Góes, A Paz das Senzalas: Famílias Escravas e Tráfico Atlântico, Rio de Janeiro, c.1790–c.1850 (Rio de Janeiro, Brazil: Civilização Brasileira, 1997); Herbert S. Klein and Francisco Vidal Luna, Slavery and the Economy of São Paulo, 1750–1850 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003); Herbert S. Klein and Francisco Vidal Luna, Slavery in Brazil (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010); Pedro Carvalho de Mello, Slavery and the Economics of Labor in Brazilian Coffee Plantations, 1850–1888 (Santo André, Brazil : Strong Educacional, 2017); Robert Wayne Slenes, “The Demography and Economics of Brazilian Slavery, 1850-1888” (PhD diss., Stanford University, 1976); and Robert W. Slenes, Na Senzala, Uma Flor: Esperanças e Recordações Na Formação Da Família Escrava, Brasil Sudeste, Século XIX (Rio de Janeiro, Brazil: Editora Nova Fronteira, 1999).

59. Manning, Slavery and African Life . See also his earlier work, Patrick Manning, Slavery, Colonialism and Economic Growth in Dahomey, 1640–1960 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1982).

60. Curtin, Economic Change .

61. Jan S. Hogendorn and Marion Johnson, The Shell Money of the Slave Trade (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 2.

62. Natalie Zemon Davis, The Return of Martin Guerre (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983); Carlo Ginzburg, The Cheese and the Worms: The Cosmos of a Sixteenth-Century Miller , trans. Anne Tedeschi and John Tedeschi (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980); and Giovanni Levi, Inheriting Power: The Story of an Exorcist , trans. Lydia G. Cochrane (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988).

63. In addition to the sources cited in note 15, see Mahommah Gardo Baquaqua, The Biography of Mahommah Gardo Baquaqua: His Passage from Slavery to Freedom in Africa and America , ed. Robin Law and Paul E. Lovejoy (Princeton, NJ: Markus Wiener, 2007); Sean M. Kelley, The Voyage of the Slave Ship Hare: A Journey into Captivity from Sierra Leone to South Carolina (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2016); Kristin Mann, “The Illegal Slave Trade and One Yoruba Man’s Transatlantic Passages from Slavery to Freedom,” in The Rise and Demise of Slavery and the Slave Trade in the Atlantic World , ed. Philip Misevich and Kristin Mann (Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 2016), 220–246; Scott and Hébrard, Freedom Papers ; and Randy J. Sparks, Africans in the Old South (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016).

64. David Eltis and David Richardson, “The ‘Numbers Game’ and Routes to Slavery,” in Routes to Slavery: Direction, Ethnicity, and Mortality in the Atlantic Slave Trade , ed. David Eltis and David Richardson (New York: Routledge, 1997), 3.

65. Deborah Gray White, Aren’t I a Woman? Female Slaves in the Plantation South (New York: Norton, 1985), 15.

66. Deborah Gray White, “‘Matter Out of Place:’ Aren’t I a Woman? Black Female Scholars and the Academy,” Journal of African American History 92, no. 1 (2007): 5–12. See also the reflective contributions to this journal issue by other pioneers in the field of black women’s history. Jacqueline Jones’s Labor of Love, Labor of Sorrow was published in the same year as White’s Aren’t I a Woman , though it had a broader scope and agenda. See Jacqueline Jones, Labor of Love, Labor of Sorrow: Black Women, Work and the Family from Slavery to the Present (New York: Basic Books, 1985).

67. Catherine Clinton, The Plantation Mistress: Woman’s World in the Old South (New York: Pantheon Books, 1982), 35.

68. Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, Within the Plantation Household: Black and White Women of the Old South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988).

69. The expression “natural rebels” comes from Hilary McD. Beckles, Natural Rebels: A Social History of Enslaved Black Women in Barbados (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1989). For a small but representative sample of women’s resistance to slavery in the Americas, see the many contributions in Stephanie M. H. Camp, Closer to Freedom: Enslaved Women and Everyday Resistance in the Plantation South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004); and David Barry Gaspar and Darlene Clark Hine, eds., More Than Chattel: Black Women and Slavery in the Americas (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996).

70. Ester Boserup, Woman’s Role in Economic Development (London: Allen & Unwin, 1970); Leith Mullings, “Women and Economic Change in Africa,” in Women in Africa: Studies in Social and Economic Change , ed. Nancy J. Hafkin and Edna G. Bay (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1976), 239–264; G. Ugo Nwokeji, “African Conceptions of Gender and the Slave Traffic,” William and Mary Quarterly 58, no. 1 (2001): 47–68; and Claire C. Robertson and Martin A. Klein, “Women’s Importance in African Slave Systems,” in Women and Slavery in Africa , ed. Claire C. Robertson and Martin A. Klein (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1983), 3–25.

71. David Eltis and Stanley L. Engerman, “Was the Slave Trade Dominated by Men?,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 23, no. 2 (1992): 237–257; Herbert S. Klein, “African Women in the Atlantic Slave Trade,” in Women and Slavery in Africa , ed. Claire C. Robertson and Martin A. Klein (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1983), 29–38; and Nwokeji, “African Conceptions of Gender.”

72. The related bibliography is, of course, too vast to cite here, but see Catherine Coquery-Vidrovitch, “Women, Marriage, and Slavery in Sub-Saharan Africa in the Nineteenth Century,” in Women and Slavery: Africa, the Indian Ocean, and the Medieval North Atlantic , ed. Gwyn Campbell, Suzanne Miers, and Joseph C. Miller, vol. 1, 2 vols. (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 2007), 43–61 ; Claire C. Robertson and Marsha Robinson, “Re-Modeling Slavery as If Women Mattered,” in Women and Slavery: The Modern Atlantic , ed. Gwyn Campbell, Suzanne Miers, and Joseph C. Miller, vol. 2, 2 vols. (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 2008), 253–283; Joseph C. Miller, “Women as Slaves and Owners of Slaves: Experiences from Africa, the Indian Ocean World, and the Early Atlantic,” in Women and Slavery: Africa, the Indian Ocean, and the Medieval North Atlantic , ed. Gwyn Campbell, Suzanne Miers, and Joseph C. Miller, vol. 1, 2 vols. (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 2007), 1–39 ; and Joseph C. Miller, “Domiciled and Dominated: Slaving as a History of Women,” in Women and Slavery: The Modern Atlantic , ed. Gwyn Campbell, Suzanne Miers, and Joseph C. Miller, vol. 2, 2 vols. (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 2008), 284–310.

73. Domingues da Silva, The Atlantic Slave Trade , 100–121; David Eltis, The Rise of African Slavery in the Americas (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 85–113 ; Klein, “African Women”; and Nwokeji, “African Conceptions of Gender.”

74. Jennifer L. Morgan, Laboring Women: Reproduction and Gender in New World Slavery (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004) ; and Marietta Morrissey, Slave Women in the New World: Gender Stratification in the Caribbean (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1989).

75. Kathleen M. Brown, Good Wives, Nasty Wenches, and Anxious Patriarchs: Gender, Race, and Power in Colonial Virginia (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996); and Thayolia Glymph, Out of the House of Bondage: The Transformation of the Plantation Household (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2008).

76. Pamela Scully and Diana Paton, eds., Gender and Slave Emancipation in the Atlantic World (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005) .

77. Fernand Braudel, The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II , trans. Siân Reynolds (New York: Harper & Row, 1972).

78. Donald William Meinig, The Shaping of America: A Geographical Perspective on 500 Years of History (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1986), i, 64–65. Quoted in Bernard Bailyn, Atlantic History: Concept and Contours (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005), 55–56.

79. Thornton, Africa and Africans , 74.

80. Thornton, Africa and Africans , 192–193.

81. Thornton, Africa and Africans , 206.

82. Ira Berlin, Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in North America (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1998). Berlin later refined his argument in Ira Berlin, Generations of Captivity: A History of African-American Slaves (Cambridge, MA : Belknap Press, 2003).

83. Berlin, Many Thousands Gone , 17.

84. Berlin, Many Thousands Gone , 64–65.

85. Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (London: Verso, 1993), 19 .

86. Jack P. Greene and Philip D. Morgan, eds., Atlantic History: A Critical Appraisal (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009).

87. Linda M. Heywood, ed., Central Africans and Cultural Transformations in the American Diaspora (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002).

88. Rebecca Shumway and Trevor R. Getz, Slavery and Its Legacy in Ghana and the Diaspora (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2017) .

89. Toyin Falola and Matt D. Childs, eds., The Yoruba Diaspora in the Atlantic World (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2004) .

90. J. D. Y. Peel, Religious Encounter and the Making of the Yoruba (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000).

91. Robin Law, “Ethnicity and the Slave Trade: ‘Lucumi’ and ‘Nago’ as Ethnonyms in West Africa,” History in Africa 24 (1997): 205–219; David Northrup, “Becoming African: Identity Formation among Liberated Slaves in Nineteenth-Century Sierra Leone,” Slavery and Abolition 27, no. 1 (2006): 1–21; and Robert Sydney Smith, Kingdoms of the Yoruba , 3rd ed. (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1988).

92. Scott and Hébrard, Freedom Papers .

93. Manuel Barcia, West African Warfare in Bahia and Cuba (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014); Carney, Black Rice ; and James H. Sweet, Domingos Álvares, African Healing, and the Intellectual History of the Atlantic World (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011).

94. See, for instance, Anstey and Hair, Liverpool, the African Slave Trade, and Abolition ; Mariana L. R. Dantas, Black Townsmen: Urban Slavery and Freedom in the Eighteenth-Century Americas (New York: Macmillan, 2008); Mary C. Karasch, Slave Life in Rio de Janeiro, 1808–1850 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1987); and Holger Weiss, ed., Ports of Globalisation, Places of Creolisation: Nordic Possessions in the Atlantic World during the Era of the Slave Trade (Leiden, The Netherlands: Brill, 2016).

95. Cândido, An African Slaving Port ; Robin Law, Ouidah: The Social History of a West African Slaving “Port”, 1727–1892 (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 2004); Mann, Slavery and the Birth of an African City ; Randy J. Sparks, Where the Negroes Are Masters: An African Port in the Era of the Slave Trade (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014). See also Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra, Matt D. Childs, and James Sidbury, eds., The Black Urban Atlantic in the Age of the Slave Trade (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013) .

96. Gregory E. O’Malley, Final Passages: The Intercolonial Slave Trade of British America, 1619–1807 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2014) .

97. Richard Blair Allen, European Slave Trading in the Indian Ocean, 1500–1850 (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 2014) .

98. Although not always acknowledged, these debates clearly started with Williams, Capitalism & Slavery .

99. Edward E. Baptist, The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism (New York: Basic Books, 2014); Sven Beckert, Empire of Cotton: A Global History (New York: Knopf, 2014); Dale W. Tomich, Through the Prism of Slavery: Labor, Capital, and World Economy (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2004), 56–71. See also Sven Beckert and Seth Rockman, eds., Slavery’s Capitalism: A New History of American Economic Development (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016); and Dale W. Tomich, ed., Slavery and Historical Capitalism during the Nineteenth Century (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2017). An excellent review of the literature on this theme is available in Marc Parry, “ Shackles and Dollars: Historians and Economists Clash over Slavery ,” Chronicle of Higher Education , December 8, 2016.

100. Jerome S. Handler and Michael L. Tuite Jr., “ The Atlantic Slave Trade and Slave Life in the Americas: A Visual Record ,” 2008.

101. “ Google Books .”

102. “ Slavery, Abolition and Social Justice: Digital Primary Sources ” (Thousand Oaks, CA: Adam Matthew).

103. “ Endangered Archives Programme ” (London: British Library).

104. “Endangered Archives Programme.”

105. Jane G. Landers, “ Slave Societies Digital Archive ,” 2003.

106. David Eltis and Philip Misevich, “ African Origins: Portal to Africans Liberated from Transatlantic Slave Vessels ,” 2009. Another related project is Henry Lovejoy, “ Liberated Africans ,” 2015.

107. Richard Anderson et al., “Using African Names to Identify the Origins of Captives in the Transatlantic Slave Trade: Crowd-Sourcing and the Registers of Liberated Africans, 1808–1862,” History in Africa 40, no. 1 (2013): 165–191; Domingues da Silva, The Atlantic Slave Trade ; David Eltis, “The Diaspora of Yoruba Speakers, 1650–1865: Dimensions and Implications,” in The Yoruba Diaspora in the Atlantic World , ed. Toyin Falola and Matt D. Childs (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2004), 17–39 ; Philip Misevich, “The Origins of Slaves Leaving the Upper Guinea Coast in the Nineteenth Century,” in Extending the Frontiers: Essays on the New Transatlantic Slave Trade Database , ed. David Eltis and David Richardson (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2008), 155–175; G. Ugo Nwokeji and David Eltis, “The Roots of the African Diaspora: Methodological Considerations in the Analysis of Names in the Liberated African Registers of Sierra Leone and Havana,” History in Africa 29 (2002): 365–379; and Ojo, “The Slave Ship Manuelita.”

108. Eltis et al., “Voyages.”

109. Gwendolyn Midlo Hall and Walter Hawthorne, “ Slave Biographies: The Atlantic Database Network ,” 2012.

110. Lovejoy, “Liberated Africans.”

111. This database will be launched on the same website as “Voyages.” A description of it as well as its scholarly potential is available in Gregory E. O’Malley and Alex Borucki, “Patterns in the Intercolonial Slave Trade across the Americas before the Nineteenth Century,” Tempo 23, no. 2 (2017): 314–338.

112. Dean Rehberger and Walter Hawthorne, “ Enslaved: People of the Historic Slave Trade ,” 2018.

113. Laurent Dubois, “ Confronting the Legacies of Slavery ,” New York Times , October 28, 2013, sec. Opinion.

114. Ta-Nehisi Coates, “ The Case for Reparations ,” The Atlantic , June 2014.

115. Ana Lúcia Araújo, Reparations for Slavery and the Slave Trade: A Transnational and Comparative History (New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2017) . Her previous publications include Ana Lúcia Araújo, Living History: Encountering the Memory of the Heirs of Slavery (Newcastle, UK: Cambridge Scholars Pub., 2009); Ana Lúcia Araújo, Public Memory of Slavery Victims and Perpetrators in the South Atlantic (Amherst, NY: Cambria Press, 2010); Ana Lúcia Araújo, ed., Politics of Memory: Making Slavery Visible in the Public Space (New York: Routledge, 2012); and Araújo, Public Memory of Slavery Victims and Perpetrators in the South Atlantic .

116. Araújo, Reparations , 2.

Related Articles

  • Slavery at the Cape
  • African Religion and Healing in the Atlantic Diaspora
  • Slavery in the South African Interior during the 19th Century
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  • Africa in the World: History and Historiography
  • Digital Approaches to the History of the Atlantic Slave Trade

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7 key questions about the transatlantic slave trade – answered

Professor James Walvin answers seven questions about the transatlantic slave trade – from why it was Africans who were enslaved to the reparations that have been made since abolition…

Men operate a cotton gin in Dahomey, Mississippi, in 1898

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Why was it Africans who were enslaved?

Europeans developed the Atlantic slave trade , and American plantation slavery, at a time when they had turned their back on slavery at home. African slavery was encountered in the early European trading missions, but it was the shortage of labour in the Americas that sealed the Africans’ fate. The swift collapse of the population of native peoples in the Americas through disease, and the relative scarcity of European labour, made the development of American settlements tenuous. Neither European free labour nor Amerindian labour (free or enslaved) was adequate to the tasks of mining precious metals or cultivating tropical and semi-tropical produce. African slavery offered a solution, not least because it had been tried with great success on the sugar plantations in the islands in the Gulf of Guinea. Thus, at a time when the idea of enslaving fellow Europeans had disappeared, settlers in the Americas found African slaves an irresistible temptation.

A depiction of a 19th-century slave auction in the West Indies.

A range of cultural justifications were offered for the enslavement and transportation of Africans as slaves, while Europeans quickly developed the maritime skills and practices needed to transport Africans in large numbers across the Atlantic. In the process, African slavery developed not merely as a vital economic force but as a legal concept. Laws governing slave ships and colonial plantation slavery evolved, and all hinged on the concept of the slave as a thing . Africans were bought and sold in the same manner as other items of commerce: they were cargo on board ships and part of the property on plantations. From the first, this created obvious legal and philosophical problems. What happened to slaves when they stepped ashore in the free societies of Europe? Did European rights apply to Africans? What were the boundaries between freedom and enslavement? Such questions, in various forms, taxed slave-holding societies throughout the history of African slavery. They were only finally resolved when the abolitionist concept 'Am I not a man/woman and a brother/sister?' was conceded in law in the course of the 19th century.

Learn more:

  • A brief guide and timeline of the transatlantic slave trade
  • David Olusoga: “Thousands of Britons opposed abolition – because they owned slaves”
  • The road to abolition in Britain

Why did the slave trade last so long?

Over three centuries, more than 12 million Africans were removed by Atlantic slave ships. More than 11 million survived to landfall in the Americas. Why did the trade last so long? Why did such huge numbers not create viable, thriving populations that increased of their own natural accord?

Firstly, the sexual composition of the captives was important. Where the sexual balance was uneven (with more men or more children), it was difficult for a slave population to grow naturally. Equally, the ill health of Africans landing on the slave ships often militated against normal or healthy patterns of childbearing. The physical and mental traumas of enslavement and travel, and especially the impact of the slave ships, impaired healthy reproduction, not to mention working and living conditions on the plantations. More complex still was the question of links between Africans and Europeans. In societies where slaves greatly outnumbered whites and where Africans dominated the slave force, African customs and habits persisted. Prolonged breast-feeding (common among many African women) tended to suppress the birth rate. Where female slaves had closer social links to European women (who tended to have shorter breast-feeding patterns), slave birth rates tended to be higher.

Once local-born slave women entered child-bearing years, they tended to have more children than African women. This pattern emerged in the Caribbean and in the North American colonies. One result was that the newly formed USA had a growing slave population, and no longer required slaves from Africa. However, where new frontiers and industries opened up – around coffee in Brazil and sugar in Cuba, for instance – large numbers of Africans continued to be imported from Africa. Hence the survival of the slave trade well into the 19th century.

More like this

Why did the west turn against slavery.

For much of its history, the Atlantic slave system had few critics. Moreover, their voices were usually drowned out by the wealth generated by successful slaving. That began to change, quickly, after the declaration of American independence in 1776. The rise of a new political and religious sensibility – part Enlightenment, part theological – prompted the rise of a widespread abolition sentiment. Though the vested interests of slave trading (merchants, traders and planters) fought a dogged rearguard action, the slaves’ cause became a tide that undermined the slave system. Revolutionary and wartime violence corroded slavery. And so too did the actions of the slaves themselves. Their voices and actions, their defiance, resistance and flight, helped tip the balance. When the west became abolitionist, the most persuasive critics had been the slaves and their allies, who promoted the cause of freedom. And the most persuasive evidence was the horror stories that emerged from the bellies of the slave ships.

A meeting of the Anti-Slavery Society at London’s Exeter Hall in 1841

How did slavery tie into the global economy?

Much of our understanding about slavery has been defined by national boundaries (slavery in the US, in Jamaica, in Brazil , etc.) But innovative research on the Atlantic slave trade has exposed slavery as a ubiquitous, global force. For all the obvious boundaries of national interests – in colonial, trading and military affairs – slavery had global consequences. There were extensive trading routes (not unlike the old silk routes) which bound Atlantic slavery to a wider world economy. Goods from Asia found their way onto Atlantic slave ships. Slave-grown produce could, by the late 18th century, be found in far-flung global locations. The profits from slaving enabled western consumers to acquire luxury goods from China – a country that even used silver from the high Andes as its currency. Africans were scattered to all corners of the globe – and so too were the commodities they produced.

For all the obvious boundaries of national interests – in colonial, trading and military affairs – slavery had global consequences

Although the Atlantic slave trade was physically defined by the ocean, its consequences were global, from Africa to the American frontiers – where, for example, great damage was inflicted on native peoples by slave-grown rum, which was exchanged for pelts and furs. More crucially, the importation of African slaves to the Americas helped create a platform for the remarkable material development of the Americas. The slave ships thus contributed to laying the foundations from which the modern world emerged.

What happened to slavery after abolition?

The west turned against slavery and the slave trade – slowly – in the 19th century. In 1800, no western state had abolished it. By 1888, it had gone. Or had it? The new imperial determination to end the practice – especially in Africa – uncovered slavery and slave trading everywhere. Western powers now used their military and diplomatic might to stop it (though doing so was often a means of strengthening their own interests). The late-century outcry about atrocities and slavery in the Congo Free State revealed how far the west had turned against slaving. Navies and diplomats united in curbing slave trading in Africa, Arabia and the sea lanes linking them. Long before 1914, abolition had, in the words of Seymour Drescher, become the “gold standard of civilisation”.

And yet slavery re-emerged in the 20th century. The rise of the Soviet Union, with its massive use of forced labour, and especially the Nazis’ vast conquests and enslavement of millions, presented a deeply troubling development in slavery’s history. The practice had been revived, not in distant colonies but in Europe’s heartlands.

After 1945, the drive to put an end to slavery was taken over by agencies of the United Nations. Despite this, it lived on. Scholars reckon that upwards of 40 million people are in slavery today – including trafficked people, child labourers and those entangled in a raft of forms of unfree labour. Slave trafficking thrives because of dire poverty, warfare, corruption and dysfunctional government. The question remains, however: is modern trafficking the same as the Atlantic slave trade?

UK protesters wear face masks denoting the silence of slaves during a 2017 march

Was the slave trade a holocaust?

The Atlantic slave trade is sometimes described as a holocaust . But is this an appropriate or accurate description? No serious student can contest the enormous human damage that spread over such an enormous period of time and space. Nor do serious scholars dispute the levels of suffering and mortality involved on the pestilential slave ships. We need, however, to consider the purpose of the Atlantic slave trade. It aimed to secure enslaved people for the labour markets of the Americas. It was a trade that reduced its African victims to the status of chattel: objects to be bought and sold. At each point of that complex trade – in Africa, on the Atlantic coast and in the slave markets of the Americas – all sides involved hoped for profitable business. And everywhere the story was the same: the weaker and less suitable the enslaved victims, the lower their commercial value.

A print of a chained slave

The human suffering involved – in Africa, on the coast, on the ships and later on the plantations – must not deceive us. Capricious and institutional cruelty was commonplace. Often it was used to secure greater effort from the enslaved. But even in the harshest of shipboard or plantation regimes, commercial profit remained the aim. Though the slave trade involved cruelty and suffering on an extraordinary scale, the purpose was not to damage or destroy the slaves, but to secure the best return from them. So is ‘holocaust’ the best description?

Have reparations been made since abolition?

British slave owners shared £20m compensation for the loss of their slaves after 1833. Except for their freedom, the slaves received nothing. US slaves had been promised 40 acres and a mule, but they too got nothing. Though mentioned by some abolitionists, the question of compensation for the slaves – for their loss of liberty, and for their enforced labour from one generation to another – was not seriously considered. In recent years, however, the debate about compensation has resurfaced. The foundations were laid by the post-1945 legal and political settlement of German and Austrian debts. The Nuremberg trials and a string of legal disputes established a link between the concept of crimes against humanity and compensation. This became the basis and inspiration for contemporary campaigns in Africa, the Caribbean, Europe and the Americas for reparations for slavery. The campaign gained strength when adopted by the UN.

Today, the question has become an inescapable feature in political argument on both sides of the Atlantic. It is a debate that, inevitably, draws on historical scholarship. Historians of slavery regularly face questions about reparations: a reminder that, today, slavery still matters. It matters not simply as an important aspect of our historical past, but as a critical ingredient in a complex modern political debate.

James Walvin is professor emeritus of history at the University of York and author of The Slave Trade (Thames & Hudson, 2011) and Freedom: The Overthrow of the Slave Empires (Robinson, 2019).

This article was first published in the November 2019 issue of BBC History Magazine

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Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History Essays

The transatlantic slave trade.

Necklace: Pendant

Necklace: Pendant

Figure: Seated Portuguese Male

Figure: Seated Portuguese Male

Pipe: Rifle

Pipe: Rifle

Alexander Ives Bortolot Department of Art History and Archaeology, Columbia University

October 2003

From the seventeenth century on, slaves became the focus of trade between Europe and Africa. Europe’s conquest and colonization of North and South America and the Caribbean islands from the fifteenth century onward created an insatiable demand for African laborers, who were deemed more fit to work in the tropical conditions of the New World. The numbers of slaves imported across the Atlantic Ocean steadily increased, from approximately 5,000 slaves a year in the sixteenth century to over 100,000 slaves a year by the end of the eighteenth century.

Evolving political circumstances and trade alliances in Africa led to shifts in the geographic origins of slaves throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Slaves were generally the unfortunate victims of territorial expansion by imperialist African states or of raids led by predatory local strongmen, and various populations found themselves captured and sold as different regional powers came to prominence. Firearms, which were often exchanged for slaves, generally increased the level of fighting by lending military strength to previously marginal polities. A nineteenth-century tobacco pipe ( 1977.462.1 ) from the Democratic Republic of the Congo or Angola demonstrates the degree to which warfare, the slave trade, and elite arts were intertwined at this time. The pipe itself was the prerogative of wealthy and powerful individuals who could afford expensive imported tobacco, generally by trading slaves, while the rifle form makes clear how such slaves were acquired in the first place. Because of its deadly power, the rifle was added to the repertory of motifs drawn upon in many regional depictions of rulers and culture heroes as emblematic of power along with the leopard, elephant, and python.

The institution of slavery existed in Africa long before the arrival of Europeans and was widespread at the period of economic contact . Private land ownership was largely absent from precolonial African societies, and slaves were one of the few forms of wealth-producing property an individual could possess. Additionally, rulers often maintained corps of loyal, foreign-born slaves to guarantee their political security, and would encourage political centralization by appointing slaves from the imperial hinterlands to positions within the royal capital. Slaves were also exported across the desert to North Africa and to western Asia, Arabia, and India.

It would be impossible to argue, however, that transatlantic trade did not have a major effect upon the development and scale of slavery in Africa. As the demand for slaves increased with European colonial expansion in the New World, rising prices made the slave trade increasingly lucrative. African states eager to augment their treasuries in some instances even preyed upon their own peoples by manipulating their judicial systems, condemning individuals and their families to slavery in order to reap the rewards of their sale to European traders. Slave exports were responsible for the emergence of a number of large and powerful kingdoms that relied on a militaristic culture of constant warfare to generate the great numbers of human captives required for trade with the Europeans. The Yoruba kingdom of Oyo on the Guinea coast, founded sometime before 1500, expanded rapidly in the eighteenth century as a result of this commerce. Its formidable army, aided by advanced iron technology , captured immense numbers of slaves that were profitably sold to traders. In the nineteenth century, the aggressive pursuit of slaves through warfare and raiding led to the ascent of the kingdom of Dahomey, in what is now the Republic of Benin, and prompted the emergence of the Chokwe chiefdoms from under the shadow of their Lunda overlords in present-day Angola and Democratic Republic of the Congo. The Asante kingdom on the Gold Coast of West Africa also became a major slave exporter in the eighteenth century.

Ultimately, the international slave trade had lasting effects upon the African cultural landscape. Areas that were hit hardest by endemic warfare and slave raids suffered from general population decline, and it is believed that the shortage of men in particular may have changed the structure of many societies by thrusting women into roles previously occupied by their husbands and brothers. Additionally, some scholars have argued that images stemming from this era of constant violence and banditry have survived to the present day in the form of metaphysical fears and beliefs concerning witchcraft. In many cultures of West and Central Africa, witches are thought to kidnap solitary individuals to enslave or consume them. Finally, the increased exchange with Europeans and the fabulous wealth it brought enabled many states to cultivate sophisticated artistic traditions employing expensive and luxurious materials. From the fine silver- and goldwork of Dahomey and the Asante court to the virtuoso wood carving of the Chokwe chiefdoms, these treasures are a vivid testimony of this turbulent period in African history.

Bortolot, Alexander Ives. “The Transatlantic Slave Trade.” In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History . New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2000–. http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/slav/hd_slav.htm (October 2003)

Further Reading

Hogendorn, Jan, and Marion Johnson. The Shell Money of the Slave Trade . Cambridge : Cambridge University Press, 1986.

Klein, Herbert S. The Atlantic Slave Trade . Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999.

Additional Essays by Alexander Ives Bortolot

  • Bortolot, Alexander Ives. “ Portraits of African Leadership: Living Rulers .” (October 2003)
  • Bortolot, Alexander Ives. “ Portraits of African Leadership: Memorials .” (October 2003)
  • Bortolot, Alexander Ives. “ Portraits of African Leadership: Royal Ancestors .” (October 2003)
  • Bortolot, Alexander Ives. “ Trade Relations among European and African Nations .” (October 2003)
  • Bortolot, Alexander Ives. “ Ways of Recording African History .” (October 2003)
  • Bortolot, Alexander Ives. “ Art of the Asante Kingdom .” (October 2003)
  • Bortolot, Alexander Ives. “ Asante Royal Funerary Arts .” (October 2003)
  • Bortolot, Alexander Ives. “ Asante Textile Arts .” (October 2003)
  • Bortolot, Alexander Ives. “ Gold in Asante Courtly Arts .” (October 2003)
  • Bortolot, Alexander Ives. “ The Bamana Ségou State .” (October 2003)
  • Bortolot, Alexander Ives. “ Women Leaders in African History: Ana Nzinga, Queen of Ndongo .” (October 2003)
  • Bortolot, Alexander Ives. “ Women Leaders in African History: Dona Beatriz, Kongo Prophet .” (October 2003)
  • Bortolot, Alexander Ives. “ Exchange of Art and Ideas: The Benin, Owo, and Ijebu Kingdoms .” (October 2003)
  • Bortolot, Alexander Ives. “ Women Leaders in African History: Idia, First Queen Mother of Benin .” (October 2003)
  • Bortolot, Alexander Ives. “ Kingdoms of Madagascar: Malagasy Funerary Arts .” (October 2003)
  • Bortolot, Alexander Ives. “ Kingdoms of Madagascar: Malagasy Textile Arts .” (October 2003)
  • Bortolot, Alexander Ives. “ Kingdoms of Madagascar: Maroserana and Merina .” (October 2003)
  • Bortolot, Alexander Ives. “ Kingdoms of the Savanna: The Kuba Kingdom .” (October 2003)
  • Bortolot, Alexander Ives. “ Kingdoms of the Savanna: The Luba and Lunda Empires .” (October 2003)
  • Bortolot, Alexander Ives. “ Women Leaders in African History, 17th–19th Century .” (October 2003)
  • Bortolot, Alexander Ives. “ Portraits of African Leadership .” (October 2003)

Related Essays

  • The Manila Galleon Trade (1565–1815)
  • Portraits of African Leadership
  • Religion and Culture in North America, 1600–1700
  • Trade Relations among European and African Nations
  • Visual Culture of the Atlantic World
  • Women Leaders in African History, 17th–19th Century
  • African Christianity in Kongo
  • The Age of Iron in West Africa
  • American Federal-Era Period Rooms
  • Art of the Asante Kingdom
  • George Washington: Man, Myth, Monument
  • Gold in Asante Courtly Arts
  • Kingdoms of the Savanna: The Luba and Lunda Empires
  • Kongo Ivories
  • The New York Dutch Room
  • The Portuguese in Africa, 1415–1600
  • Ways of Recording African History
  • Women Leaders in African History: Ana Nzinga, Queen of Ndongo

List of Rulers

  • Presidents of the United States of America
  • Arabian Peninsula, 1600–1800 A.D.
  • Central Africa, 1600–1800 A.D.
  • Central America and the Caribbean, 1400–1600 A.D.
  • Eastern and Southern Africa, 1400–1600 A.D.
  • Guinea Coast, 1600–1800 A.D.
  • Guinea Coast, 1800–1900 A.D.
  • Maya Area, 1400–1600 A.D.
  • Mexico and Central America, 1600–1800 A.D.
  • Mexico, 1400–1600 A.D.
  • South Asia, 1600–1800 A.D.
  • The United States, 1600–1800 A.D.
  • Western and Central Sudan, 1600–1800 A.D.
  • Western and Central Sudan, 1800–1900 A.D.
  • Western North Africa (The Maghrib), 1600–1800 A.D.
  • Arabian Peninsula
  • The Caribbean
  • Central Africa
  • Central America
  • Guinea Coast
  • North Africa
  • North America
  • South America

The New York Times

Magazine | a brief history of slavery that you didn't learn in school, a brief history of slavery that you didn't learn in school.

By MARY ELLIOTT and JAZMINE HUGHES AUG. 19, 2019

Four hundred years after enslaved Africans were first brought to Virginia, most Americans still don’t know the full story of slavery.

essay about slave trade

Curated by Mary Elliott All text by Mary Elliott and Jazmine Hughes Aug. 19, 2019

Sometime in 1619, a Portuguese slave ship, the São João Bautista, traveled across the Atlantic Ocean with a hull filled with human cargo: captive Africans from Angola, in southwestern Africa. The men, women and children, most likely from the kingdoms of Ndongo and Kongo, endured the horrific journey, bound for a life of enslavement in Mexico. Almost half the captives had died by the time the ship was seized by two English pirate ships; the remaining Africans were taken to Point Comfort, a port near Jamestown, the capital of the English colony of Virginia, which the Virginia Company of London had established 12 years earlier. The colonist John Rolfe wrote to Sir Edwin Sandys, of the Virginia Company, that in August 1619, a “Dutch man of war” arrived in the colony and “brought not anything but 20 and odd Negroes, which the governor and cape merchant bought for victuals.” The Africans were most likely put to work in the tobacco fields that had recently been established in the area.

[ Read our essay on why American schools can’t teach slavery right .]

Forced labor was not uncommon — Africans and Europeans had been trading goods and people across the Mediterranean for centuries — but enslavement had not been based on race. The trans-Atlantic slave trade, which began as early as the 15th century, introduced a system of slavery that was commercialized, racialized and inherited. Enslaved people were seen not as people at all but as commodities to be bought, sold and exploited. Though people of African descent — free and enslaved — were present in North America as early as the 1500s, the sale of the “20 and odd” African people set the course for what would become slavery in the United States.

Slavery, Power and the Human Cost

1455 - 1775.

In the 15th century, the Roman Catholic Church divided the world in half, granting Portugal a monopoly on trade in West Africa and Spain the right to colonize the New World in its quest for land and gold. Pope Nicholas V buoyed Portuguese efforts and issued the Romanus Pontifex of 1455, which affirmed Portugal’s exclusive rights to territories it claimed along the West African coast and the trade from those areas. It granted the right to invade, plunder and “reduce their persons to perpetual slavery.” Queen Isabella invested in Christopher Columbus’s exploration to increase her wealth and ultimately rejected the enslavement of Native Americans, claiming that they were Spanish subjects. Spain established an asiento, or contract, that authorized the direct shipment of captive Africans for trade as human commodities in the Spanish colonies in the Americas. Eventually other European nation-states — the Netherlands, France, Denmark and England — seeking similar economic and geopolitical power joined in the trade, exchanging goods and people with leaders along the West African coast, who ran self-sustaining societies known for their mineral-rich land and wealth in gold and other trade goods. They competed to secure the asiento and colonize the New World. With these efforts, a new form of slavery came into being. It was endorsed by the European nation-states and based on race, and it resulted in the largest forced migration in the world: Some 12.5 million men, women and children of African descent were forced into the trans-Atlantic slave trade. The sale of their bodies and the product of their labor brought the Atlantic world into being, including colonial North America. In the colonies, status began to be defined by race and class, and whether by custom, case law or statute, freedom was limited to maintain the enterprise of slavery and ensure power.

essay about slave trade

Queen Njinga

In 1624, after her brother’s death, Ana Njinga gained control of the kingdom of Ndongo, in present-day Angola. At the time, the Portuguese were trying to colonize Ndongo and nearby territory in part to acquire more people for its slave trade, and after two years as ruler, Njinga was forced to flee in the face of Portuguese attack. Eventually, however, she conquered a nearby kingdom called Matamba. Njinga continued to fight fiercely against Portuguese forces in the region for many years, and she later provided shelter for runaway slaves. By the time of Njinga’s death in 1663, she had made peace with Portugal, and Matamba traded with it on equal economic footing. In 2002, a statue of Njinga was unveiled in Luanda, the capital of Angola, where she is held up as an emblem of resistance and courage.

essay about slave trade

Means of Control

“The iron entered into our souls,” lamented a formerly enslaved man named Caesar, as he remembered the shackles he had to wear during his forced passage from his home in Africa to the New World. Used as restraints around the arms and legs, the coarse metal cut into captive Africans’ skin for the many months they spent at sea. Children made up about 26 percent of the captives. Because governments determined by the ton how many people could be fitted onto a slave ship, enslavers considered children especially advantageous: They could fill the boat’s small spaces, allowing more human capital in the cargo hold. Africans were crammed into ships with no knowledge of where they were going or if they would be released. This forced migration is known as the Middle Passage. As Olaudah Equiano, the formerly enslaved author, remembered, “I was soon put down under the decks, and there I received such a salutation in my nostrils as I had never experienced in my life: so that, with the loathsomeness of the stench, and crying together, I became so sick and low that I was not able to eat, nor had I the least desire to taste anything. I now wished for the last friend, death, to relieve me.” Overheating, thirst, starvation and violence were common aboard slave ships, and roughly 15 percent of each ship’s enslaved population died before they ever reached land. Suicide attempts were so common that many captains placed netting around their ships to prevent loss of human cargo and therefore profit; working-class white crew members, too, committed suicide or ran away at port to escape the brutality. Enslaved people did not meekly accept their fate. Approximately one out of 10 slave ships experienced resistance, ranging from individual defiance (like refusing to eat or jumping overboard) to full-blown mutiny.

essay about slave trade

Cultivating Wealth and Power

The slave trade provided political power, social standing and wealth for the church, European nation-states, New World colonies and individuals. This portrait by John Greenwood connects slavery and privilege through the image of a group of Rhode Island sea captains and merchants drinking at a tavern in the Dutch colony of Surinam, a hub of trade. These men made money by trading the commodities produced by slavery globally — among the North American colonies, the Caribbean and South America — allowing them to secure political positions and determine the fate of the nation. The men depicted here include the future governors Nicholas Cooke and Joseph Wanton; Esek Hopkins, a future commander in chief of the Continental Navy; and Stephen Hopkins, who would eventually become one of the signers of the Declaration of Independence.

All children borne in this country shall be held bond or free only according to the condition of the mother.’

Race Encoded Into Law

The use of enslaved laborers was affirmed — and its continual growth was promoted — through the creation of a Virginia law in 1662 that decreed that the status of the child followed the status of the mother, which meant that enslaved women gave birth to generations of children of African descent who were now seen as commodities. This natural increase allowed the colonies — and then the United States — to become a slave nation. The law also secured wealth for European colonists and generations of their descendants, even as free black people could be legally prohibited from bequeathing their wealth to their children. At the same time, racial and class hierarchies were being coded into law: In the 1640s, John Punch, a black servant, escaped bondage with two white indentured servants. Once caught, his companions received additional years of servitude, while Punch was determined enslaved for life. In the wake of Bacon’s Rebellion, in which free and enslaved black people aligned themselves with poor white people and yeoman white farmers against the government, more stringent laws were enacted that defined status based on race and class. Black people in America were being enslaved for life, while the protections of whiteness were formalized.

essay about slave trade

A Deadly Commodity

Before cotton dominated American agriculture, sugar drove the slave trade throughout the Caribbean and Spanish Americas. Sugar cane was a brutal crop that required constant work six days a week, and it maimed, burned and killed those involved in its cultivation. The life span of an enslaved person on a sugar plantation could be as little as seven years. Unfazed, plantation owners worked their enslaved laborers to death and prepared for this high “turnover” by ensuring that new enslaved people arrived on a regular basis to replace the dying. The British poet William Cowper captured this ethos when he wrote, “I pity them greatly, but I must be mum, for how could we do without sugar or rum?” The sweetening of coffee and tea took precedence over human life and set the tone for slavery in the Americas.

Continual Resistance

Enslaved Africans had known freedom before they arrived in America, and they fought to regain it from the moment they were taken from their homes, rebelling on plantation sites and in urban centers. In September 1739, a group of enslaved Africans in the South Carolina colony, led by an enslaved man called Jemmy, gathered outside Charleston, where they killed two storekeepers and seized weapons and ammunition. “Calling out Liberty,” according to Gen. James Oglethorpe, the rebels “marched on with Colours displayed, and two Drums beating” along the Stono River, entreating other members of the enslaved community to join them. Their goal was Spanish Florida, where they were promised freedom if they fought as the first line of defense against British attack. This effort, called the Stono Rebellion, was the largest slave uprising in the mainland British colonies. Between 60 and 100 black people participated in the rebellion; about 40 black people and 20 white people were killed, and other freedom fighters were captured and questioned. White lawmakers in South Carolina, afraid of additional rebellions, put a 10-year moratorium on the importation of enslaved Africans and passed the Negro Act of 1740, which criminalized assembly, education and moving abroad among the enslaved. The Stono Rebellion was only one of many rebellions that occurred over the 246 years of slavery in the United States.

essay about slave trade

Memory and Place-Making

Enslaved black people came from regions and ethnic groups throughout Africa. Though they came empty-handed, they carried with them memories of loved ones and communities, moral values, intellectual insight, artistic talents and cultural practices, religious beliefs and skills. In their new environment, they relied on these memories to create new practices infused with old ones. In the Low Country region of the Carolinas and Georgia, planters specifically requested skilled enslaved people from a region stretching from Senegal to Liberia, who were familiar with the conditions ideal for growing rice. Charleston quickly became the busiest port for people shipped from West Africa. The coiled or woven baskets used to separate rice grains from husks during harvest were a form of artistry and technology brought from Africa to the colonies. Although the baskets were utilitarian, they also served as a source of artistic pride and a way to stay connected to the culture and memory of the homeland.

The Limits of Freedom

1776 - 1808.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” So begins the Declaration of Independence, the document that eventually led to the creation of the United States. But the words point to the paradox the nation was built on: Even as the colonists fought for freedom from the British, they maintained slavery and avoided the issue in the Constitution. Enslaved people, however, seized any opportunity to secure their freedom. Some fought for it through military service in the Revolutionary War, whether serving for the British or the patriots. Others benefited from gradual emancipation enacted in states like Pennsylvania, New York and New Jersey. In New York, for example, children born after July 4, 1799, were legally free when they turned 25, if they were women, or 28, if they were men — the law was meant to compensate slaveholders by keeping people enslaved during some of their most productive years.

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Yet the demand for a growing enslaved population to cultivate cotton in the Deep South was unyielding. In 1808, Congress implemented the Act Prohibiting Importation of Slaves, which terminated the country’s legal involvement in the international slave trade but put new emphasis on the domestic slave trade, which relied on buying and selling enslaved black people already in the country, often separating them from their loved ones. (In addition, the international trade continued illegally.) The ensuing forced migration of over a million African-Americans to the South guaranteed political power to the slaveholding class: The Three-Fifths Clause that the planter elite had secured in the Constitution held that three-fifths of the enslaved population was counted in determining a state’s population and thus its congressional representation. The economic and political power grab reinforced the brutal system of slavery.

essay about slave trade

A Powerful Letter

After the Revolutionary War, Thomas Jefferson and other politicians — both slaveholding and not — wrote the documents that defined the new nation. In the initial draft of the Declaration of Independence, Jefferson condemned King George III of Britain for engaging in the slave trade and ignoring pleas to end it, and for calling upon the enslaved to rise up and fight on behalf of the British against the colonists. This language was excised from the final document, however, and all references to slavery were removed, in stunning contrast to the document’s opening statement on the equality of men. Jefferson was a lifelong enslaver. He inherited enslaved black people; he fathered enslaved black children; and he relied on enslaved black people for his livelihood and comfort. He openly speculated that black people were inferior to white people and continually advocated for their removal from the country. In 1791, Benjamin Banneker, a free black mathematician, scientist, astronomer and surveyor, argued against this mind-set when he wrote to Jefferson , then secretary of state, urging him to correct his “narrow prejudices” and to “eradicate that train of absurd and false ideas and opinions, which so generally prevails with respect to us.” Banneker also condemned Jefferson’s slaveholding in his letter and included a manuscript of his almanac, which would be printed the following year. Jefferson was unconvinced of the intelligence of African-Americans, and in his swift reply only noted that he welcomed “such proofs as you exhibit” of black people with “talents equal to those of the other colors of men.”

essay about slave trade

She Sued for Her Freedom

In the wake of the Revolutionary War, African-Americans took their cause to statehouses and courthouses, where they vigorously fought for their freedom and the abolition of slavery. Elizabeth Freeman, better known as Mum Bett, an enslaved woman in Massachusetts whose husband died fighting during the Revolutionary War, was one such visionary. The new Massachusetts Constitution of 1780 stated that “All men are born free and equal, and have certain natural, essential and unalienable rights; among which may be reckoned the right of enjoying and defending their lives and liberties.” Arguing that slavery violated this sentiment, Bett sued for her freedom and won. After the ruling, Bett changed her name to Elizabeth Freeman to signify her new status. Her precedent-setting case helped to effectively bring an end to slavery in Massachusetts.

‘If one minute’s freedom had been offered to me, and I had been told I must die at the end of that minute, I would have taken it.’

essay about slave trade

God Wouldn’t Want Segregated Sanctuaries

Black people, both free and enslaved, relied on their faith to hold onto their humanity under the most inhumane circumstances. In 1787, the Rev. Richard Allen and other black congregants walked out of services at St. George’s Methodist Episcopal Church in Philadelphia to protest its segregated congregations. Allen, an abolitionist who was born enslaved, had moved to Philadelphia after purchasing his freedom. There he joined St. George’s, where he initially preached to integrated congregations. It quickly became clear that integration went only so far: He was directed to preach a separate service designated for black parishioners. Dismayed that black people were still treated as inferiors in what was meant to be a holy space, Allen founded the African Methodist Episcopal denomination and started the Mother Bethel A.M.E. Church. For communities of free people of color, churches like Allen’s were places not only of sanctuary but also of education, organizing and civic engagement, providing resources to navigate a racist society in a slave nation. Allen and his successors connected the community, pursued social justice and helped guide black congregants as they transitioned to freedom. The African Methodist Episcopal Church grew rapidly; today at least 7,000 A.M.E. congregations exist around the world, including Allen’s original church.

essay about slave trade

The Destructive Impact of the Cotton Gin

The national dialogue surrounding slavery and freedom continued as the demand for enslaved laborers increased. In 1794, Eli Whitney patented the cotton gin, which made it possible to clean cotton faster and get products to the market more quickly. Cotton was king, as the saying went, and the country became a global economic force. But the land for cultivating it was eventually exhausted, and the nation would have to expand to keep up with consumer demand. In 1803, Thomas Jefferson struck a deal with Napoleon Bonaparte, the Louisiana Purchase: In exchange for $15 million, the United States gained almost 830,000 square miles of land, doubling the size of the country and expanding America’s empire of slavery and cotton. Soon after this deal, the United States abolished the international slave trade, creating a labor shortage. Under these circumstances, the domestic slave trade increased as an estimated one million enslaved people were sent to the Deep South to work in cotton, sugar and rice fields.

Describing the Depravity of Slavery

“Benevolent men have voluntarily stepped forward to obviate the consequences of this injustice and barbarity,” proclaimed the Rev. Peter Williams Jr. in a historic speech about the end of the nation’s involvement in the trans-Atlantic slave trade. “They have striven assiduously to restore our natural rights; to guaranty them from fresh innovations; to furnish us with necessary information; and to stop the source from whence our evils have flowed.” A free black man who founded St. Philip’s African Church in Manhattan, Williams spoke in front of a white and black audience on Jan. 1, 1808 — the day the United States ban on the international slave trade went into effect. The law, of course, did not end slavery, and it was often violated. Williams forced the audience to confront slavery’s ugliness as he continued, “Its baneful footsteps are marked with blood; its infectious breath spreads war and desolation; and its train is composed of the complicated miseries of cruel and unceasing bondage.” His oration further defined a black view of freedom that had been building since the foundation of the country, as when the formerly enslaved poet Phillis Wheatley noted in 1774,“for in every human Breast, God has implanted a Principle, which we call love of Freedom; it is impatient of Oppression, and pants for Deliverance.”

A Slave Nation Fights for Freedom

1809 - 1865.

As demand for cotton grew and the nation expanded, slavery became more systemic, codified and regulated — as did the lives of all enslaved people. The sale of enslaved people and the products of their labor secured the nation’s position as a global economic and political powerhouse, but they faced increasingly inhumane conditions. They were hired out to increase their worth, sold to pay off debts and bequeathed to the next generation. Slavery affected everyone, from textile workers, bankers and ship builders in the North; to the elite planter class, working-class slave catchers and slave dealers in the South; to the yeoman farmers and poor white people who could not compete against free labor. Additionally, in the 1830s, President Andrew Jackson implemented his plan for Indian removal, ripping another group of people from their ancestral lands in the name of wealth. As slavery spread across the country, opposition — both moral and economic — gained momentum. Interracial abolition efforts grew in force as enslaved people, free black people and some white citizens fought for the end of slavery and a more inclusive definition of freedom. The nation was in transition, and it came to a head after Abraham Lincoln was elected president; a month later, in December 1860, South Carolina seceded from the Union, citing “an increasing hostility on the part of the nonslaveholding states to the institution of slavery” as a cause. Five years later, the Civil War had ended, and 246 years after the “20 and odd Negroes” were sold in Virginia, the 13th Amendment ensured that the country would never again be defined as a slave nation.

essay about slave trade

A Woman Bequeathed

Rhoda Phillips’s name was officially written down for the first time in 1832, in the record of her sale. She was purchased when she was around 1 year old, along with her mother, Milley, and her sister Martha, for $550. The enslaver Thomas Gleaves eventually acquired Rhoda. He bequeathed her to his family in his will, where she is listed as valued at $200. She remained enslaved by them until the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863. Afterward, Rhoda is believed to have married a man and had eight children with him. When she died, the Gleaves family ran an obituary in The Nashville Banner that showed the family still could not see the inhumanity of slavery. “Aunt Rhody,” the obituary said, “was raised by Mr. Gleaves and has lived with the family all her life. She was one of the old-time darkies that are responsible for the making of so many of their young masters.” In this daguerreotype of Rhoda, she is about 19, and in contrast to the practice at the time, Rhoda appears alone in the frame. Typically, enslaved people were shown holding white children or in the background of a family photo, the emphasis placed on their servitude. Rhoda’s story highlights one of the perversities of slavery: To the Gleaves, Rhoda was a family member even as they owned her.

By Black People, for Black People

On March 16, 1827, the same year that slavery was abolished in New York, Peter Williams Jr. co-founded Freedom’s Journal, the first newspaper owned and operated by African-Americans. A weekly New York paper, it was edited by John Russwurm and Samuel Cornish, who wrote in their first editorial , “We wish to plead our own cause. Too long have others spoken for us. Too long has the publick been deceived by misrepresentations.” Russwurm and Cornish wanted the paper to strengthen relations among newly freed black people living in the North and counter racist and hostile representations of African-Americans in other papers. At its peak, the paper circulated in 11 states and internationally. Although it folded in 1829, Freedom’s Journal served as inspiration for other black newspapers, and by the start of the Civil War, there were at least two dozen black-owned papers in the country. The renowned abolitionist and scholar Frederick Douglass used his newspapers to call for and to secure social justice.

Generations of Enslavement

On March 7, 1854, Sally and her three daughters, Sylvia, Charlotte and Elizabeth, were sold for $1,200. Sally was able to remain with her children, at least for a short time, but most enslaved women had to endure their children being forcibly taken from them. Their ability to bear children — their “increase” — was one of the reasons they were so highly valued. Laws throughout the country ensured that a child born to an enslaved woman was also the property of the enslaver to do with as he saw fit, whether to make the child work or to sell the child for profit. Many enslaved women were also regularly raped, and there were no laws to protect them; white men could do what they wanted without reproach, including selling the offspring — their offspring — that resulted from these assaults. Many white women also served as enslavers; there was no alliance of sisterhood among slave mistresses and the black mothers and daughters they claimed as property.

‘Brethren, arise, arise! Strike for your lives and liberties. Now is the day and the hour. ... Let your motto be resistance!’

Liberation Theology

In 1831, Nat Turner, along with about 70 enslaved and free black people, led a revolt in Southampton County, Va., that shook the nation. Turner, a preacher who had frequent, powerful visions, planned his uprising for months, putting it into effect following a solar eclipse, which he interpreted as a sign from God. He and his recruits freed enslaved people and killed white men, women and children, sparing only a number of poor white people. They killed nearly 60 people over two days, before being overtaken by the state militia. Turner went into hiding, but he was found and hanged a few months later. It was one of the deadliest revolts during slavery, a powerful act of resistance that left enslavers scared — both for their lives and for the loss of their “property.” The Virginia resident Eleanor Weaver reflected on the events, stating in a letter to family members: “We hope our government will take some steps to put down Negro preaching. It is those large assemblies of Negroes causes the mischief.” More stringent laws went into effect that controlled the lives of black people, free or enslaved, limiting their ability to read, write or move about.

The Slave Patrols

In 1846, Col. Henry W. Adams, of the 168th Regiment, Virginia Militia, started a slave patrol in Pittsylvania County, Va., that would “visit all Negro quarters and other places suspected of entertaining unlawful assemblies of slaves ... as aforesaid, unlawfully assembled, orany others strolling from one plantation to another, without a pass from his or her master or mistress or overseer, and take them before the next justice of the peace, who if he shall see cause, is hereby required to order every such slave ... aforesaid to receive any number of lashes, not exceeding 20 on his or her back.” Slave patrols throughout the nation were created by white people who were fearful of rebellion and were seeking to protect their human property. While overseers were employed on plantation sites as a means of control, slave patrols — which patrolled plantations, streets, woods and public areas — were thought to serve the larger community. While slave patrols tried to enforce laws that limited the movement of the enslaved community, black people still found ways around them.

Growing National Tension

In 1850, Congress passed a new Fugitive Slave Act, which required that all citizens aid in the capturing of fugitive enslaved black people. Lack of compliance was considered breaking the law. The previous act, from 1793, enabled enslavers to pursue runaway enslaved persons, but it was difficult to enforce. The 1850 act — which created a legal obligation for Americans, regardless of their moral views on slavery, to support and enforce the institution — divided the nation and undergirded the path to the Civil War. Black people could not testify on their own behalf, so if a white person incorrectly challenged the status of a free black person, the person was unable to act in his or her own defense and could be enslaved. In 1857, Dred Scott, who was enslaved, went to court to claim his freedom after his enslaver transported him into a free state and territory. The Supreme Court determined his fate when Chief Justice Roger B. Taney stated that no black person, free or enslaved, could petition the court because they were not “citizens within the meaning of the Constitution.” By statute and interpretation of the law, black people in America were dehumanized and commodifiedin order to maintain the economic and political power supported by slavery.

essay about slave trade

Enlisting in a Moral Fight

It is unclear whether Jacob Johns was enslaved, recently freed or a free man when he enlisted in the Union Army as a sergeant in the 19th United States Colored Troops Infantry, Company B. His unit fought in 11 battles, and 293 of its men were killed or died of disease, including Johns. When the war began in 1861, enslaved African-Americans seized their opportunity for freedom by crossing the Union Army lines in droves. The Confederate states tried to reclaim their human “property” but were denied by the Union, which cleverly declared the formerly enslaved community as contraband of war — captured enemy property. President Abraham Lincoln initially would not let black men join the military, anxious about how the public would receive integrated efforts. But as casualties increased and manpower thinned, Congress passed the Second Confiscation and Militia Act in 1862, allowing Lincoln to “employ as many persons of African descent” as he needed, and thousands enlisted in the United States Colored Troops. Jacobs was one of nearly 180,000 black soldiers who served in the U.S.C.T. during the Civil War, a group that made up nearly one-tenth of all soldiers, fighting for the cause of freedom.

essay about slave trade

Always on Your Person

A free black man living in Loudoun County, Va., Joseph Trammell created this small metal tin to protect his certificate of freedom — proof that he was not enslaved. During slavery, freedom was tenuous for free black people: It could be challenged at any moment by any white person, and without proof of their status they could be placed into the slave trade. Trammell, under Virginia law, had to register his freedom every few years with the county court. But even for free black people, laws were still in place that limited their liberty — in many areas in the North and the South, they could not own firearms, testify in court or read and write — and in the free state of Ohio, at least two race riots occurred before 1865.

One Family’s Ledger

Slaveholding families kept meticulous records of their business transactions: buying, selling and trading people. A record of the Rouzee family’s taxable property includes five horses, 497 acres of land and 28 enslaved people. Records show the family enterprise including the purchase and sale of African-Americans, investment in provisions to maintain the enslaved community and efforts to capture an enslaved man who ran toward freedom. From one century to the next, the family profited from enslaved people, their wealth passing from generation to generation. As enslaved families were torn apart, white people — from the elite planter class to individuals invested in one enslaved person — were building capital, a legacy that continues today.

‘I shall never forget that memorable night, when in a distant city I waited and watched at a public meeting, with 3,000 others not less anxious than myself, for the word of deliverance which we have heard read today. Nor shall I ever forget the outburst of joy and thanksgiving that rent the air when the lightning brought to us the Emancipation Proclamation.’

essay about slave trade

Freedom Begins

On Sept. 22, 1862, Abraham Lincoln issued the preliminary Emancipation Proclamation, stating that if the Confederacy did not end its rebellion by Jan. 1, 1863, “all persons held as slaves” in the states that had seceded would be free. The Confederacy did not comply, and the proclamation went into effect. But the Emancipation Proclamation freed only those enslaved in the rebelling states, approximately 3.5 million people. It did not apply to half a million enslaved people in slaveholding states that weren’t part of the Confederacy — Kentucky, Maryland, Missouri, Delaware and what would become West Virginia — or to those people in parts of the Confederacy that were already under Northern control. They remained enslaved until Gen. Robert E. Lee surrendered at Appomattox in April 1865. The freedom promised by the proclamation — and the official legal end of slavery — did not occur until the ratification of the 13th Amendment on Dec. 6, 1865. Only then was the tyranny of slavery truly over. Nevertheless, the Emancipation Proclamation was deeply meaningful to the community of formerly enslaved African-Americans and their allies. Annual emancipation celebrations were established, including Juneteenth; across the country, African-American gathering spots were named Emancipation Park; and the words of the proclamation were read aloud as a reminder that African-Americans, enslaved and free, collectively fought for freedom for all and changed an entire nation.

‘The story of the African-American is not only the quintessential American story but it’s really the story that continues to shape who we are today.’

Mary Elliott is curator of American slavery at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture, where she co-curated the ‘‘Slavery and Freedom’’ exhibition. Jazmine Hughes is a writer and editor at The New York Times Magazine.

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The Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History Advanced Placement United States History Study Guide

AP US History Curriculum Study Guide

The Discovery of the Americas and the Transatlantic Slave Trade

Detail of El Mina from a portolan chart of the Atlantic Ocean published in 1633. (Library of Congress, Geography and Map Division)

Few people wanted to work on a sugar plantation. In the fifteenth century, most men and women labored to gain a competency—a livelihood—for themselves and their families. In the Mediterranean, peasants (generally attached to a lord in some sort of feudal subordination) grew enough to feed themselves and their families and a bit more to satisfy the demand of the lord. They wanted little to do with sugar, whose empty calories might provide a quick burst of energy but could not sustain life. Free workers also disdained sugar plantations, appreciating that the labor was brutal and dangerous—literally killing. Sugar entrepreneurs turned to enslaved labor, an ancient form familiar to all in the fifteenth-century Mediterranean, although rarely employed on a massive scale.

At first, the sugar entrepreneurs enslaved any men and women they could buy or capture. Christian and Muslim, European and African slaves worked side-by-side on the sugar estates. For reasons of propinquity, Slavic people taken from the Black Sea composed the majority of the enslaved population—hence the word “slave.” But, in 1453, when Ottoman Turks seized Constantinople and denied Christian Europeans access to the Black Sea, Africans—who had been carried across the Sahara—began to make up a larger and larger proportion of the slave labor force.

Africans loomed even larger in the slave population when the Portuguese carried the sugar enterprise onto newly discovered Atlantic islands: the Azores, the Canaries, and Madeira. On these islands, plantations were even larger and required even more labor. Portuguese planters, often backed by Italian bankers, began raiding along the west coast of Africa, seizing Africans and carrying them back to Lisbon, where they were sold to locals, sent to the Atlantic islands, or re-exported to other parts of Europe.

The Portuguese found slave raiding lucrative, but it was also dangerous. Africans resisted, counterattacking with punishing blows. Eventually, they forced the Portuguese to turn from unabashed kidnapping to trade, which proved more efficient, more profitable, and safer.

In Africa, native merchants were more than willing to sell slaves to European outsiders, but they did not sell their own people; rather they sold men and women of nations other than their own, usually men captured in war or guilty of some heinous offense. They also sold them on their terms. They kept the Portuguese and other Europeans who entered the trade at a distance, never allowing them onto African soil without permission, which generally had to be purchased by paying a tax of some sort. African merchants drove hard bargains with European traders, giving as good as they got. Responsibility for the slave trade rested with both Europeans and Africans.

The exchange of European goods for enslaved Africans that began in the middle of the fifteenth century set the terms of the slave trade for the next four hundred years, but the character of that trade was constantly changing for both traders and slaves. The number of slaves grew; their nationality, sex, and age fluctuated. New maritime technology changed the transport that carried slaves, which, in turn, affected everything from the price of slaves to the slaves’ mortality and morbidity. And while the trade expanded enormously, reaching deep into the African interior and to all parts of the Americas, it also created opposition among Africans, Europeans, and the Americas, which eventually led to the slave trade’s final demise during the middle years of the nineteenth century.

Over the course of its history, the largest change in the nature of the slave trade was simply the growth of the numbers. During the fifteenth century, some fifty thousand slaves entered Europe and the Atlantic islands. The number of Africans shipped across the Atlantic during the sixteenth century topped one quarter of a million. That number grew to nearly two million in the seventeenth century, some six and one half million in the eighteenth, and another three million plus in the nineteenth century, for an estimated total of some twelve and a half million.

The origins of the slave population and their destinations also changed over time. The vast majority of slaves sent to the Americas sailed from west central Africa—Angola and the Kongo—(over 5.5 million), followed by the Bight of Benin (nearly 2 million), Bight of Biafra (one and a half million), the Upper Guinea coast (1.5 million), and the Gold Coast (1.2 million). However, the point of disembarkation only provides partial clues to the origins of the Africans sent to the Americas, as slaves taken from various places in the interior often left from the same port.

The destinations of slaves taken to the Americas were equally diverse. Slavers carried most of the Africans caught up in the trade to Brazil (approximately five million), with another 2.25 million sent to the British Caribbean, and about 1.75 million to the French Caribbean. Most of the rest landed in Spanish America. The mainland North American colonies and United States, which would eventually have the largest slave population in the Americas, received less than 400,000 African slaves.

This distribution changed radically over time. For example, most of the slaves imported to the United States arrived before the American Revolution, while most of those shipped to Cuba landed during the nineteenth century. Likewise, the Bight of Benin was a bigger source of slaves than the Bight of Biafra during the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, but the reverse was true in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Through the entire period of the slave trade, West Central Africa remained the largest source of slaves. In short, any account that estimates which slaves went where and when must consider changes of time and place. And what was true of slaves was also true of slave traders. The English who were hardly involved in the early slave trade became the largest slave traders in the world by the eighteenth century.

Although the nature of the slave trade constantly changed, one thing remained the same. The trade was a violent, deadly business that killed millions, mutilated millions, and traumatized millions. Enslaved Africans everywhere endured the trauma of enslavement. Although the initial deportees may have been drawn from wartime prisoners, by the eighteenth century enslaved peoples were rarely guilty of anything more than being in the wrong place at the wrong time, taken by mercenary armies, bandits, and professional slavers.

Captured deep in the African interior, Africans faced a long, deadly march to the coast. Traveling sometimes for months, they were passed from group to group, as many different African nations participated in the slave trade. But whoever drove the captives to their unwanted destiny, the circumstances of their travel were extraordinarily taxing. Ill-clothed and ill-fed, the captives moved at a feverish pace, only to stop and languish in some pen, while middlemen bartered over their bodies, sold some, and purchased yet others to add to the sad coffle. The journey then began again. Taken together, the movement to the coast was nothing more than a death march for many. In some places, some 40 percent of the slaves died between their capture in the interior and their arrival on the coast.

Herded into dismal holding pens or factories along the Atlantic, the survivors—weakened and traumatized—did not simply await their fate. Even at this last moment, the captives sought to regain their freedom. Some tried to get word to their families, so they might be ransomed. A handful sought to escape, although once they entered the walled castles of the slave ports flight became increasingly difficult. That of course did not prevent them from trying and a small number from succeeding.

These were the fortunate few. Most captives faced the nightmarish transatlantic crossing, the dreaded Middle Passage. The depths of human misery and the astounding death toll of men and women packed in the stinking hulls shamed the most hard hearted. Slave traders themselves admitted the deleterious effects of the trade. Even among those who defended slavery, there were those who condemned the Middle Passage as an abomination. But, like all human experiences—even the worst—the Middle Passage was not of one piece. While the vast majority suffered below deck, a few men and women chosen from among the captives helped set the sails, steer the ships, and serve the crews that carried the mass of Africans across the Atlantic. Denmark Vesey, the former slave whose alleged conspiracy shook South Carolina in the 1820s, was but one of many slaves who sailed the Atlantic as the personal servant of the captain of a slave ship. The Atlantic passage of these captives differed greatly from those stowed below deck.

For all captives, however, some things never changed. Fear was omnipresent as the Africans, stripped naked and bereft of their every belonging, boarded the ships and met—often for the first time—white men. Brandishing red hot irons to mark their captives in the most personal way, these “white men with horrible looks, red faces, and long hair” left more than a physical scar. [1] Many enslaved Africans concluded the slavers were in league with the devil, if not themselves devils. For others, the searing of their skin confirmed that they were bound for the slaughterhouse to be eaten by the cannibals who had stamped them in much the way animals were marked.

The branding iron was but the first of many instruments of savagery the captives faced. Eighteenth-century ships were violent places where imperious captains ruled with the lash, and the barbarity of the maritime world reached new heights on the slave ship, where whips, chains, shackles, and thumbscrews were standard equipment. When it came to subduing slaves, the captains’ autocratic power was extended to the crew, and men who had been brutalized often felt little compunction in brutalizing others. Indeed, the inability of the captives to defend themselves unleashed the most sadistic impulses among members of the crew.

While violence was ubiquitous on the slave ship, it was neither random nor purposeless. Rather, it was carefully orchestrated to intimidate captives in circumstances where there were few incentives for men and women to submit. Slavers hoped that awing captives with overwhelming power wielded without compunction for life or limb would convince them that resistance was futile. To that end, captives were stripped of their humanity: denied personal possessions, privacy, and other prerogatives accorded the meanest members of free society. Slavers used every occasion to emphasize the captives’ degraded status, indeed their lack of status. The filth and violence dissolved the carefully developed distinctions between the pure and impure upon which many African societies rested. The humiliation that accompanied such degradation was almost always public, giving the captives little means to maintain their dignity. Among the lessons taught in this systematic debasement was the sacrosanctity of a white skin. More than any single place, the origins of white supremacy can be found in the holds of the slave ship. Speaking though a black interpreter, one captain informed his captives “no one that killed a white man should be spared.” [2]

Equally inescapable was the horror and anguish that accompanied the captives’ stark realization of what plantation slavery in the Americas entailed. Sometime during their journey, in one terrifying moment, they understood that family, friends, and country were gone, never to be seen again. The markers of identity—many of which were physically inscribed upon their bodies in ritual scarification, tooth filing, body piercing, and tattooing—were rendered meaningless, if not a source of ridicule. Lineage, the most important source of social cohesion in African society, was dissolved. Sons could no longer follow fathers or daughters follow mothers. The captives had been orphaned, and their isolation shook them to the very essence of their beings. They had been separated from everything they knew and loved.

The violence and horror of isolation soon yielded to an even more pervasive companion. As the sharks that trailed understood, death was a universal presence aboard the slave ship. Its ubiquity was matched only by its variety, as some men and women died from disease, dehydration, and abuse. The damp, dank, crowded holds spawned an endless variety of deadly afflictions. Children, whose mortality exceeded that of adults, fared particularly poorly. Although mortality rates of those crossing the Atlantic improved over time, on average more than one in seven Africans who boarded a slave ship died, as the enslaved struggled for space, food, and water. Slaves squabbled among themselves endlessly. Men and women of many nations who spoke many languages and who frequently belonged to nations with long histories of animosity did not come automatically or easily make shipboard alliances. Indeed, to prevent such alliances, slavers sometimes deliberately loaded their ships with men and women of different nationalities and placed them in close proximity to one another. They understood that old enmities lingered. It was often easier—and more rewarding—to collaborate with slavers as an informer than with one’s fellows. Slavers depended upon these collaborators as much as they did their own guns. When “the Jollofes rose,” according to one report, “the Bambaras sided with the Master.” [3]

But as the inevitability of a common future manifested itself, the captives found reason to join together. Confederations born of shared anguish and pain made impossible situations bearable, as captives bolstered each others’ spirits, shared food, and nursed one another through the inevitable bouts of nausea, fever, and dysentery—the feared bloody flux. Small acts of kindness provided the basis for resistance. A new order took shape below deck. Sullen men and women began to forge a new language from knowing glances and a few shared words. They watched the slavers carefully, studying their routines and habits so that they ultimately knew more about their captors than their captors knew about them. They awaited their chance, and when it arrived, they struck their enslavers hard. About one in ten slave ships faced some kind of insurrection. Most failed, and punishment was swift and unforgiving, but even those who watched the proceeding in silence learned powerful lessons. Shipboard alliances marked the beginnings of new solidarities.

Surviving the Middle Passage was but the first of the many tests faced by the forced immigrants. They would now have to make their way in perhaps the most difficult situations human beings have ever faced.

[1] Olaudah Equiano, The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African , 9th ed. (London, 1794), 47.

[2] William Snelgrave, A New Account of Some Parts of Guinea, and the Slave Trade (London, 1734), 184.

[3] Quoted in David Eltis, The Rise of African Slavery in the Americas (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 229; Marcus V. Rediker, The Slave Ship: A Human History (New York: Viking Penguin, 2007), 271–276, 297–298; Stephanie Smallwood, Saltwater Slavery: A Middle Passage from Africa to American Diaspora (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 2008), 103.

Ira Berlin , Distinguished University Professor at the University of Maryland, is a leading historian of slavery in North America and the Atlantic World. His books include Generations of Captivity: A History of Slaves in the United States (2002) and Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in Mainland North America (1999), which received the Bancroft Prize and the Frederick Douglass Book Prize.

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World History Project - Origins to the Present

Course: world history project - origins to the present   >   unit 6, read: why was slavery abolished three theories.

  • READ: Race and Post-Abolition Societies
  • READ: Rise of Proletariat
  • BEFORE YOU WATCH: Capitalism and Socialism
  • WATCH: Capitalism and Socialism
  • READ: Child Labor
  • READ: A World Tour of Women's Suffrage
  • READ: Responses to Industrialization
  • Transformation of Labor

First read: preview and skimming for gist

Second read: key ideas and understanding content.

  • According to the article, which countries in the Atlantic abolished the slave trade early? Which countries abolished slavery early? Which countries abolished it late?
  • How might capitalism have helped end slavery? How did this connect to production and distribution during the Industrial Revolution?
  • How might changing morality have helped end slavery? How did this connect to the transformations in human communities caused by the Enlightenment and changes in religious and political communities?
  • How might networks of Africans and descendants of Africans have helped end slavery?
  • Does the author argue that slavery actually ended when it became illegal? Use evidence from the text to back up your answer.

Third read: evaluating and corroborating

  • Earlier in this era, you learned about liberal and national political revolutions as well as the Industrial Revolution. In this lesson, you’re learning about networks of reformers who tried to change the world. This article presents you with political, economic, and reform arguments for why slavery ended. Based on what you’ve learned in this era, which argument seems most convincing? Which is the least convincing?

Why Was Slavery Abolished?: Three Theories

Theory 1: free labor and free wages, theory 2: morality, theory 3: the actions of africans in the americas and europe, want to join the conversation.

essay about slave trade

Origins of the Slave Trade

essay about slave trade

Written by: Mark Christensen, Assumption College

By the end of this section, you will:.

  • Explain how the growth of the Spanish Empire in North America shaped the development of social and economic structures over time

Suggested Sequencing

This Narrative can be assigned to students after the Life in the Spanish Colonies Narrative. Connections can be drawn between this Narrative and the Las Casas on the Destruction of the Indies, 1552 .

In 1734, British sea captain William Snelgrave stated that Africans had been trafficking in slaves long before the Europeans arrived and explained the various ways Africans could become enslaved in their native country. Slavery could result from crimes committed or unpaid debts; parents could also sell their children into slavery. Yet the most common source of slavery was the taking of war captives by an enemy tribe or state. Snelgrave argued that the slave trade between Europeans and Africans was moral and just and, in fact, benefitted the African slaves. According to him, Europeans had an economic incentive to treat slaves better than their African counterparts because of the expense incurred in their purchase. Furthermore, European slavers would introduce African slaves to Christianity, thus saving their souls for eternity. Many Europeans shared Snelgrave’s opinions, as did the Catholic Church and its popes, who issued several decrees concerning Africa beginning in the mid-fifteenth century and authorizing the enslavement of non-Christians.

Although grossly exaggerating the improved treatment of slaves by Europeans, Snelgrave was right in that the slave trade was just that: a trade. Contrary to popular understanding, Europeans were generally prevented by disease and Africans wielding metal weapons from raiding the African continent and stealing away people they then enslaved. These limitations forced them to deal with Africans as equal business partners. After all, the business of slavery had existed in Africa and been controlled by the African elite since the seventh century. Some historians estimate that, before the arrival of the Europeans in the fifteenth century, Africans had sold upward of eleven million slaves to the Islamic world. When the Portuguese arrived on the coast of Africa, African merchants and rulers were more than happy to exchange enslaved Africans for various commodities. In other words, Europeans simply accessed the preexisting systems of slave trading and provided a new means of transport across the Atlantic to the Americas.

It is important to view slavery and its deep history not as a “white” versus “black” racial issue, but as a longstanding example of “us” versus “them” exploitation. Slavery has existed in various forms since at least ancient times and throughout many world cultures. Before the Industrial Revolution, the invention of advanced labor-saving technology, and the development of markets for free labor, forced or coerced human labor was used by civilizations from Sumeria, Egypt, and Greece to Rome, and eventually African and European nations. Cultures and nations routinely used other cultures and nations deemed different or inferior as sources of slaves. In other words, European and African involvement in a slave trade was just one link in an already long chain of examples.

In Africa, slaves served in a variety of roles. Some worked on the agricultural estates of nobles and kings; some served in domestic roles or as indicators of wealth and prestige; some performed hard labor in gold mines or as soldiers; and others served as artisans, concubines, tutors, and in many other roles. Slaves in Africa were seen as a form of property, and slave markets abounded throughout west and central Africa. The all-too-real danger of becoming enslaved due to violent raids by other Africans prompted many African communities to use the natural geography of cliffs, lakes, mountains, and caves, and the construction of walls around communities, towns, and cities to protect themselves from aggressive neighbors.

The discovery of the Americas and the increased demand for the labor-intensive production of sugar led to an increased European demand for slaves, and Africa provided the perfect solution. Not only was it close to the trade routes going west to the Americas but it had a preexisting system of slavery that facilitated the trade. Business-savvy African merchants and rulers knew they held a product highly valued by Europeans and adjusted their price accordingly. Some demanded cowry shells for their slaves; others requested European goods such as rum, tobacco, guns, iron bars, axes, knives, and textiles. These goods enhanced the prestige of their African owners while also providing a military advantage over their rivals.

A typical slave-trading venture might begin with a European ship captain, before his departure, obtaining from his government the necessary permissions and paying the necessary fees to trade in slaves. He would hire a crew and check the local ports for men returning from Africa to ascertain the current value of slaves and the goods African traders sought. After purchasing supplies and desired trade items, he would set sail for the African coast. For their part, African rulers and merchants would acquire slaves, often through violent raids, and bring them to coastal forts, such as the one shown in, to be held until they were purchased by Europeans.

A painting shows Elmina Castle, which is flying the Dutch flag.

In 1482, Portuguese traders built Elmina Castle (also called São Jorge da Mina, or Saint George’s of the Mine) in present-day Ghana, on the west coast of Africa. Originally the fort was used to trade gold, but by the sixteenth century it was serving as a holding pen for enslaved Africans waiting to board ships that would take them to the Americas. This image of the Elmina dates from the 1660s, when the fort had been seized by Dutch traders.

Having arrived, the European captain would likely offer “gifts” or pay “dues” to the local African traders and kings in exchange for the opportunity to trade with them. The captain would then purchase as many slaves as the African merchants had available and continue this process all along the coastline as he sailed to various vendors until he had purchased his desired number of slaves. A trip could last weeks or even months, depending on the number of enslaved people available at each stop.

During the purchasing process, the crew outfitted the boat for its trans-Atlantic voyage. They installed planks in the storage hold on which to keep the slaves, and nets around the deck to prevent escape or suicide. Enslaved people spent the hellish voyage across the Atlantic Ocean shackled together in the cramped, dark, and foul confines below deck. Approximately 10 to 15 percent of the 12 million Africans in the slave trade – more than one million people – died on the voyage of disease, mistreatment, or suicide.

An image shows a drawing of the sections of a slave ship: from the top and a longitudinal section, as well as the dimensions.

What does this cross-section of a slave ship reveal about the treatment of Africans during the Middle Passage?

Known as the “Middle Passage” of the triangular trade between Europe, Africa, and the Americas, the ordeal took one to two months. After arriving in the Americas, the captain would sell his slaves for local goods including cotton, rum, sugar, dyes, and logwood. These goods would then be transported back to Europe for sale. Although European and African slavers saw the slave trade as beneficial and lucrative, the Africans who had been kidnapped and enslaved suffered inhumane exploitation, mistreatment, and denial of the fundamental individual rights to life, liberty, and ownership of their labor and themselves.

Before 1820, four of every five people bound for North or South America arrived in chains. Once purchased and transported from Africa, slaves ended up in a variety of places. A small portion was taken to Europe. Nearly one-third of slaves were sent to Brazil, which received more than four million slaves to work on its numerous sugar plantations, to mine and pan for gold, and eventually to grow coffee. Caribbean islands owned by the British, French, and Dutch likewise received millions of slaves, as did Spanish America, where enslaved people commonly worked in the mines, in artisan trades, and around ports as laborers and sailors. Contrary to popular belief, British North America received only about six percent of the captives transported in the slave trade. Demand was greater in the sugar islands of the Caribbean, whereas North American labor needs were met, in part, by white indentured servants and a naturally reproducing slave population. In the end, however, Africa and Europe worked together to supply the Americas with their primary source of immigrants in the colonial period: African slaves.

A map shows the routes that were used in the course of the slave trade and the number of enslaved people who traveled each route. Slaves traveled from Africa to South and Central America and well as to the Middle East and within Africa itself.

This map shows the routes that were used in the Atlantic slave trade. The majority of slaves were sent to the plantations and mines of Brazil. (attribution: Copyright Rice University, OpenStax, under CC BY 4.0 license)

Review Questions

1. What was the final destination for most slaves coming to the New World?

  • North America
  • The Caribbean

2. Before 1820, approximately how many people coming to the Americas were enslaved?

3. The Atlantic slave trade

  • brought more slaves to the sugar-producing colonies than to any other area
  • was supported in part by freed slaves who became slave owners themselves
  • brought more slaves to the British colonies than to the Caribbean
  • reached its height in the early 1600s

4. The first European country to participate in the slave trade was

5. African rulers and merchants participated in the Atlantic slave trade by

  • raiding rival groups for captives to sell to European traders
  • protesting the conditions of the Middle Passage
  • partnering with Europeans to ensure slaves’ conversion to Christianity
  • refusing to cooperate with European slave traders

6. Historians looking to study the role of African rulers and merchants in the Atlantic slave trade would likely consult

  • a map indicating the origins and ultimate destination of slaves in the New World
  • a treaty signed between an African ruler and a European trader
  • a first-hand account of the Middle Passage
  • a graph showing the growth of the slave trade over time

7. Which statement best describes the interaction between Europeans and Africans in capturing slaves on the African continent?

  • Europeans directly raided the African continent and captured slaves with the permission of African rulers.
  • Europeans relied on Africans as business partners to capture and provide them with slaves for payment.
  • Europeans sought the advice of African rulers and merchants on the best places to purchase slaves within the continent.
  • Europeans and African rulers and merchants had little to no interaction during the Atlantic slave trade.

8. Before European involvement in the Atlantic slave trade, what was the most common form of slavery in Africa?

  • Children sold into slavery by their parents
  • Debtors sold into slavery for nonpayment of their debts
  • Captives taken during war
  • Soldiers serving in the military

Free Response Questions

  • Explain how the Europeans viewed the African slave trade.
  • Explain Africa’s role in the international slave trade.
  • Explain how the New World economy determined where most slaves were eventually brought.

AP Practice Questions

“The inhabitants of . . . the sugar colonies, are composed of Whites and Blacks, or in other words of British subjects and African slaves. It is from the skill and industry of the former, supported by the painful and indefatigable labour of the latter, that not sugar only, but various other commodities . . . are raised in those countries, and exported to different parts of the world. It is to the cheapness of the labor of these poor people . . . that those costly and extensive works, which are necessary in a sugar plantation, are derived, as well as . . . the affluence of our countrymen in these isles, who are their masters.”

John Campbell, Candid and Impartial Considerations on the Nature of the Sugar Trade; the Comparative Importance of the British and French Islands in the West Indies, 1763

1. According to this source, what was the main motivation for the origins of slavery?

  • An economic need for cheap labor in industrial processes
  • A religious motive to convert non-Christians
  • A racial motive rooted in the belief in European superiority
  • An economic need for cheap labor on large-scale plantations

2. Which piece of evidence would best support this source’s argument for the motivations of slavery?

  • A chart showing an increase in European sugar consumption over time
  • A missionary lamenting the treatment of enslaved workers
  • A first-hand account of the Middle Passage
  • A ledger showing prices paid for slaves on a plantation

Primary Sources

Nzinga Mbemba’s Letter to the King of Portugal: http://www.classzone.com/books/wh_05_shared/pdf/WHS05_020_568_PS.pdf

Suggested Resources

Benjamin, Thomas. The Atlantic World: Europeans, Africans, Indians, and Their Shared History, 1400-1900 . Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009.

Curtain, Philip D. The African Slave Trade: A Census . Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1972.

Klein, Herbert S. The Atlantic Slave Trade . Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999.

Thomas, Hugh. The Slave Trade: The Story of the Atlantic Slave Trade, 1440-1870 . New York: Simon and Schuster, 1997.

Related Content

essay about slave trade

Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness

In our resource history is presented through a series of narratives, primary sources, and point-counterpoint debates that invites students to participate in the ongoing conversation about the American experiment.

Slavery and the Slave Trade

By James Gigantino | Reader-Nominated Topic

Slavery and the slave trade were central to the history of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Philadelphia as the region economically benefited from the institution and dealt with tensions created by slave trading, slave holding, and abolitionism. Early Philadelphia, an Atlantic trading hub, became both a focal point for the slave trade and a community of enslaved Africans. Slaves created their own family and social networks while simultaneously integrating into white Philadelphia, shaping the political, economic, and social course that the region took into the nineteenth century.

Slave labor was integral to the region even before William Penn (1644-1718) founded Pennsylvania. New Sweden colonists, whose settlement from 1638-1655 centered on present-day Wilmington, Delaware, and extended throughout the lower Delaware Valley, imported the first African slaves in the mid- to late seventeenth century.  After Penn founded his colony, slavery continued to be integral to the infant city of Philadelphia and its environs with the first slave ship arriving in Philadelphia itself in 1684. Slaves filled labor needs in many occupations as the region developed a diverse economy. Colonists in New Jersey and Delaware utilized slavery in essentially the same ways, though planters in central and southern Delaware used slaves to grow tobacco, wheat, and other commodities.

The presence of indentured servants in the colonial period created a hybrid labor system in which the region’s indentured white laborers, free wage laborers, and slaves worked alongside each other. This system created flexibility for meeting labor needs as labor costs and supply fluctuated throughout the colonial period. Masters routinely hired out their slaves, which further added to the labor system’s flexibility and the regional impact of slavery. The hiring-out system allowed slaves to move throughout the region on long and short term contracts to various masters. Native Americans were occasionally among the enslaved until at least the middle of the eighteenth century, but most enslaved people were Africans or African descendants. By the 1710s,  race-based  slavery had developed and European colonists rationalized slavery by seeing Africans as barbaric, heathen, and therefore eligible for enslavement. Through Philadelphia’s port, like in other colonies, these ideas of race and slavery came into the region as merchants and sailors participated in the growth of Western slavery and the slave trade. By 1710, slaves constituted almost twenty percent of Philadelphia’s population; while the number of slaves increased until just before the American Revolution, reaching 1,375 in 1770 or just over eight percent of the total population.

lithograph of the London Coffee House

Most Came from Caribbean

The slave trade represented a major part of the Philadelphia region’s relationship to the Atlantic world, the networks formed by trade, migration, and political associations between Europe, Africa, and the Americas. Slave ships outfitted in Philadelphia traveled to the West African coast to trade for slaves, though the majority of slaves who entered the region did not come from Africa directly. Most came after living for several years in the Caribbean with their masters or on slave ships whose masters had purchased them in the Caribbean for sale in the smaller North American market. These largely West African slaves filled labor shortages in the Philadelphia region, especially when disruptions limited the supply of indentured laborers. For example, when the Seven Years’ War interrupted the flow of indentured laborers, the Philadelphia region imported almost 1,300 slaves in a nine-year period, including many directly from Africa. By 1767, fifteen percent of Philadelphia households owned slaves. However, the slave trade to the region largely ended when Pennsylvania levied a high duty on imported slaves in 1773 in response to fears of slave revolt as well as calls to end the most horrid part of the institution of slavery. Most other colonies had also begun to limit or prohibit the slave trade by the beginning of the Revolution for similar reasons, including New Jersey and Delaware, a trend which continued when all but South Carolina and Georgia banned the trade in the aftermath of the Revolution.

Philadelphia’s enslaved men and women, as part of the region’s hybrid labor force, toiled for masters who in most cases owned only one or two slaves, which limited their ability to interact with other slaves. These small holdings also increased the masters’ ability to control most of their daily routine and limited the development of slave families and a distinct culture.  Despite these arrangements, slaves managed to establish kinship networks around the city and its environs by interacting with one another in the city’s marketplaces and worship services. Ship captains also routinely used slave labor both in their homes as well as on their ships which allowed these slaves to create extensive Atlantic networks that allowed for an exchange of culture, information, and possibly the tools to achieve freedom. On the other hand, slaves who lived in rural areas similarly established these community networks when they traveled with their masters into Philadelphia to sell at the city’s markets or for other business purposes. These networks allowed enslaved Philadelphians to develop their own culture, social customs, and exercise their own religion. In this “underground” world beyond the control of white masters, slaves interacted with each other on a daily basis, forming romantic relationships, sustaining African cultural institutions, and maintaining family connections across long distances. This also allowed slaves to organize in resistance to the institution and advocate for abolition in the late eighteenth century.

Though early historians portrayed slavery in the North as benign, physical force and violence always mediated the master-slave relationship in the Philadelphia region. Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and Delaware, like all other colonies, passed strict regulations to govern enslaved labor in the early eighteenth century. These regulations limited slave movement, provided harsh punishment for violent acts against whites, and established rules for general slave conduct. As in the Caribbean and the American South, resistance took many forms, but running away became the most frequent method.  Slaves left their owners regularly both as a way to reject their masters’ control as well as to maintain kinship ties with distant families and communities.

Discussions of abolitionism developed in tandem with slavery’s increase. In 1688, four Germantown Quakers protested against African slavery, which mirrored Quaker founder George Fox ’s (1624-91) questioning of the institution. However, Quakers continued to hold slaves throughout the colonial period as few believed the practice immoral as long as owners treated their slaves fairly and without violence. In 1776, the Philadelphia Yearly Meeting banned its members from owning slaves or face disownment from the Society of Friends.

Gradual Abolition Act

Quakers and non-Quaker allies discussed abolition in the midst of the American Revolution. Abolitionists routinely used the same language that Patriots utilized in their quest for freedom from British “tyranny” or “enslavement” to highlight the hypocrisy of owning slaves amidst a crusade for freedom. In Pennsylvania, this revolutionary rhetoric motivated the state legislature to enact the first legislative emancipation in history: the Gradual Abolition Act of 1780 . However, the Act of 1780 freed no slaves immediately. It only provided freedom for children born to slaves after its enactment. These children labored for their mothers’ masters for twenty-eight years and therefore, in effect, paid slaveholders the cost of their own freedom. These children, an entirely new legal category, entered a society that was unprepared to deal with their eventual freedom.  This led many slaveholders to treat them as slaves, working, beating, and selling them in the same way as their parents.  Slavery, therefore, died a very slow and painful death.

photograph of the President's House

After 1780, the presence of slavery continued to be a concern in Pennsylvania as non-resident slaveholders regularly brought slaves into the state. This became even more problematic when Philadelphia became the nation’s capital from 1790 to 1800 and southern members of Congress arrived in the city with their slaves. George Washington, living in the President’s House , brought nine of his slaves with him. As a non-resident, the 1780 Abolition Act allowed Washington and other slaveholders to bring slaves into Pennsylvania for six months before mandating their freedom. Washington and other masters exploited a loophole in a “sojourner law,” which allowed them to continue to hold slaves in Pennsylvania indefinitely as long as their slaves traveled to another state at least every six months. Washington, for example, had his slaves cross the Delaware into New Jersey to restart the six-month limit or sent them periodically back to Mount Vernon. The extension of slavery that sojourner laws permitted led many abolitionists to call for their repeal in the 1830s and 1840s, thereby exacerbating sectional tensions in the years before the Civil War.

Slavery in New Jersey remained an important institution after the American Revolution as it provided much of the labor to repair the state’s economy after armies laid waste to the state during the war.  By 1790, most of West Jersey (including present-day Sussex, Warren, Morris, Hunterdon, Mercer, Burlington, Salem, Gloucester, Cumberland, Atlantic, and Cape May Counties) was largely free of slavery due to Quaker influence. However, large portions of East Jersey (present-day Passaic, Bergen, Hudson, Essex, Union, Somerset, Middlesex, Monmouth, and Ocean Counties) retained it with some counties counting more than 15 percent of their population as enslaved. Lacking a strong abolitionist presence, New Jersey became the last northern state to adopt a gradual abolition law in 1804. Delaware, on the other hand, discussed gradual abolition but never approved it due to the slave-holding interests in the southern part of the state. However, along with the rest of the upper South, the state relaxed manumission standards and slavery gradually declined in the areas bordering Pennsylvania.

By the 1830s, slavery largely disappeared from the region, though because of the terms of gradual abolition it remained legal in Pennsylvania until 1847 and in New Jersey until 1846.  Over the next several decades, Philadelphia’s status as a port city and its border with slave-holding Maryland and Delaware attracted increasing numbers of fugitive slaves from the South. Free Blacks also risked being kidnapped into slavery to feed the hungry labor markets of Louisiana and Mississippi. Concern over kidnapping led white and Black Philadelphians to action. For instance, Absalom Jones , a former slave and leading Black abolitionist and minister, helped author a 1799 petition with other free Blacks to Congress asking for revisions to the 1793 Fugitive Slave Law . When relief did not come from the federal government, Philadelphia’s Mayor Joseph Watson used city resources in the 1820s to recover slaves and freed Blacks kidnapped to the South. This new dimension of slavery continued debates over the institution in the state until the Civil War.

James Gigantino is an Assistant Professor of History at the University of Arkansas.  He is currently working on a book project on slavery and abolition in New Jersey. (Author information current at time of publication.)

Copyright 2012, Rutgers University.

essay about slave trade

Alice of Dunk's Ferry

Library Company of Philadelphia

Alice, also known as “black Alice” or “Alice of Dunk’s Ferry,” lived as a slave in Philadelphia for the entirety of her 116 years. This image is an engraving, probably part of a larger book by Thomas Isaiah, “Memoirs of Remarkable Female Characters, Ancient and Modern” or more commonly known as “Eccentric Biography,” published in 1804. Aside from the extraordinarily long life that marked her notable in the eyes of Thomas, Alice led a relatively normal life for a Philadelphia slave. For the majority of her life, Alice collected tolls to cross the river on Dunk’s Ferry, located in the present day at the end of Dunk’s Ferry Road on the Delaware River near Bristol. However, she is remembered as one of Philadelphia’s first oral historians. In her time Alice kept the chronicle of Philadelphia’s persons, places, and events in her memory. She lived from 1686 until 1802 and during her lifetime saw the transformation of Philadelphia from a rural forest, to a burgeoning metropolis, to a revolutionary hotbed, to the young capital of a new nation. It is likely that many of the children and grandchildren of Philadelphia’s first settlers sought out Alice to hear stories of their ancestors and the events that took place around them. However, for many years that followed, voices like Alice’s were far less prominent in history than those of men such as William Penn, Benjamin Franklin, and George Washington.

Inspired by the interpretation of slavery at the President’s House site in Philadelphia, Christ Church (Second and Market Streets) developed programs to allow Alice’s voice be heard once more. During her lifetime, Alice was an active member of Christ Church’s congregation and is documented as having ridden on horseback to mass every Sunday through her nineties. Her acute memory recalled when the now-historic church was just a wooden building in which she could touch the ceiling. In recently developed programs, interpreters at Christ Church costumed as slaves perform a mini-drama that narrates real stories of Black Alice and speaks to other topics on slavery in Philadelphia. Through the work of historic interpreters at sites such as Christ Church and the President's House, Philadelphians are working to retell history and recognize that the voices of slaves are crucial in telling the story of the United States.

Text by Kim Coulter

essay about slave trade

The London Coffee House

This lithograph by Kennedy & Lucas depicts the London Coffee House as it stood in 1830. Once located at the southwest corner of Front and Market Streets in Philadelphia, the London Coffee House was more than just a place to get a drink. Owned by printer and entrepreneur William Bradford, the London Coffee House served as a center for economic transactions in early Philadelphia. In this image an auction block with slaves standing upon it is visible outside the Coffee House. For colonial Philadelphians, this would have been a common sight. The first slaves arrived in Pennsylvania in 1684 when the Isabella docked and disembarked slaves not far from the London Coffee House. The sale of human beings was just one of the many routine business transactions at the Coffee House.

essay about slave trade

The Destruction of Pennsylvania Hall

On a spring night on May 17, 1838 at the corner of Sixth and Haines Streets, almost sixty years after the Gradual Emancipation Act, Pennsylvania Hall (erected 1837-1838) burned to the ground at the hands of a large crowd. Constructed as a place for local abolitionist groups to meet, the dedication ceremonies began on May 14 amidst swarming, angry crowds that eventually burned the building down on the evening of May 17th. The building was allowed to smolder. Although firefighters were on hand to control the blaze, they chose to save surrounding buildings and let the Pennsylvania Hall perish. A few days after the fire John T. Bowen, a local printer, issued this image. Known as the Philadelphia Riot, the incident at Pennsylvania Hall demonstrated the lack of support for abolition in the city of Philadelphia though legislation for its graduate abolition had been enacted more than half a century earlier.

essay about slave trade

Cliveden, located in Germantown and shown here in April 1859 in a photograph by F. De B. Richards, is well known as the site of the Battle of Germantown and also as the summer home of the Chew family. Until recently, like many historic house museums in America, a typical tour of Cliveden focused on a wealthy white family, their lives, property, and fine things. However, on July 4, 2012 Cliveden, debuted a new project, Emancipating Cliveden, and exhibit, “Life, Liberty & the Pursuit of Happiness?” In an effort to rewrite the history of Cliveden, the narrative has shifted away from the Chews to the lives of the many slaves and servants that who took care of the family and their properties. This new view of Cliveden's history identifies the Chews primarily as slaveholders and describes their participation in the management, trade, and sale of human beings. Emancipating Cliveden is one example of how historic house museums are rethinking domestic history and incorporating the lives slaves and servants. The attention to slaves at Cliveden recognizes slavery as a broader American story that has until recently been left largely untold. More than this, Cliveden presents slaves as individuals with independent thoughts and freewill.

The incorporation of slavery at Cliveden was ten years in the making. In 2000, the Chew family began to inventory and describe a trove of correspondence, account books, photos, receipts, journals, recipes, inventories, maps, and other archival material. To fully complete their records, the Chews even sought out and bought back groups of papers that had been lost or sold in the nineteenth century. The Chew papers eventually found a home at the Historical Society of Pennsylvania where they continue to be a wealth of information about slavery in the Philadelphia area and the development of African American community. With help from many sources including Historical Society Pennsylvania and the National Endowment for the Humanities, in the early 2000s the monumental task of sifting through several hundred years of papers began. Unearthed in this process was evidence of the Chews’ participation in slavery long after Pennsylvania enacted the Gradual Abolition Act of 1780. Benjamin Chew however, circumvented the law by sending all women of childbearing age and most young men out of the state to Delaware, where slavery remained legal. The Chews sent and received many letters from overseers running their Maryland and Delaware plantations on topics ranging from acquiring clothes and shoes for slaves, to requests for advice on how to handle repeatedly disobedient or lazy slaves. While slavery dwindled in Philadelphia for the Chews, it thrived in their outlying plantations until the mid-nineteenth century.

essay about slave trade

The President's House

Visit Philadelphia

In the first decade of the twenty-first century, the President’s House at Sixth and Market Streets attracted new attention and instigated change in the common perceptions of slavery in Philadelphia and in American memory. After much debate and years of planning, the site of the George Washington’s mansion became a place of commemoration of the legacy of nine enslaved Africans and their continued struggle for freedom in the shadow of an emerging reputedly equal nation. Like many Philadelphians, Washington found ways to circumvent the Pennsylvania Law for the Gradual Abolition of Slavery. This law stipulated that slave children born after 1780 were to be freed at the age of 28. Slaves born before 1780 could remain enslaved in the state their entire lifetime and no slaves from another state could be legally brought into the state for more than six months. Washington lived in Philadelphia from 1790 to 1797. In order to keep his Virginia residency and thus his entitlement to hold slaves, Washington was careful that neither he nor his slaves spent the six continuous months in the state necessary to establish legal residency.

In 2000 an excavation associated with the New Liberty Bell Center uncovered foundations of an ice house associated with the President’s house. Consequently the National Park Service, prompted by community members and historians, made plans to undertake an archaeological excavation of the President’s House site. In 2007, much of the foundation for the main house, kitchen, cellars, and some servant spaces were uncovered as well as the foundation for the bow window, a predecessor to the oval office in Washington D.C. Though the excavation is finished, it is still accessible to the public. At the center of the President’s House site is a glass vitrine, which houses elements of the 18th century structure that were unexpectedly uncovered in the 2007 dig. The archaeological process has attracted more than 300,000 visitors and continues to serve as a public forum for open discussion about freedom, slavery, and the nation’s beginnings. (Photo by G. Widman)

essay about slave trade

Related Topics

  • Cradle of Liberty
  • Philadelphia and the World
  • Philadelphia and the Nation

Time Periods

  • American Revolution Era
  • Colonial Era
  • Capital of the United States Era
  • Center City Philadelphia
  • Chester County, Pennsylvania
  • Montgomery County, Pennsylvania
  • Salem County, New Jersey
  • Camden County, New Jersey
  • Gloucester County, New Jersey
  • Abolitionism
  • African American Migration
  • Appeal of Forty Thousand Citizens
  • Christiana Riot Trial
  • Colonization Movement (Africa)
  • Free Black Communities
  • Fugitives From Slavery
  • Haitian Revolution
  • Immigration and Migration (Colonial Era)
  • Liberia; Or, Mr. Peyton’s Experiments
  • Mason-Dixon Line
  • Mexican-American War
  • Mount Holly Township, New Jersey
  • National Freedom Day
  • Pennsylvania Emancipation Exposition (1913)
  • Pennsylvania Hall
  • Philadelphia and Its People in Maps: The 1790s
  • Price of a Child (The)
  • U.S. Congress (1790-1800)
  • U.S. Presidency (1790-1800)
  • Underground Railroad
  • Vigilance Committees
  • Free Labor Pinafore
  • Presentation Pitcher

Related Reading

Berlin, Ira.  Many Thousands Gone:  The First Two Centuries of Slavery in North America.  Cambridge:  Harvard University Press, 1998.

Dunbar, Erica.  A Fragile Freedom:  African American Women and Emancipation in the Antebellum City.  New Haven:  Yale University Press, 2008.

Essah, Patience.  A House Divided:  Slavery and Emancipation in Delaware, 1638-1865 .  Charlottesville:  University of Virginia Press, 1996.

Hodges, Graham.  Root and Branch:  African Americans in New York and East Jersey.   Chapel Hill:  University of North Carolina Press, 1999.

Jackson, Maurice. Let This Voice Be Heard: Anthony Benezet, Father of Atlantic Abolitionism. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010.

Nash, Gary.  Forging Freedom:  The Formation of Philadelphia’s Black Community, 1720-1840 .  Cambridge:  Harvard University Press, 1988.

Nash, Gary and Jean Soderlund, Freedom by Degrees:  Emancipation in Pennsylvania and its Aftermath .  New York:  Oxford, 1991.

Newman, Richard.  The Transformation of American Abolitionism:  Fighting Slavery in the Early Republic .  Chapel Hill:  University of North Carolina Press, 2002.

Soderlund, Jean.  Quakers and Slaves:  A Divided Spirit.  Princeton:  Princeton University Press, 1985.

Zilversmit, Arthur. The First Emancipation:  The Abolition of Slavery in the North.  Chicago:  University of Chicago Press, 1967.

Related Collections

  • Afro-Americana Collection Library Company of Philadelphia 1314 Locust Street, Philadelphia.
  • Charles L. Blockson Afro-American Collection Special Collections Research Center, Temple University Libraries 1900 Thirteenth Street, Philadelphia.
  • Pennsylvania Abolition Society Records Historical Society of Pennsylvania 1300 Locust Street, Philadelphia.
  • Quaker Meeting Records Friends Historical Library, Swarthmore College 500 College Avenue, Swarthmore, Pa.
  • Special Collections, Haverford College 370 Lancaster Avenue, Haverford, Pa.

Related Places

  • African American Museum in Philadelphia
  • Cliveden of the National Trust
  • London Coffee House (Historical Marker)
  • The President's House Site

Backgrounders

Connecting Headlines with History

  • Bucks County Quakers honor 'forgotten slaves' buried in unmarked graves (WHYY, October 7, 2018)
  • Africans in America: Brotherly Love (PBS)
  • Slavery and Servitude at Cliveden
  • London Coffee House: Behind the Marker (Explore PA History)
  • Teaching Unit: Fugitive Slaves: The Cost of Caring (Historical Society of Pennsylvania)
  • The Transatlantic Slave Trade Primary Source Set (Digital Public Library of America)
  • Penn unveils new findings on history with slavery (Daily Pennsylvanian)

Connecting the Past with the Present, Building Community, Creating a Legacy

Atlantic Slave Trade Essay

essay about slave trade

The Atlantic Slave Trade : The Impact Of The Atlantic Slave Trade

greatly desired, an intercontinental trading network called the Atlantic Slave Trade was established. The need for cheap labor and the desire for large profits brought slaves from Africa, to North/South America. Slavery began to take a new shape, with a focus on plantation agriculture through a dehumanized class of workers. During the Atlantic Slave Trade, slavery was primarily beneficial to European’s. Not only did the Atlantic Slave Trade supply European’s with the resources (primarily crops) required

The Atlantic Slave Trade

The Atlantic Slave Trade was a very important time in history. When the records of the Atlantic slave Trade are reflected upon ,the impacts of the shipboards revolts are often times overseen .Although these revolts did have an immense effect on the political, views of the Slave trade. Richardson’s “shipboard revolts,African Authority,and the Atlantic slave trade”. brings into view the fluctuating causes and effects of shore based, and shipboard insurrection . Because of Richardson occupation

Everyone has their own understanding of what slavery is, but there are misconceptions about the history of “slavery”. Not many people understand how the slave trade initially began. Originally Africa had “slaves” but they were servants or serfs, sometimes these people could be part of the master’s family. They could own land, rise to positions of power, and even purchase their freedom. This changed when white captains came to Africa and offered weapons, rum, and manufactured goods for people

Although the Atlantic Slave Trade (AST, hereafter) enabled a European-dominated international economy to mobilize, diversify, and prosper for centuries; the indigenous populations enslaved to put in the labor to produce assets for said economy experienced a radical change of life, unfathomable turmoil and grief, and in the most wicked cases, as did their offspring. The parameters of this paper will be restricted to: the development of the AST (from its nascence to its peak), the economic implications

Essay on The Atlantic Slave Trade

The Atlantic Slave Trade The changes in African life during the slave trade era form an important element in the economic and technological development of Africa. Although the Atlantic slave trade had a negative effect on both the economy and technology, it is important to understand that slavery was not a new concept to Africa. In fact, internal slavery existed in Africa for many years. Slaves included war captives, the kidnapped, adulterers, and other criminals and outcasts. However

Slave Trade In The Atlantic World

Draft 02, May 2017 The Slave Trade in the Atlantic World The slave trade within the Atlantic World took place amongst the Atlantic Ocean beginning in the fifteenth century. The majority of the individuals whom became part of the slave trade were moved about on the triangular trade route to the New World. The Portuguese empire in 1418 was the first to conform into the idea of the New World slave trade. In 1440 Columbus’s discovery of the Americas created a new Atlantic zone of human contact and

Effects Of The Atlantic Slave Trade

The Atlantic Slave trade was a trade of African people from Western Africa to the Americas. During this time, the “European settled on the islands like Saint-Louis, Goree, Central May, or in the ports that were built along the coast, so it was the defensive possibilities of the island that made Goree a slave center, and its position along the way to the New World from Africa” (Street). “When the Europe and the Indian populations in the Americas and the West Indies died out, the New World looked at

Atlantic Slave Trade Rebellion

lives of slaves who were enslaved in the Atlantic Slave trade from the African slave’s perspective. That does not mean it didn’t happen. The Africans who were enslaved in the Atlantic Slave trade by their slave-owners tried any way to get out of their forced work. African slaves almost fought daily for their own equal rights and better lives in the form of rebellion and resistance to their slave-owners. Resistance, rebellion and retaliation rates happened immensely throughout the Atlantic Slave Trade

Atlantic World Slave Trade

The Atlantic World slave trade gave birth to an Atlantic world of people, goods, and cultures that spread, collided, and melded together to lay the foundations for much of our modern world. The Atlantic slave trade involved the transportation by slave traders of enslaved African people, mainly from Africa to the Americas, and then their sale there. The 18th century was the great period of importation of slaves from Africa throughout the whole new world and most of the slaves brought to Colonial North

Summary: The Atlantic Slave Trade

The Atlantic exchange started in 1444, when the Portuguese started to ship the slaves from West Africa to Europe. (Hardy, 2014) There were a few conditions and circumstances that prompted the ascent of the Atlantic Slave Trade. One fundamental driver of the exchange was the improvement of settlements in European nations. In America, for instance, being a province of England there was a vast interest for unpaid workers to give items like sugar, tobacco and cotton plantations for the generation of

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How Wall Street Funded Slavery

The New York Stock Exchange Following News Of Federal Reserve March Cut Unlikely

I n 1855, when Stephen Duncan, the largest enslaver in the United States, reaped a windfall from his cotton plantations across Mississippi, he tasked his banker to ship the crops North, to sell the cotton for cash, and to invest the proceeds into Northern corporate stocks, plucking up prized Manhattan real estate on the side. He had made such investments for almost 30 years. Duncan, who enslaved as many as 2,200 Black people, including many hundreds of children, died after the Civil War a very rich man, his reviled fortune handsomely intact, passed on to his heirs. Duncan’s banker was Charles P. Leverich, Vice President of the Bank of New York, a Wall Street tycoon. In fact, it was Leverich who managed the sumptuous riches of Mississippi’s other leading enslavers, ensuring that their vast fortunes—the proceeds of slavery laundered into coin and currency—endured well after the war, into the 20 th century.

As a researcher of Wall Street’s role in financing slavery, I spent the last three years tracking that there were hundreds of New York and Boston bankers like this, not to mention industrial magnates and corporate directors—Northern men who, working hand-in-glove with Southern enslaving families, crystallize a crucial history: that contrary to popular belief, the wealth of slavery did not disappear after the Civil War, burned in the fires of conflict; it endured, in the form of private and public wealth, in the form of institutional fortunes. The wealth that many corporations and banks enjoy today is directly derived from this stolen wealth. As such, corporations, including many of our nation’s leading banks, have a critical obligation not only to acknowledge this history—something most have not done—but to outline meaningful ways to address these wounds through reparations to Black Americans.

Many are the myths that warp America’s history of slavery, one of which is the failure to identify that slavery was the cause of the Civil War. It’s an equally self-deluding myth for some to think that the fortune of slavery, all the tremendous wealth that white people sieved for generations from enslaved Black people, from decimated families and stolen children, could vanish into thin air. Consider how that defies logic: according to U.S. Treasury figures , enslaved Black people in the South produced, in the period between 1851 and 1860 alone, a bounty of cotton amounting to $1.5 billion then ($54 billion today)—and we are speaking only of cotton, and only one decade. The amount of wealth that enslaved peoples generated throughout the life of the Republic before Emancipation, though difficult to precisely detail, surely amounts to hundreds of billions of dollars then, and likely trillions today.

Read More: Colonial America Is a Myth

Though the supposition that it “disappeared” seems, practically speaking, preposterous, it lives on, as a kind of emotional, psychological crutch. It would mean that nothing from slavery had been gained in the end, that any sense of white guilt, of accountability and culpability, should vanish too. Leading corporations, certainly, have adopted this mindset. Side-stepping their accountability first in the horrors of enslavement, in the nation’s original sin, has only snowballed a deeper corporate culture of avoiding accountability, when what we need and expect today is the opposite: ethical standards, and fiscal responsibility toward the communities from which they derive their wealth.

The origins of the myth of disappeared slavery wealth are to be found in the Lost Cause, that falsified mythology of the Old South, which, in seeking to ennoble the dehumanizing greed of slavery, widely broadcast how Southern “planters” were reduced to ruin by Northern aggression. The same myth still holds up a cornerstone of Civil War history, positing that the war obliterated the southern aristocracy, and that, as postwar historian C. Vann Woodward, put it  “no ruling class of our history ever found itself so completely stripped of its economic foundations as did that of the South in this period.” And though he extrapolated his claim from a single survey, conducted in 1920, no less, and using a sample of just 254 southern industrialists, Woodward’s rendering came to dominate our view of history for generations.

Naturally, Woodward did have a point. Of course, it is true that during the Great Conflict parts of the South burned; that during his famous march to the sea, Union general William Sherman confiscated 400 thousand acres of land and caused $2 billion worth of damage in today’s dollars. And yet, in 2019, a groundbreaking study published by the National Bureau of Economic Research found, using US Census data, that white slave-holding families had dramatically reinvented themselves after the Civil War and recovered their wealth. They did so in just one generation, the study found, redirecting their capital into the modern economy. These findings help amplify the larger point: that the vast portion of American wealth generated by enslavement did not go up in smoke.

The story of Duncan and Leverich shows why: the riches that Black people created for white Americans, though physically produced in the South, were not ultimately reaped by the South, nor invested into the South. Abolitionists at that time, Northern observers, and even Southern enslavers all knew this to be true: that Northern merchants owned the greatest shipping fleets of their commercial age, causing the prodigious output wrought by Black people’s labor—billions of pounds of cotton, sugar and rice, not to mention turpentine, hemp, and gin—to flow North, to be sold, to be transmuted from agricultural wealth into many other things. And there, in the vaults of Wall Street, and invested into the coal fields of Pennsylvania, into the corporate bedrock of America’s Industrial Age, this money, stolen from the energy of Black people’s hearts, hands, and minds, took on a new life, and grew.

At the famous City Bank of New York, President Moses Taylor conducted immense sums of money from slavery—both in the South but also Cuba—into industrial development and modern corporations, including many, like Consolidated Edison, that still exist today. This is history that echoes. Leading corporations, having based their models of success on ruthless exploitation back then, continue to do so now, though, rather than exploiting workers for the benefit of executives and stockholders, they should be accountable as much to the citizens and communities whose lives and labor make possible their wealth.

The figures who peopled America’s repugnant history of slavery, as with the institution of slavery itself, may all be gone, but it is the wealth that remains. Our failure to recognize so is dangerous, the breeding ground of inequality and myth. Projecting that the vast contributions of enslaved people are gone, that nothing remains, makes it easier today for corporations to side-step their ethical obligations, to downplay what’s in need of repair, and to dismiss what Black people are owed.

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Slave Trade as Part of Atlantic Commerce Essay

The dominance of the slave trade, impact of the atlantic trade.

Bibliography

The slave trade is a dramatic page in the world’s history, which has existed and developed over the centuries. Africans in this respect are often seen as victims of the brutality of European colonialists who needed labor. However, from the beginning of the establishment of the Atlantic Trade and throughout its existence, the Africans were the voluntary sellers of their people. Although Europeans mercilessly exploited slaves in America, black people initially did not resist the slave trade, which was highly beneficial to them.

The Atlantic slave trade from Africa to South and North America is the most extensive maritime trade in history. The first among European traders who began to exchange goods with Africans were the Portuguese. At the beginning of the development of relations, they exchanged with the continent’s inhabitants “pepper, ivory, cloth, and beads.” However, by the beginning of the sixteenth century, Europeans needed slaves for sugar plantations, which led to the opening of a separate slave market in 1516. However, it is important to note the exceptional and often central role of Africans and their interest in relations with European merchants, including slave traders.

First of all, Africans expected to profit from the Atlantic trade and made efforts to develop it. The rulers of Congo and Benin played a central role in the early development of trade with Europeans, as both states sought to monopolize exchange. It was the ruler of Benin who first noticed the Europeans’ need for African slaves and opened a special market in the early 16th century for overseas visitors. While Benin had a wide range of valuable goods for Europe, Congo focused specifically on the African slave trade. Commercial relations were mutually beneficial for both parties since there was an exchange of goods between continents, and Europeans also paid some African rulers a tax for the right to trade in a certain territory.

However, until the early eighteenth century, slave selling was not as widespread as in later periods. At the end of the sixteenth and the beginning of the seventeenth century, the African gold trade began to develop. Even then, the Africans’ dominant position in the establishment of trade orders was noticeable, as conflicts occurred if the Europeans violated the conditions set by the inhabitants of the continent. Africans had little reason to fear European traders, which allowed them to set their rules on favorable terms. Thus, Europeans and Africans traded together, which is true for all goods, including slaves.

At the turn of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Atlantic trade between continents underwent significant changes. In a hundred years, from 1680 to 1780, the volume of goods exchanged increased approximately sixfold. Most importantly, during this period, the slave trade became the primary source of benefit for Africans, as its volumes exceeded the volume of trade of all other African commodities combined. Moreover, there were changes in the structure, as the maritime business became mostly British, and the Africans were able to centralize their power over commerce on the continent and strengthen their position. The increased demand for African slaves enabled the rulers to receive three to four times more goods for each of them than a century ago. The primary source of slaves was Central West Africa, where the exports grew to 40,000 people a year at the end of the eighteenth century. With the expansion of African rulers’ control over the Atlantic trade, slave prices for Europeans also rose, increasing the continent’s inhabitants’ profits.

The slave trade was the primary source of benefits for Africans, as they received considerable quantities of European goods in exchange for people. In turn, this situation is explained by the need of the New World’s inhabitants for African workers on various plantations. Thus, the slave trade became dominant in the Atlantic Trade by the early eighteenth century, which was beneficial to both Africans and Europeans.

The exchange of goods had a significant impact on the life of society across the Atlantic world. First of all, there were changes in commerce, since for Africans it was important not only to export but also to import European goods. Moreover, traders from the New World conducted exchanges also within the African continent, which allowed the development of many territories. It is noteworthy that the production of African goods was well developed even before the colonialists’ arrival, and they also withstood competition in many areas of exchange, including cloth and beads. Thus, commerce changed only in relation to new goods and technologies, as well as the flow of African slaves.

More significant changes have occurred in society’s culture, particularly in terms of language and family relations. Since European traders were beneficial to Africans, they actively studied European languages ​​and acted as translators. Africans perceived the introduction of another culture as a positive experience, as it was beneficial for commercial activities. Despite the study of languages, the adoption of writing was not widespread on the continent. Many African women have also interacted with European men, as the children could be important in “commercial and cultural relations. Often women, having married a European slave trader, also engaged in commerce, achieving some success. For the most part, in patriarchal Africa, such relationships were male-led, and marriages served to strengthen bonds with business partners. Thus, not only Europeans conducted the direct sale of slaves in America, but also Africans and women in particular. Ethnically mixed relations were quite common at the time with the development of the Atlantic trade.

Politically, there have been changes in relation to local authorities and the position of slaves and free blacks on both continents. It is noted that Africans could be not only slaves but also free blacks in America, mainly due to marriage. Positions responsible for the terms of trade in certain territories have been created in Africa. Firearms imports had an impact on both the military transformation of African states and the increase in the slave trade. From a technological and economic perspective, trade did not have a major impact on the Africans since they had most of the goods before the Europeans came, and they were not particularly interested in technology. Thus, the exchange had for both sides mostly cultural and commercial significance, increasing the volume of goods, income, and also creating ethnic mixing.

In the modern world, it is widely believed that the position of Africans in the slave trade is solely as victims. However, upon closer examination of the problem, it appears that they had a commercial interest in selling African people to Europeans. Moreover, African rulers created and managed slave markets on the territory of their states. Some black people took an active part in the Atlantic trade as free people of the New World. Thus, slaves became the dominant commodity precisely because of the desire of Africans to profitably exchange them for imported goods, as well as the need for labor in America.

Ashcraft-Eason, L. “‘She Voluntarily Hath Come’: A Gambian Woman Trader in Colonial Georgia in the Eighteenth Century.” In the Identity in the Shadow of Slavery (The Harriet Tubman Series on the African Diaspora), edited by P. E. Lovejoy, 202-221. New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2009.

Northrup, David. Africa’s Discovery of Europe. 2nd ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013.

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IvyPanda. (2022, February 28). Slave Trade as Part of Atlantic Commerce. https://ivypanda.com/essays/slave-trade-as-part-of-atlantic-commerce/

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IvyPanda . 2022. "Slave Trade as Part of Atlantic Commerce." February 28, 2022. https://ivypanda.com/essays/slave-trade-as-part-of-atlantic-commerce/.

1. IvyPanda . "Slave Trade as Part of Atlantic Commerce." February 28, 2022. https://ivypanda.com/essays/slave-trade-as-part-of-atlantic-commerce/.

IvyPanda . "Slave Trade as Part of Atlantic Commerce." February 28, 2022. https://ivypanda.com/essays/slave-trade-as-part-of-atlantic-commerce/.

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  1. Slave trade

    (Jan. 22, 2024) See all related content → slave trade, the capturing, selling, and buying of enslaved persons. Slavery has existed throughout the world since ancient times, and trading in slaves has been equally universal.

  2. The slave trade

    The slave trade was worldwide and was abolished in the United States in 1865. Although slavery no longer exists, it left a powerful impact in today's society. Enslaved Africans helped build the economic foundations of this country. The European slave trade started during the 15th century, a trend the Europeans adopted from Arab Muslims.

  3. Atlantic Slavery and the Slave Trade: History and Historiography

    From the 16th to the mid- 19th century, approximately 12.5 million enslaved Africans were forcibly embarked on slave ships, of whom only 10.7 million survived the notorious Middle Passage. 1 Captives were transported in vessels that flew the colors of several nations, mainly Portugal, Britain, France, Spain, and the Netherlands.

  4. 7 key questions about the transatlantic slave trade

    1 Why was it Africans who were enslaved? Europeans developed the Atlantic slave trade, and American plantation slavery, at a time when they had turned their back on slavery at home. African slavery was encountered in the early European trading missions, but it was the shortage of labour in the Americas that sealed the Africans' fate.

  5. The Slave Trade

    Overview Essay on The Slave Trade The Debate Over Abolition The Middle Passage The Christianization of Slaves in the West Indies From the 17th century until the 19th century, almost twelve million Africans were broug ht to the New World against their will to perform back-breaking labor under terrible conditions.

  6. The Transatlantic Slave Trade

    From the seventeenth century on, slaves became the focus of trade between Europe and Africa. Europe's conquest and colonization of North and South America and the Caribbean islands from the fifteenth century onward created an insatiable demand for African laborers, who were deemed more fit to work in the tropical conditions of the New World.

  7. A Brief History of Slavery That You Didn't Learn in School

    The slave trade provided political power, social standing and wealth for the church, European nation-states, New World colonies and individuals. This portrait by John Greenwood connects slavery ...

  8. READ: The Transatlantic Slave Trade (article)

    This overview of the event known as the transatlantic slave trade shows a major economic development depended on the horrific treatment of enslaved humans. The violence and scale of the transatlantic slave trade seems to exceed any other known instance of slavery in history. The article below uses "Three Close Reads".

  9. African societies and the beginning of the Atlantic slave trade

    The slave trade then expanded across the Atlantic as European colonies demanded an ever-increasing number of workers for the extensive plantations growing the labor-intensive crops of tobacco, sugar, and eventually rice and cotton. Soon, the Spanish, Dutch, and English all followed the Portuguese in transporting enslaved people across the ...

  10. The Discovery of the Americas and the Transatlantic Slave Trade

    The English who were hardly involved in the early slave trade became the largest slave traders in the world by the eighteenth century. Although the nature of the slave trade constantly changed, one thing remained the same. The trade was a violent, deadly business that killed millions, mutilated millions, and traumatized millions.

  11. READ: Why Was Slavery Abolished? Three Theories

    Also, the slave trade created chaos in Africa. Many of these business people were hoping to make money from trade in Africa by selling finished goods to Africans and buying palm oil and other African resources to use in their factories. Ending the slave trade, they hoped, could make business in Africa more stable and profitable.

  12. Origins of the Slave Trade

    3. The Atlantic slave trade. brought more slaves to the sugar-producing colonies than to any other area. was supported in part by freed slaves who became slave owners themselves. brought more slaves to the British colonies than to the Caribbean. reached its height in the early 1600s. 4.

  13. History of the slave trade and abolition

    Until European involvement in the trade, however, slavery was a private and domestic institution. Beginning in the 16th century, a more public and "racially" based type of slavery was established when Europeans began importing slaves from Africa to the New World (see slave trade). An estimated 11 million people were taken from Africa during ...

  14. The Origins of American Slavery

    Ralph A. Austen, "The Trans-Saharan Slave Trade: A Tentative Census," The Uncommon Market: Essays in the Economic History of Atlantic Slave Trade, ed. Henry A. Gemery and Jan S. Hogendorn (New York: Academic Press, 1979), ... The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade: A Database on CD-ROM. CD-ROM. Cambridge University Press, 1999. Contains information on ...

  15. Slavery and the Slave Trade

    Essay. Slavery and the slave trade were central to the history of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Philadelphia as the region economically benefited from the institution and dealt with tensions created by slave trading, slave holding, and abolitionism. Early Philadelphia, an Atlantic trading hub, became both a focal point for the slave trade ...

  16. The Atlantic Slave Trade: Causes, Operation, and Effects

    The Atlantic Slave Trade was one of the most inhumane forms of slavery. It should, however, be noted that it was neither the first nor the only slave trade [1]. By The eighteenth century, a large percentage of the European population was descendants of slaves. Slavery was not only about the Africans who endured the Atlantic Slave Trade.

  17. PDF Papers of the American Slave Trade

    stop the slave trade in the courts permanently stalled. The end of Rhode Island participation in illegal African commerce would begin only years later with the implementation of the Anti-Slave Trade Act of 1807 on January 1, 1808. This now constitutional statute outlawed all foreign slave trading by American citizens in any capacity.

  18. The Slave Trade

    In discussions of the Atlantic slave trade, the term "Middle Passage" often arises. The Middle Passage was the route of sea going journeys of Africans taken from their Native land, to the shores of the Caribbean and America, where they were invariably destined to an existence of institutional slavery. The journey was one of the most horrific ...

  19. Atlantic Slave Trade Essay

    Although the Atlantic Slave Trade (AST, hereafter) enabled a European-dominated international economy to mobilize, diversify, and prosper for centuries; the indigenous populations enslaved to put in the labor to produce assets for said economy experienced a radical change of life, unfathomable turmoil and grief, and in the most wicked cases, as ...

  20. Are We Connected To The Slave Trade? Teaching Difficult Histories

    The history of the slave trade for school-aged and college students must start with the experiences in Africa between African kings and European traders; it should involve an understanding of the ...

  21. Impact of the Slave Trade

    History Impact of the Slave Trade Reference this Share this: Facebook Twitter Reddit LinkedIn WhatsApp This essay is going to explore the repercussions and the impact of transatlantic slave trade on the law, economy and society and how this impacts today's world.

  22. 261 Ideas, Essay Examples, and Topics on Slavery

    Updated: Oct 26th, 2023 26 min Table of Contents Tips for an Essay, Research Paper or Speech about Slavery Writing an essay on slavery may be challenging as the topic brings up negative emotions to many people. We will write a custom essay specifically for you by our professional experts 809 writers online Learn More

  23. Transatlantic Slave Trade

    The Slave Trade affected the economic stability of every targeted society. This situation made such societies more vulnerable to colonialism. This slave trade produced different racial groups in many countries across the globe. The trade also produced long-term effects such as poverty, inequality, and discrimination.

  24. How Wall Street Funded Slavery

    As a researcher of Wall Street's role in financing slavery, I spent the last three years tracking that there were hundreds of New York and Boston bankers like this, not to mention industrial ...

  25. Slave Trade as Part of Atlantic Commerce Essay

    The Atlantic slave trade from Africa to South and North America is the most extensive maritime trade in history. The first among European traders who began to exchange goods with Africans were the Portuguese. At the beginning of the development of relations, they exchanged with the continent's inhabitants "pepper, ivory, cloth, and beads.".