essay on the transatlantic slave trade

Transatlantic Slave Trade Essay

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The infamous Transatlantic Slave Trade “took place from the 15 th to the 19 th century” (Bush 19). This trade resulted in massive human migration. Many Africans came to America during the period. According to historians, many Europeans wanted to support their colonies in order to achieve their goals. During the period, many “colonies were producing various cash crops such as cotton, sugar, and tobacco” (Bush 27).

Most of the paid laborers were becoming extremely expensive. The indigenous populations were also dying due to poverty, conflicts, and diseases. The colonialists wanted to get new sources of cheap labor. The best solution to this problem was to acquire different slaves from Africa. Some African societies collaborated with different Europeans in order support this illegal trade. Some merchants also wanted to benefit from the Slave Trade. This fact explains why different African leaders and merchants supported the trade.

The Slave Trade also affected many societies across the world. For example, the trade supported the economic needs of different colonies. The practice also supported the economic positions of different countries. A large number of individuals lost their original lands. According to many scholars, the trade introduced new diseases and socio-cultural practices in these colonies. The trade also resulted in environmental destruction.

The Slave Trade “left many societies underdeveloped and disorganized” (Bush 62). This development also weakened several communities in Africa and Asia. 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. Many descendants of these slaves are currently facing most of these challenges. The Slave Trade presented numerous lessons to different societies. Many societies enacted new laws in order to safeguard the rights of every minority group.

Imperialism

The word imperialism “refers to a policy aimed at expanding a nation’s influence and capability through military force, colonization, or assimilation” (Thomas 38). Many countries such as the United States “pursued aggressive policies in an attempt to extend their economic and political influences across the word” (Thomas 47). Some historians have presented numerous arguments regarding the major causes of imperialism.

For example, many nations wanted to acquire new territories in order to emerge powerful. This expectation encouraged some countries such as Britain, France, and Italy to colonize different societies. The second factor that contributed to imperialism was “the desire to govern and develop different societies” (Thomas 49). Some countries also used the policy to acquire different uninhabited lands. This argument explains why different countries wanted to support their economies.

Imperialism transformed the economic strengths of different countries. Colonialism was one of the strategies aimed at promoting this policy. The approach resulted in new ideas such as globalization. The development supported the economic positions of different nations. This situation also made it easier for many nations to achieve the best goals. A “multi-polar world also developed because of imperialism” (Thomas 84). This development also produced different empires. The evolution of these empires reshaped the economic policies and political systems of many countries. Many governments and societies have borrowed their leadership ideas from the wave of imperialism. Historians and scholars have gained numerous political and economic ideas from the wave of imperialism.

Works Cited

Bush, Barbara. Imperialism and Post-colonialism History: Concepts, Theories and Practice . New York, Longmans, 2006. Print.

Thomas, Hugh. The Slave Trade: The History of the Atlantic Slave Trade, 1440-1870. New York: Oxford University Press, 2006. Print.

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• Slavery and the Southern Society's Development
• Pre-Civil War Antislavery Movement and Debates
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• Chicago (A-D)
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Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History Essays

The transatlantic slave trade.

Necklace: Pendant

Figure: Seated Portuguese Male

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 Transatlantic Slave Trade

16th Century–1867

The Transatlantic Slave Trade was a business in which the commodity was African men, women, and children. They were captured in Africa, transported across the Atlantic Ocean over the “Middle Passage,” and forced to work in the Americas. It was also part of the Triangular Trade System and the Mercantile System.

Detail from The Slave Trade by Auguste François Biard, 1840. Image Source: Wikipedia.

What was the Transatlantic Slave Trade?

The Transatlantic Slave Trade was a business network built to profit from the acquisition, transfer, and distribution of African men, women, and children who were forcibly removed from their homes. 

There were two major points of exchange in the network The first was in Africa; the second in the Americas. Bridging the gap between the two points of exchange was the Middle Passage — the horrific overseas route captive Africans were forced to travel as cargo, below deck in the dark holds of slave ships.

Those who survived the Middle Passage were forced to work in the Americas, primarily on plantations, growing and harvesting things like sugar, rice, and cotton. However, many were also put to work in mines and others worked as servants in homes.

The system was lucrative for just about everyone involved in it, especially those directly involved with the exchange of Africans. However, many others benefitted from the products that were produced from slave labor and the wealth it created.

Important Dates in the Transatlantic Slave Trade

16th Century — The Transatlantic Slave Trade begins.

1526 — The first voyage carrying enslaved people from Africa to the Americas is believed to have sailed.

1867 — The business was outlawed, however, the slave trade continued to operate outside of the law.

1700–1850 — More than eight out of ten Africans forced into the system crossed the Atlantic Ocean over the Middle Passage.

1720–1780 — The majority of Africans carried to British North America arrived.

1821–1830 — It is believed more than 80,000 people a year left Africa in slave ships.

By 1825 — Roughly 25% of the population of the Western Hemisphere was made up of Africans who had been enslaved and their ancestors, many of whom were born into slavery.

Transatlantic Slave Trade Statistics 

The Transatlantic Slave Trade lasted for approximately 366 years.

It is estimated that 12.5 million African men, women, and children were taken as captives in Africa, sold to merchants, and shipped across the Middle Passage. Roughly 11 million arrived in the Americas. The rest died in some way.

90% of the enslaved Africans were delivered to South America and the Caribbean.

6% of the enslaved Africans were delivered to the American Colonies. The largest number of them entered through Sullivan’s Island, just outside of Charleston, South Carolina.

Roughly 70% of the Africans were forced to work on plantations that produced molasses, sugar, and rum.

Brief History of the Transatlantic Slave Trade

The Transatlantic Slave Trade was started by the Portuguese and Spanish. They were followed by other European nations, including the Netherlands, England, and France.

The business increased with the establishment and expansion of plantations in South America and the Caribbean. This also led other nations and colonies to participate in the business, including the American Colonies.

Slave labor was eventually expanded to plantations that produced valuable goods, including tobacco, cotton, and rice.

The Transatlantic Slave Trade was a key component of Mercantilism, the economic theory that drove European nations to establish colonies in the New World . Cheap labor became a cornerstone of the system and carried over into the Colonial Era in America, particularly in the Southern Colonies where tobacco, rice, indigo, and cotton were vital to the economy.

Transatlantic Slave Trade Facts

The Transatlantic Slave Trade was a lucrative business and benefitted slavers, traders, merchants, plantation owners, and anyone else who was involved.

There were risks involved that could easily reduce profitability — rough weather on the seas, inexperienced crews, outbreaks of disease, uprisings organized by the Africans, and attacks by privateers and pirates.

Over time, the system was modified and streamlined. 

Spain essentially outsourced its slave acquisition operation by creating agreements with other nations — Asiento — to supply its colonies with Africans.

Eventually, two significant companies controlled the Transatlantic Slave Trade — the Royal African Company (Britain) and the Dutch West India Company (Netherlands).

The ports where slave traders and merchants operated prospered, due to the influx of wealth. The first ports to prosper were in Europe — Liverpool, Liston, Nantes — and spread to South America — Rio de Janeiro — and North America — Boston, Newport, and Charleston.

The routes traveled by slave ships also allowed the transfer of goods and products from one region to another. This led to the development of the Triangular Trade System which was part of the English Mercantile System that the American Colonies were part of. 

After American merchants became involved in the Transatlantic Slave Trade, the routes their ships sailed allowed them to trade with ports in places like the French West Indies. This violated Britain’s maritime laws, the Navigation Acts . Although Americans considered it good business, Britain considered it smuggling. However, during the time of Salutary Neglect , when Britain failed to strictly enforce the Navigation Acts, American merchants prospered.

The Role of Captains, Crews, and Ships of the Transatlantic Slave Trade

Merchants and investors hired ships to transport cargo from one location to another. The cargo could include Africans, along with raw materials, goods, and finished products that could be traded in various ports.

The goods and products that were traded were often seasonal in nature. A number of things affected the business, including growing seasons, the spread of disease, and the weather on the high seas.

Despite the dangers of the voyages, it was in the best interest of the ship’s crew to ensure the safety of the Africans on board. However, Africans were often subjected to violence and brutal conditions that led to many of them dying on the journey across the Atlantic Ocean. Some estimates say as many as 20% of Africans died.

When ships arrived at their port of destination, the captain and crew were responsible for preparing the Africans to be delivered to their owners or to be sold at auctions.

John Hawkins and the English Slave Trade

John Hawkins (c. 1532–1595) was one of the most prolific sailors and commanders of his time. He is most well-known for his role as a “Sea Dog” and for involving England in the Transatlantic Slave Trade. Born in Plymouth, England, Hawkins followed in the footsteps of his father, who was a prominent merchant.

During his early years as a merchant, Hawkins traveled to the Canary Islands, where he saw the use of enslaved Africans. Believing he could profit from the slave trade, he formed a business partnership that was responsible for funding three major slave trading expeditions.

In 1562, he captured and traded for captive Africans along the coast of Africa, and sailed to the Caribbean, where he traded them for pearls, animal hides, and sugar. The expedition was so lucrative that a coat of arms was designed for him, which included a crude drawing of an enslaved African. The first trip is considered by some to be the first implement and profit from the Triangular Trade Route.

Hawkins carried out two more slave expeditions and helped fund another. He was one of the Sea Dogs, a group of privateers who were hired by Queen Elizabeth I to attack Spanish ships. 

The others were Sir Francis Drake, Sir Martin Frobisher, and Sir Walter Raleigh, all of whom had connections to the establishment of English colonies in North America. Hawkins and the others were so successful that King Philip II sent the Spanish Armada to invade England, however, most of the fleet was destroyed at the Battle of Gravelines (August 8, 1588). Hawkins served as Vice Admiral of the English Navy during the conflict.

Although Hawkins is praised for his role as a naval commander, he is also identified as the founder of Triangular Trade, which was largely based on the Transatlantic Slave Trade.

Trade Routes in the Transatlantic Slave Trade

The Transatlantic Slave Trade Trade consisted of three main routes along which Africans were acquired, transported, and distributed.

First Route — Acquisition in Africa

Historians indicate that slavery was practiced in Africa in various forms long before the continent was exposed to Europeans. However, the practice was not unique to Africa and was found in every inhabited continent at some time.

When Europeans started trading for captive Africans, it transformed the system of slavery and gave rise to the Transatlantic Slave Trade.

There were three distinct groups involved in the acquisition of Africans for the Transatlantic Slave Trade:

1. Local Slavers — Local slave traders were responsible for kidnapping people and subjugating tribes living in the African interior and then transferring them to the West Coast of Africa. The work of local slavers made large numbers of captives available to the kingdoms on the coast.

2. African Coast Slave Traders — Local slavers delivered their captives to the African kingdoms on the coast, who held them and then traded them to Europeans. The desire for the coastal kingdoms to acquire European goods and products incentivized them to provide more captives for trade.

3. European Slave Traders — Europeans formed business alliances with the kingdoms on the coast and then traded goods and products for the captive Africans. Europeans built forts and factories — trading posts — on the African coast, which were used to acquire and then hold people before they were loaded onto ships.

Second Route — Transportation Across the Middle Passage

The Middle Passage was the route that transported captive Africans across the Atlantic Ocean to the Americas and the West Indies, where they were sold into slavery, often to work on large tobacco and sugar plantations.

The conditions on the ships were horrible, as Africans were usually confined below deck in cramped quarters. Many were marked with brands and men were chained together. Many Africans died during the journey and many more suffered from illness or harsh treatment from the crewmembers.

From 1619 to 1860, it is believed roughly 475,000 Africans were abducted and sent to North America, where they landed in a port and were auctioned off as slaves. It is believed that 18-20 percent of the slaves that crossed the Middle Passage died during the journey.

Third Route — Distribution in the Americas

After arriving in the Americas, Africans were forced to travel to their destination, which could be to a plantation deep in the South American forests, the Carolina Backcountry, or slave auctions in large cities like New York, Charleston, and Savannah.

Enslaved Africans in the Americas

The majority of captive Africans were enslaved in the Caribbean and South America. However, enslaved Africans in the American Colonies and the practice of chattel slavery became a key point of disagreement in the United States, eventually leading to the Civil War.

The Age of Exploration led to significant growth in European exploration, as nations and merchants looked for new trade routes and sources of gold and other precious metals. 

Christopher Columbus first arrived in the Caribbean in 1492, leading to a massive cultural exchange that was felt worldwide. Initially, the Spanish enslaved the indigenous populations, but eventually moved away from that, replacing them with Africans. 

In the Caribbean, Africans were forced to work in mines and on plantations in various locations, including Barbados, Saint-Domingue — present-day Haiti — and Jamaica.

South America

Portuguese explorers followed in the footsteps of Columbus and other Spanish expeditions in exploring the New World and establishing colonies. 

The Portuguese arrived in present-day Brazil in the early 1500s and, like the Spanish, enslaved the indigenous population and then transitioned to an African workforce.

By the middle part of the 16th Century, the Portuguese were establishing Sugar Plantations in Brazil and imported Africans to work on them.

Brazil was one area that continued to participate in the Transatlantic Slave Trade into the latter half of the 19th Century.

North America and the American Colonies

In North America, there was a mix of French, Spanish, and English colonies. In the interior of North America, the colonies were largely divided by major geographical landmarks, including the Mississippi River, the Appalachian Mountains, and the Great Lakes.

French colonies formed along the north of the Atlantic Coast, although French territory stretched south to Louisiana, along the Mississippi River. The entire region was known as New France.

New Spain, the Spanish colonies, were located in the Caribbean, South America, and stretched north into the present-day American Southwest, up the coast into the upper regions of present-day California.

The English Colonies developed south and east of New France, along the Atlantic Coast. They went as far south as present-day Georgia. Originally called “Virginia,” the region was eventually divided into 13 Colonies. Colonies in the Chesapeake Bay and further south enjoyed a long growing season due to the climate, which allowed certain crops, including tobacco, rice, indigo, and cotton, to flourish.

Over time, England transformed into Great Britain and a Domestic Slave Trade emerged in the British Colonies, encouraging the exchange of enslaved Africans between colonies and geographical regions. By the middle of the 18th century, the colonies experienced the First Great Awakening, and the seeds of abolition were planted in the minds of many Americans.

Following the American Revolution and the American Revolutionary War, the institution of slavery still drove the economy in many states. By then, production was so high — and dependent on cheap labor — that it was difficult for many merchants and plantation owners to conceive of any other way to continue their operations.

Although the Transatlantic Slave Trade was abolished in the United States in 1808, the Domestic Slave Trade continued to thrive.

In the wake of the Second Great Awakening , the Abolition movement grew, led by former slaves like Harriet Tubman , Sojourner Truth , and Federick Douglass , journalists like William Lloyd Garrison , politicians like Abraham Lincoln , and religious leaders like Henry Ward Beecher . 

Impact of the Headright System on the Transatlantic Slave Trade

Several colonies, including Virginia, needed to increase their population and workforce.

The Headright System was developed to encourage settlement . In that system, wealthy landowners paid for settlers to move to America. 

In return, the settler agreed to work for the landowner as an Indentured Servant. The company that ran the colony also gave the landowner more land. 

However, when servants finished their contracts, they were freed, leaving the landowner with no way to replace the worker.

Eventually, landowners realized that they could use the Headright System to a greater advantage. If they paid to have captive Africans imported into their colony, they received land — and they also created a more permanent, reliable workforce for their plantations.

Transatlantic Slave Trade Significance

The Transatlantic Slave Trade is important to United States history for the role it played in transporting captive and enslaved Africans to the American Colonies. Over time, American merchants, especially in the South, replaced indentured servants with slaves, boosting profits and ensuring a sustainable workforce. However, the institution of slavery was divisive, contributing to decades of disagreement between the North and South, eventually leading to the Civil War.

Transatlantic Slave Trade APUSH Notes and Study Guide

Use the following links and videos to study the Colonial Era, the New England Colonies, the Middle Colonies, and the Southern Colonies for the AP US History Exam. Also, be sure to look at our Guide to the AP US History Exam .

Transatlantic Slave Trade APUSH Definition and Simple Explanation

The Transatlantic Slave Trade was a system of commerce that operated for more than 350 years. It involved the forced movement of millions of Africans across the Atlantic Ocean to the Americas, where they were exploited as forced laborers in various industries, particularly the agrarian economies of the Southern Colonies.

Transatlantic Slave Trade Video for APUSH Notes

This video from Heimler’s History discusses the history of slavery in the British Colonies, including the impact of the Transatlantic Slave Trade.

• Written by Randal Rust

A deep dive into the transatlantic slave trade

Madick Gueye Doctor of underwater archaeology, coordinator of the Slave Wrecks Project, Cultural Engineering and Anthropology Research Unit (URICA) at IFAN, Cheikh Anta Diop University, Dakar (Senegal).

Today known as a place of memory dedicated to the slave trade, the island of Gorée was the largest slave-trading centre on the African coast from the 15 th to the 19 th century. Thousands of human beings passed through this small island some five kilometres from Dakar, Senegal, before being used as forced labour in American plantations.  It is estimated that nearly a thousand slave ships wrecked between Africa and the Americas. Only a tiny fraction of these wrecks are known and documented today. Consequently, a huge amount of mapping work needs to be undertaken. Tracking down these archeological remains and exploring the underwater sites would help obtain invaluable scientific data and shed light on the tragic history of the triangular trade.

The waters surrounding the island of Gorée, inscribed on the World Heritage list in 1978, are an important part of this history. This is why, in 2016 and 2017, a team of research divers from the Institut fondamental d'Afrique noire (IFAN) at Cheikh Anta Diop University in Dakar, undertook two underwater archaeological research missions off the coast of the island. Using a magnetometer to detect the presence of metals, combined with a navigation system and a depth sounder, we were able to cover the entire coastline of the island within a radius of 500 metres, recording the data generated with the aid of software. The subsequent work of cataloguing enabled us to identify 24 archaeological sites, confirming the richness of Senegal's underwater cultural heritage.  

The Middle Passage

The team then carried out dives in some of the sites. We had a clear mission – to assess the potential of the sites, measure their extent, map the apparent structures and study their environment. This was a decisive factor in the conservation of the remains. So far, IFAN has identified two major sites:  HMS Sénégal,  which was shipwrecked in 1780, and a second site dating from the early 19 th century that requires more in-depth archaeological assessment before it can be fully identified.

In Senegal the research focuses on the Middle Passage, the transatlantic stage of the triangular trade linking Europe, Africa and the Americas, a field that still remains largely undocumented. Given its strategic position and major role in transatlantic trade relations, Senegambia – historically a geographical area corresponding to the Senegal and Gambia river basins –  appears to be a privileged area to be explored.

The Senegalese waters are home to many slave shipwreck sites

For over four centuries, thousands of European slave ships sailed along the coast of West Africa, with the main trading points centred on the coastal regions of Saint-Louis, Gorée, Rufisque, Portudal, Joal, Albreda and Rivières du Sud. 

Obstacles to navigation, such as poor visibility and sandbanks, as well as rivalry between European powers, caused many of these vessels to run aground. Reconstructing what life was like on board and the hardship endured by these men and women is one of the aims of our research.

Training at sea and in the classroom

These initial explorations were carried out as part of the  Slave Wrecks Project , initiated by the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington, DC (United States). The aim of the international network of researchers set up by the project is not only to document the history of the transatlantic slave trade, but also to approach it in a new way by placing people at the heart of the story.

Training is an essential dimension of this initiative bringing together Africans and African-American descendants to study underwater archaeology, both at sea and in classrooms. Since 2014, the Slade Wrecks Project has been able to train a network of researchers at IFAN's Archaeology Laboratory in diving and marine archaeology techniques and technology. It has thus been instrumental in setting up the first African-led marine archaeology team in West Africa.

 The Cheikh Anta Diop University has established the first African-led marine archaeology team in West Africa

Underwater archaeological sites enable us to re-examine the stories and legacies of the slave trade. By promoting knowledge, the underwater archaeology of the slave trade fosters reconciliation and promotes social justice.

The desire to document slave trade history by studying underwater remains is not something new. Since the late 1980s, researchers such as Max Guérout, a French underwater archaeologist, have been working on the subject. He led two diving missions to the Gorée area in 1988, as part of UNESCO's programme to safeguard the island. The work of Professor Ibrahima Thiaw, a Senegalese archaeologist and specialist in the living conditions of the slaves on Gorée, has also been instrumental in the development of this discipline in Senegal. 

A very present past

The transatlantic slave trade is not only a thing of the past – Senegalese social landscapes are still strongly marked by the stigma of slavery. Racial stereotypes arising from the slave trade have had a profound impact on intercultural and interracial relations. 

The question of the role played by the African continent in the export of black slaves continues to be debated. This topic, sometimes reduced to simplistic statements, has been the source of misunderstandings and even tensions with Afro-descendant Americans. Africans were undeniably implicated, but the moral and political economy of the slave trade is highly complex and cannot be reduced to clichés or hasty interpretations.

In this context, a better understanding of the past and of the complexity of the transatlantic slave trade is essential to foster dialogue and heal the wounds of the past, wounds which are sometimes still open. Moreover, by involving the local population in the research we will help them take ownership of the black slave trade history.  

Provided, however, that the ruins and remains can continue to reveal their secrets to future generations. In fact, underwater archaeological sites face a number of threats. Several dozen metres below the surface, micro-organisms, marine fauna and the mechanical effects of the sea, currents and even fishing gear can destroy wrecks.

Buried in the sediment, sheltered from light and in an oxygen-poor environment, organic matter is well preserved. But once brought to the surface, the objects are fragile and need to be preserved with appropriate conservation treatment. This is particularly true of iron objects and wood. Indeed, the archaeological objects excavated by Max Guérout in the late 1980s are already deteriorating.

Senegal does not yet have a conservation laboratory, which is essential for continuing underwater archaeological excavations

Senegal does not yet have a conservation laboratory, an essential element for continuing underwater archaeological excavations. The creation of such an establishment is therefore imperative for the future of our research and, more broadly, for the documentation of the history of the transatlantic slave trade.

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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.

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The Transatlantic Slave Trade

Introduction.

• 2. New England
• 3. Boston, Massachusetts
• 4. New York, New York
• 5. The Mid-Atlantic
• 6. Virginia
• 7. Richmond, Virginia
• 8. The Carolinas
• 9. Charleston, South Carolina
• 10. The Deep South
• 11. Savannah, Georgia
• 12. New Orleans, Louisiana
• 13. Conclusion
• Download report
• More resources

Cite this report Equal Justice Initiative, "The Transatlantic Slave Trade" (2022).

Text copied.

A National Legacy: Our Collective Memory Of Slavery, War & Race

• Chapter 1 Origins Intro

The European Influence on Africa

The barbarity of the middle passage, slavery in the americas.

• 2. New England Intro
• New England Trafficking
• A Trafficking-Based Economy
• Industries Reliant on Enslaved Labor
• Laws Limiting Freedom
• 3 Boston Intro
• The Port of Boston
• Controlling Enslaved People
• Profiting from Trafficking
• After Abolition
• 4 New York City Intro
• Trading on Wall Street
• Laws Targeting Black People
• An Economy Founded on Slavery
• Post-War Racial Discrimination
• 5 Mid-Atlantic Intro
• A Hub for Human Trafficking
• Work of Enslaved People
• Separating Families
• Controlling Black People
• A Legacy of Racial Bias
• 6 Virginia Intro
• Tobacco Drives Trafficking
• Legislating Hereditary Enslavement
• Laws Controlling Lives
• The Domestic Slave Trade
• 7 Intro Richmond
• A Trafficking Hub
• An Enslavement-Based Economy
• Suppressing Black Resistance
• Center of the Domestic Slave Trade
• 8 Intro Carolinas
• Trafficking for Rice and Indigo
• North Carolina Trafficking
• Resistance to Enslavement
• 9 Intro Charleston
• “Carolina Gold”
• Centrality of African Culture
• Wealth Through Exploitation
• 10 Intro Deep South
• Spanish and French Trafficking
• Enslavement Conditions
• Trafficking Surges in the 18th Century
• Illegal Transatlantic Trafficking
• 11 Intro Savannah
• Trafficking in Savannah
• Urban Enslavement
• “The Weeping Time”
• Legacy of Enslavement
• 12 Intro New Orleans
• A City Built on Trafficking
• Brutal Conditions
• Resistance and Violent Response
• Conclusion TST Intro

Table of Contents

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• Acknowledgments

The enslavement of human beings occupies a painful and tragic space in world history. Denying a person freedom, autonomy, and life represents the worst kind of abuse of human rights.

Many societies tolerated and condoned human slavery for centuries. But in the 15th century, an expanded and terrifying new era of enslavement emerged that has had a profound and devastating impact on human history.

The abduction, abuse, and enslavement of Africans by Europeans for nearly five centuries dramatically altered the global landscape and created a legacy of suffering and bigotry that can still be seen today.

After discovering lands that had been occupied by Indigenous people for centuries, European powers sent ships and armed militia to exploit these new lands for wealth and profit starting in the 1400s. In territories we now call “the Americas,” gold, sugar, tobacco, and extraordinary natural resources were viewed as opportunities to gain power and influence for Portugal, Spain, Great Britain, France, Italy, Germany, and Scandinavian nations.

Europeans first sought to enslave the Indigenous people who occupied these lands to create wealth for foreign powers, resulting in a catastrophic genocide. Disease, famine, and conflict killed millions of Native people within a relatively short period of time.

Determined to extract wealth from these distant lands, European powers sought labor from Africa, launching a tragic era of kidnapping, abduction, and trafficking that resulted in the enslavement of millions of African people.

Between 1501 and 1867, nearly 13 million African people were kidnapped, forced onto European and American ships, and trafficked across the Atlantic Ocean to be enslaved, abused, and forever separated from their homes, families, ancestors, and cultures.

The Transatlantic Slave Trade represents one of the most violent, traumatizing, and horrific eras in world history. Nearly two million people died during the barbaric Middle Passage across the ocean. The African continent was left destabilized and vulnerable to conquest and violence for centuries. The Americas became a place where race and color created a caste system defined by inequality and abuse.

In the “colonies” that became the United States, slavery took on uniquely appalling features. From New England to Texas, Black people were dehumanized and abused while they were enslaved and denied basic freedoms. Legal and political systems were created to codify racial hierarchy and ensure white supremacy. Slavery became permanent and hereditary, defined by race-based ideologies that insisted on racial subordination of Black people for decades after the formal abolition of slavery.

Millions of Black people born in the U.S. were subjected to abuse, violence, and forced labor despite the young nation’s identity as a constitutional democracy founded on the belief that “all men are created equal.” Racialized slavery was ignored, defended, or accommodated by leaders while the new nation gained extraordinary wealth and influence in the global economy based on the forced labor of enslaved Black people.

The economic legacy of the Transatlantic Slave Trade—including generational wealth and the founding of industries that continue to thrive today—is not well understood.

New England, Boston, New York City, the Mid-Atlantic, Virginia, Richmond, the Carolinas, Charleston, Savannah, the Deep South, and New Orleans were shaped by the trafficking of African people, but few have acknowledged their history of enslavement or its legacy.

This report is a first step in helping people understand the scope and scale of the devastation created by slavery in America and the Transatlantic Slave Trade’s influence on a range of contemporary issues. It seeks to initiate more meaningful and truthful conversations about the history of slavery in America and how we can effectively address its legacy.

At a time when some believe we should avoid any discourse about our history that is uncomfortable, we believe that an honest engagement with our past is essential if we are to create a healthy and just future.

Bryan Stevenson, Executive Director

Maya Angelou

In this Chapter

T he enslavement of people has been a part of human history for centuries. Slavery and human bondage has taken many forms, including enslaving people as prisoners of war or due to their beliefs, 1 See David Brion Davis, Inhuman Bondage: The Rise and Fall of Slavery in the New World (Oxford University Press, 2006), 27, 32; Jack Goody, “Slavery in Time and Space,” in Asian and African Systems of Slavery , ed. James L. Watson (Berkley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1980), 25-27, 32-35. but the permanent, hereditary enslavement based on race later adopted in the U.S. was rare before the 15th century.

Many attributes of slavery began to change when European settlers intent on colonizing the Americas used violence and military power to compel forced labor from enslaved people. Indigenous people became the first victims of forced labor and enslavement at the hands of Europeans in the Americas. However, millions of Indigenous people died from disease, famine, war, and harsh labor conditions in the decades that followed. 2 Russell Thornton, American Indian Holocaust and Survival: A Population History Since 1492 (University of Oklahoma Press, 1987), 42-54.

Committed to extracting profit from their colonies in the Americas, European powers turned to the African continent. To meet their ever-growing need for labor, they initiated a massive global undertaking that relied on abduction, human trafficking, and racializing enslavement at a scale without precedent in human history. Never before had millions of people been kidnapped and trafficked over such a great distance.

The permanent displacement of 12.5 million African people to a foreign land, with no possibility of ever returning, created an enduring legacy and shaped challenges that remain with us today. 3 David Eltis and David Richardson, Atlas of the Transatlantic Slave Trade (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2010), 23.

Europe had no contact with Sub-Saharan Africa before the Portuguese, seeking wealth and gold, sailed down the western coast of Africa and reached the Gold Coast (modern-day Ghana) in 1471. 4 Junius P. Rodriguez, ed., The Historical Encyclopedia of World Slavery, Volume I  (Santa Barbara, California: ABC-CLIO, 1997), 307-08. Initially focused on obtaining gold, Portugal established trading relationships and built El Mina Fort to protect its interests in the gold trade. 5 Davis, Inhuman Bondage , 89.

The convergence of European powers in Sub-Saharan Africa set in motion a devastating process that fused sophisticated labor exploitation, international commerce, mass enslavement, and an elaborate race-based ideology to create the Transatlantic Slave Trade. 6 Eltis and Richardson, Atlas of the Transatlantic Slave Trade , 21, 99; Davis, Inhuman Bondage , 81-82, 84, 87, 89, 109.

Over the following decades, the Spanish, English, French, Dutch, Danish, and Swedes began to make contact with Sub-Saharan Africa as well. Portugal soon converted El Mina into a prison for holding kidnapped Africans, and European traffickers built castles, barracoons, and forts on the African coast to support the forced enslavement of abducted Africans.

German and Italian merchants and bankers who did not personally traffic kidnapped Africans nonetheless provided essential funding and insurance to develop the Transatlantic Slave Trade and plantation economy. 7 Davis, Inhuman Bondage , 87-89 Italian merchants were essential in the effort to extend the sugar plantation system to the Atlantic Islands off the west coast of Africa, like São Tomé, and financial capital from Genoa was instrumental in expanding Portugal’s ability to traffic Africans. 8 Davis, Inhuman Bondage , 84-89, 104, 109.

By the 1600s, every major European power had established trading relationships with Sub-Saharan Africa and was participating in the transportation of kidnapped Africans to the Americas in some way. During this time period, several thousand Africans were kidnapped and trafficked to mainland Europe and the Americas, but the volume of human trafficking soon escalated to horrific proportions. 9 Eltis and Richardson, Atlas of the Transatlantic Slave Trade , 21, 99; Davis, Inhuman Bondage , 81-82, 84, 87, 89, 109.

An engraving of trafficked Africans arriving in Virginia in 1619.

Hulton Archive/Getty Images

Led again by the Portuguese, European powers began to occupy the Americas in the 1500s. In the 16th and 17th centuries, using land stolen from Indigenous populations in the Americas, Europeans established plantations that relied on enslaved labor to mass produce goods (primarily sugar cane) for trading and sale. 10 Davis, Inhuman Bondage , 81, 97. The cultivation of sugar for mass consumption became a driving force in the growing trafficking of human beings from Africa. 11 Davis, Inhuman Bondage , 103, 107-09.

Europeans initially relied on Indigenous people to supply this labor. 12 Davis, Inhuman Bondage , 95-100. But mass killings and disease decimated Indigenous populations in what historian David Brion Davis called “the greatest known population loss in human history.” 13 Davis, Inhuman Bondage , 98.

The Indigenous population in Mexico plummeted by nearly 90% in 75 years. In Hispaniola (modern-day Haiti and Dominican Republic), the population of Arawak and Taino people fell from between 300,000 and 500,000 in 1492 to fewer than 500 people by 1542, just five decades later. 14 Davis, Inhuman Bondage , 98. Without Indigenous workers, plantation owners in the Americas grew desperate for a new source of exploited labor. 15 Davis, Inhuman Bondage , 95-102.

Driven by the desire for wealth, these European powers shifted from acquiring gold and other goods in Sub-Saharan Africa to trafficking in human beings. Over the following centuries, Europeans demanded that millions of Africans be trafficked to work on plantations and in other businesses in the Americas. 16 Davis, Inhuman Bondage , 99-102.

Slavery had existed in Africa prior to this point, but this new commodification of human beings by European powers was entirely unique and it drastically changed the African concept of enslavement. 17 Davis, Inhuman Bondage , 99-102.

Although some African officials and merchants acquired wealth through the export of millions of people, the Transatlantic Slave Trade devastated and de-stabilized societies and economies across Africa. The scale of disruption and violence contributed to long-term conflict and violence on the continent while European powers were able to amass massive financial benefits and global power from this dehumanizing trade. 18 Davis, Inhuman Bondage , 100.

The Iberian powers of Spain and Portugal and their colonies in Uruguay and Brazil were responsible for trafficking 99% of the nearly 630,000 kidnapped Africans trafficked from 1501 to 1625. 19 Eltis and Richardson, Atlas of the Transatlantic Slave Trade , 23, tbl. 2. Over the next 240 years, England, France, the Netherlands, Scandinavia, the Baltic States, and their colonies joined the Iberians in actively trafficking Africans. Almost 12 million kidnapped Africans were trafficked from 1625 to 1867. 20 Eltis and Richardson, Atlas of the Transatlantic Slave Trade , 23, tbl. 2. Ships from Portugal and its colony Brazil alone were responsible for trafficking 5,849,300 kidnapped Africans during this time period. 21 Eltis and Richardson, Atlas of the Transatlantic Slave Trade , 23, tbl. 2.

Ships originating in Great Britain were responsible for trafficking more than a quarter of all people taken from Africa from 1501 to 1867. 22 Eltis and Richardson, Atlas of the Transatlantic Slave Trade , 23, tbl. 2. From 1726 to 1800, British ships were the leading traffickers of kidnapped Africans, responsible for taking more than two million people from Africa. 23 Eltis and Richardson, Atlas of the Transatlantic Slave Trade , 23, tbl. 2.

A painting of kidnapped Africans aboard a trafficking ship.

Dea/G. Dagli Orti/Getty Images

From 1626 to 1867, ships from North America were responsible for trafficking at least 305,000 captured people from Africa. In the two years before the U.S. legally ended the international slave trade in 1808, a quarter of all trafficked Africans were carried in ships that flew the U.S. flag. 24 Eltis and Richardson, Atlas of the Transatlantic Slave Trade , 34. Rhode Island’s ports combined to organize voyages responsible for trafficking at least 111,000 kidnapped Africans, making it one of the 15 largest originating ports in the world. 25 Eltis and Richardson, Atlas of the Transatlantic Slave Trade , 39.

The horrific conditions of the Middle Passage meant that of more than 12.5 million Africans kidnapped and trafficked through the Transatlantic Slave Trade, only 10.7 million survived the journey. 26 Eltis and Richardson, Atlas of the Transatlantic Slave Trade , 19.

Eighty percent of the people who embarked for the Americas between 1500 and 1820 were kidnapped Africans, who far outnumbered European immigrants. 27 Eltis and Richardson, Atlas of the Transatlantic Slave Trade , xvii.

Almost two million Africans died during the Middle Passage—nearly one million more than all of the Americans who have died in every war fought since 1775 combined. 28 Department of Veteran’s Affairs, America’s Wars Fact Sheet , May 2021, https://www.va.gov/opa/publications/factsheets/fs_americas_wars.pdf ; Eltis and Richardson, Atlas of the Transatlantic Slave Trade , xvii, 18-19.

Numbers like this can help to quantify the scope of the harm, but they fail to detail the horrific and torturous experience of those who perished and the trauma that 10.7 million Africans who survived the weeks-long journey carried with them.

An exhibit at EJI’s Legacy Museum in Montgomery, Alabama, features more than 200 sculptures by Ghanaian sculptor Kwame Akoto-Bamfo memorializing those who died during the Middle Passage.

Human Pictures

Some enslaved people were taken from the coast of West Africa and sold to European slave traders. For most captives the experience of Transatlantic trafficking began weeks, months, or even years before they ever saw the coast. Driven by the increasing external demand from white enslavers and traders, African kidnappers traveled inland and kidnapped people from their villages and towns. In the 18th century, 70% of Africans trafficked in the Transatlantic Slave Trade were free people who had been “snatched from their homes and communities.” 29 Sowande M. Mustakeem, Slavery at Sea: Terror, Sex, and Sickness in the Middle Passage (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2016), 63. They were most often forced to walk, bound together in a coffle, for dozens or even hundreds of miles until they reached the coast. 30 Mustakeem, Slavery at Sea , 63, 136; Eltis and Richardson, Atlas of the Transatlantic Slave Trade , 87.

At the coast, kidnapped Africans were forced into barracoons, slave pens, and dungeons within prison castles to await the ships that would take them across the Atlantic. Kidnapped Africans were forced to board slave trading ships that stayed docked—sometimes for months—until they had loaded enough human cargo to make the passage sufficiently profitable for the enslavers. 31 Mustakeem, Slavery at Sea , 67, 99-101; Eltis and Richardson, Atlas of the Transatlantic Slave Trade , xvii, 160; Davis, Inhuman Bondage , 100. Records do not establish an exact death toll, but scholars estimate the mortality rate among those confined in barracoons and on board docked trading ships “equaled that of Europe’s fourteenth-century Black Death,” which claimed at least 40% of Europe’s population. 32 Alice M. Phillips, ed., “The Black Death: The Plague, 1331-1770,”  John Martin Rare Book Room, Hardin Library for the Health Sciences, University of Iowa, 2017, http://hosted.lib.uiowa.edu/histmed/plague/ .

Countless Africans perished before they even began the Middle Passage. 33 Eltis and Richardson, Atlas of the Transatlantic Slave Trade , xvii; Davis, Inhuman Bondage , 100.

Ottobah Cugoano was a young child when he was “snatched away from [his] native country, with about eighteen or twenty more boys and girls.” 34 Ottobah Cugoano, “Narrative of the Enslavement of Ottobah Cugoano, a Native of Africa; Published by Himself in the Year 1787,” in The Negro’s Memorial; or, Abolitionists Catechism; by an Abolitionist (London: Hatchard and Co., Piccadilly, and J. and A. Aroh, Conhill, 1825), 120. The kidnappers brandished “pistols and cutlasses” and threatened to kill the children if they did not come with them. 35 Cugoano, “Narrative of Enslavement,” 121. For Ottobah and millions like him, the trauma of familial separation would be inflicted repeatedly in the Transatlantic Slave Trade. Ottobah’s “hopes of returning home again were all over” 36 Cugoano, “Narrative of Enslavement,” 122-23. as he was marched to the coast and placed in a prison until a white slave trader’s ship arrived three days later. “[I]t was a most horrible scene,” Ottobah later recounted. 37 Cugoano, “Narrative of Enslavement,” 124.

Ottobah Cugoano

“Narrative of the Enslavement of Ottobah Cugoano,” 124.

African captives were forced to undergo invasive and dehumanizing examinations before they boarded enslavers’ ships. Women, men, and children were stripped naked, prodded, and molested to determine if they were “prime slaves” capable of performing hard labor and having children. 38 Mustakeem, Slavery at Sea , 73-85.

Rob Culpepper

Traders invasively groped the breasts, buttocks, and vaginal areas of women and young girls, allegedly to assess their childbearing ability. 39 Mustakeem, Slavery at Sea , 73-78, 85. Men and boys were similarly molested around the groin, scrotum, and anus. 40 Mustakeem, Slavery at Sea , 85. One white trafficker later testified the process was similar to what he would do to “a horse in this country, if I was about to purchase him.” 41 Mustakeem, Slavery at Sea , 85.

Captives were then assigned a number and loaded onto ships, separated by gender and tightly packed into the holds under conditions that were noxious and extreme. Men were typically “locked spoonways” together, naked and forced to lie in urine, feces, blood, and mucus, with little to no fresh air. 42 Mustakeem, Slavery at Sea , 105; Davis, Inhuman Bondage , 92-93. Alexander Falconbridge, a white surgeon who participated in the slave trade, later testified that captives “had not so much room as a man in his coffin, neither in length or breadth, and it was impossible for them to turn or shift with any degree or ease.” 43 Mustakeem, Slavery at Sea , 105.

An illustration of the Brookes, a British ship used to traffic enslaved people.

Library of Congress

Trafficked Africans were forced to lie chained and manacled for weeks during the journey, unable to stretch out or stand except during limited time on deck. The foul conditions were a breeding ground for disease and vermin; some captives suffocated from the lack of air below deck. 44 Mustakeem, Slavery at Sea , 103-08; Davis, Inhuman Bondage , 92-93. On some ships, the mortality rate was as high as 33%. 45 Davis, Inhuman Bondage , 92-93; Eltis and Richardson, Atlas of the Transatlantic Slave Trade , 18-19.

About 15% of kidnapped Africans—nearly two million people—died during the Middle Passage.

African women and girls suffered similarly horrific conditions in the hold—and they were uniquely terrorized by the crew. Forced to be naked and segregated from the men, they lived in constant fear of being raped or assaulted by white sailors, who subjected them to sexual violence and flogged those who resisted. 46 Mustakeem, Slavery at Sea , 138-48; Davis, Inhuman Bondage , 90-93.

Sexual assault of African women was so commonplace that Alexander Falconbridge later testified that sailors were “permitted to indulge their passions among them at pleasure.” 47 Mustakeem, Slavery at Sea , 138-44. Young girls were similarly subjected to violence. One surviving account details the experience of “a little girl of eight to ten years” who was repeatedly raped by a ship’s captain over three consecutive nights. 48 Mustakeem, Slavery at Sea , 144.

White sailors engaged in sexual violence without any fear of consequences or accountability. 49 Mustakeem, Slavery at Sea , 138-48; Davis, Inhuman Bondage , 90-93.

Some African women faced a second level of terror—the inability to protect their small children who were brought on board with them or born during the voyage. 50 Mustakeem, Slavery at Sea , 151-54. Many African women were forcibly separated from their infants when they were kidnapped from their homes or when they were sold to white traffickers but some women carried small infants with them. Babies were of little value in the market across the Atlantic, and so abusive sailors used them to manipulate, control, and terrorize their mothers. 51 Mustakeem, Slavery at Sea , 151-54. One account details a sailor who “tore the child from the mother, and threw it into the sea” when the newborn would not stop crying. 52 Mustakeem, Slavery at Sea , 151.

Enslaved women and young girls were systematically subjected to sexual abuse and violence by traffickers and enslavers.

Another account from a white trafficker reports that a woman and her nine-month-old were purchased and placed onboard a ship. The baby “would not eat,” so the captain “flogged him with a cat o’ nine tails” in front of his mother and other captives on the ship. 53 Mustakeem, Slavery at Sea , 152-53. When he noticed that the baby’s feet were swollen, the captain ordered his crew to submerge the baby’s legs in boiling water, causing “the skin and nails [to come] off.” 54 Mustakeem, Slavery at Sea , 153. The baby still would not eat, so the captain flogged him at each meal time for several days before finally “[tying] a log of mango, either eighteen or twenty inches long, and about twelve or thirteen pound weight, to the child by a string round its neck,” beating the baby again, and dropping the baby to the ground, killing him. 55 Mustakeem, Slavery at Sea , 153. His mother—powerless to save her baby—was beaten until she agreed to throw her baby’s body overboard. This act of terror was intentionally committed in view of other captives to strike fear and maintain control. 56 Mustakeem, Slavery at Sea , 153-54.

Cruelty and terrorism were common on trafficking vessels operated by Europeans. Sailors inflicted brutal punishments for even minor offenses as a reminder of their control. 57 Mustakeem, Slavery at Sea , 131-37. One account from a white sailor reported that eight to 10 captives were brought to the top deck one night “for making a little noise in the rooms.” 58 Mustakeem, Slavery at Sea , 136-37. Sailors were then ordered to “tie them up to the booms [horizontal poles extending from the base of the mast], flog them very severely with a wire cat [a whip with multiple tails of wire], and afterwards clap the thumb-screws upon them, and leave them in that situation till morning.” 59 Mustakeem, Slavery at Sea , 136-37. The same sailor said the use of the thumb-screws—a device that crushed fingers via pressure—was so violent and harmful that it resulted in “fevers” and even death on occasion. 60 Mustakeem, Slavery at Sea , 136-37.

For more serious offenses, sailors inflicted even greater violence. One captive woman who was accused of aiding (but not actively participating) in an attempted revolt against the kidnappers, was strung up on the deck by her thumbs in view of the other captives. As a warning to them, she was flogged and knifed to death. 61 Mustakeem, Slavery at Sea , 158.

An illustration published in an 1833 anti-slavery periodical shows traffickers throwing enslaved people overboard.

The threat of being flogged with a cat o’ nine tails [a multi-tailed whip with lashes often tipped with metal or barbs] or placed in the thumb-screws hung over each captive. 62 Mustakeem, Slavery at Sea , 186-87. Consuming more than their meager allotment of food could lead to whipping and torture. 63 Mustakeem, Slavery at Sea , 118-24. Captives were forced onto the deck and made to “dance” for exercise under threat of flogging. As one eyewitness observed, “Even those who had the flux, scurvy, and such edematous swelling in their legs, as made it painful to them to move at all, were compelled to dance by the cat.” 64 Davis, Inhuman Bondage , 92-93. Failure to eat one’s rations likewise resulted in abuse, whipping, or torture in the thumb-screws until the kidnapped African agreed to eat. 65 Mustakeem, Slavery at Sea , 118-24, 186-87.

These excruciating conditions lasted for weeks and sometimes for months. A typical voyage took five or six weeks; some took two or three months. 66 Eltis and Richardson, Atlas of the Transatlantic Slave Trade , 160. Longer voyages led to higher mortality rates among the kidnapped Africans on board. 67 Eltis and Richardson, Atlas of the Transatlantic Slave Trade , 160.

When the ships landed in ports across North and South America, the kidnapped Africans who survived the Middle Passage were subjected to a renewed round of examinations and molestation by enslavers before they were sold again and forced to do hard labor that often resulted in their untimely deaths. 68 Davis, Inhuman Bondage , 92-93, 107-17; Eltis and Richardson, Atlas of the Transatlantic Slave Trade , 6, 16, 159-61. Around 80% of kidnapped Africans transported across the Middle Passage were forced to work on sugar plantations under incredibly dangerous conditions that led to high mortality rates. 69 Eltis and Richardson, Atlas of the Transatlantic Slave Trade , 6.

Olaudah Equiano

Of the enslaved men, women, and children who survived the Middle Passage, approximately 90% arrived in the Caribbean or South America. 82 Eltis and Richardson, Atlas of the Transatlantic Slave Trade , xix. The Portuguese, Spanish, French, British, and Dutch controlled slavery in the Americas, and each followed different political, legal, and cultural practices. 83 Eltis and Richardson, Atlas of the Transatlantic Slave Trade , 21-23. Due in part to these differences, the evolution of slavery in the Americas varied across the region, as did the social construction of race and racial hierarchy.

There is no value in comparing the relative “harshness” of slavery across the Americas; the brutality and inhumanity of slavery was universal. Moreover, conditions in the South American and Caribbean colonies were horrific—the vast majority of enslaved people in these colonies worked on sugar plantations, which were notoriously harsh environments. Work on these plantations was “life-consuming,” with long hours of gang labor—often beginning at 5 a.m. and working until dusk—and extremely hazardous work conditions. Plantations in Brazil had higher mortality rates and lower life expectancies than plantations in the U.S. 84 Davis, Inhuman Bondage , 92-93, 107-119.

Factors specific to each European power and its colonies distinguished the experiences of enslaved men and women across the Americas. In the North American colonies and later the U.S., white people were in the majority everywhere except in South Carolina and Mississippi. 85 Kathryn MacKay, “Statistics on Slavery,” Weber State University, accessed September 2, 2022, https://faculty.weber.edu/kmackay/statistics_on_slavery.htm . But in South America and the Caribbean, nonwhite people regularly exceeded 80% of the population. 86 Steven Mintz, “Historical Context: American Slavery in Comparative Perspective,” The Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History, accessed September 6, 2022, https://www.gilderlehrman.org/history-resources/teaching-resource/historical-context-american-slavery-comparative-perspective ; Robert J. Cottrol, The Long Lingering Shadow: Law, Liberalism, and Cultures of Racial Hierarchy and Identity in the Americas (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2013), 39.

When the Haitian revolution started in August 1791, white Europeans made up just 7% of the population and there were roughly as many free people of color as there were Europeans. 87 Franklin W. Knight, “The Haitian Revolution,” American Historical Review 105, no. 1 (February 2000): 108. Iberian control in South America was challenged by the growing number of enslaved people, who often demanded their freedom in exchange for fighting Indigenous people who resisted European colonizers. 88 Cottrol, Long Lingering Shadow , 34. In these colonies, the threat of rebellion against the minority white population was critical in shaping society.

In contrast, the exceptionally large white majority in North America meant that rebellions by enslaved people, while far more common than most people realize today, did not represent as great a threat to white rule. 89 Cottrol, Long Lingering Shadow , 60, 86. As a result, while the fear of rebellions profoundly shaped the legal and cultural landscape of North America, 90 See, e.g. , Walter Johnson, River of Dark Dreams (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2013), 14, 18-21, 33 (discussing the impact of the Deslondes rebellion in Louisiana). British colonists rarely were forced to make legal or political concessions to enslaved people.

Geographic and demographic variations also distinguished how race and racial hierarchy developed in North America. For example, during the first century of Portuguese colonization in Brazil, there were very few Portuguese or white women, 91 D. Wendy Greene, “Determining the (In)Determinable: Race in Brazil and the United States,” 14 Mich. J. Race & L. 143, 150 (2009). which meant that despite anti-miscegenation laws passed in Portugal, there were high rates of interracial sex between white men and women of African descent in Brazil. 92 Greene, “Determining the (In)Determinable,” 150. By 1822, more than 70% of Brazil’s population “consisted of blacks or mulattoes, slaves, liberto, and free” people of color. 93 Greene, “Determining the (In)Determinable,” 151.

Today, Brazil is home to the largest population of African descendants outside the African continent. 94 Greene, “Determining the (In)Determinable,” 150.

In most South American and Caribbean colonies, large populations of free people of color emerged and “elaborate human taxonomies” based on race and caste were developed. 95 Herbert S. Klein and Ben Vinson III, African Slavery in Latin America and the Caribbean , 2d. ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 200-12. A different racial hierarchy evolved in North America, where free people of color represented a very small fraction of the population. 96 Aaron O’Neill, “Black and Slave Population of the United States from 1790 to 1880,” Statista , June 21, 2022, https://www.statista.com/statistics/1010169/black-and-slave-population-us-1790-1880/ . There, a single, rigid color line separated two racial groups: Black and white. 97 Klein and Vinson, African Slavery in Latin America , 195.

Finally, the legal codes that governed enslaved peoples’ lives—laws on manumission, the status of enslaved people as humans or property, marriage and family formation, and racial classification—varied by region and the colony. 98 Klein and Vinson, African Slavery in Latin America , 207-14. These laws demonstrate the complex racial hierarchies in the region.

Throughout the region, racial discrimination was codified in laws that barred free Black people from “hold[ing] political office, practic[ing] prestigious professions (public notary, lawyer, surgeon, pharmacist, smelter) or enjoy[ing] equal social status with whites.” 99 Ann Twinam, Purchasing Whiteness: Pardos, Mulattos, and the Quest for Social Mobility in the Spanish Indies (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2015), 52. But in 1795, the Spanish Crown made it possible to purchase whiteness—people of color with mixed ancestry could “apply and pay for a decree” that converted their legal status to white. 100 Ann Twinam, “Purchasing Whiteness: Race and Status in Colonial Latin America,” Not Even Past , September 1, 2015, https://notevenpast.org/purchasing-whiteness-race-and-status-in-colonial-latin-america/ . These laws sparked “vigorous and serious debate concerning the civil rights of those of mixed descent” in some countries. The 1812 constitution of the Spanish Empire further expanded opportunities for mixed-race citizens, including desegregating universities a century and a half before the U.S. 101 Twinam, “Race and Status.”

Evan Milligan

In French colonies, the “Code Noir” passed by Louis XIV in 1685 shaped an entirely different landscape. The code mandated execution for an enslaved person who struck their enslaver, 102 Article XXXIII, “The Code Noir (The Black Code),” LIBERTY, EQUALITY, FRATERNITY: EXPLORING THE FRENCH REVOLUTION , accessed October 17, 2022, https://revolution.chnm.org/d/335 . but it also granted free people of color the same rights as any “persons born free,” 103 Articles LVIII and LIX, “The Code Noir.” prohibited enslaved parents from being sold separately from their children, 104 Article XLVII, “The Code Noir.” deemed free the child of a free woman and an enslaved man of color, 105 Article XIII, “The Code Noir.” and fined an enslaver who had a child with an enslaved woman unless he married and freed the woman and her child. 106 Article IX, “The Code Noir.”

Critically, under the Code Noir, free people of color dramatically increased their numbers. In Louisiana, which spent decades under French control, there were 18,647 free Black people by 1860—almost 3,000 more than in South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, and Mississippi combined. 107 Laura Foner, “The Free People of Color in Louisiana and St. Domingue: A Comparative Portrait of Two Three-Caste Slave Societies,” Journal of Social History 3, no. 4 (Summer 1970): 407 n.1 (citing U.S. Bureau of the Census, “Negro Population in the United States, 1790-1915” (Washington, 1918), 57).

The British and their descendants in North America made race the central aspect of laws governing slavery and the lives of enslaved and free Black Americans. 108 Klein and Vinson, African Slavery in Latin America , 203 (“Especially following the Haitian Revolution, British, French, Dutch, and North American legislation became ever more hostile to freedmen.”).  A stark “black-white binary” reflected and reinforced the centrality of race in all areas of American life. 109 Klein and Vinson, African Slavery in Latin America , 201.

As a result, while the particular experience of slavery depended on region and time period, enslavement in the U.S. became a rigid, racialized caste system that inexorably tied enslavement to race.

The system of enslavement that emerged in North America was legitimated by an elaborate set of laws enforced through terror and violence and used to justify and codify the permanent, hereditary, and unending slavery of Black people for generations.

From the first arrival of kidnapped Africans in the English colonies that would become the United States, the institution of enslavement was foundational to the economy of every major city on the Eastern Seaboard. The history of these regions cannot be fully understood without acknowledging the role enslavement played in creating their economies, laws, and political and cultural institutions and the innumerable ways this legacy shapes these communities today.

The Role of the Christian Church

The British Library

Olaudah Equiano’s autobiography, The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano , is a firsthand account of the Transatlantic Slave Trade that provides a critical perspective into the horrors of trafficking.

Olaudah was 11 years old when he and his sister were kidnapped from their home in the Eboe region of the Kingdom of Benin (likely, modern-day Nigeria) while their parents worked in the field. 70 Olaudah Equiano, The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African,  vol. I (London, 1789) 4-5, 48-49. Separated from his sister, he was trafficked over many months through various households before eventually being taken to the ocean and forced to board a docked slave ship. 71 Equiano, Interesting Narrative , 49-71.

Overwhelmed with terror, Olaudah was placed below decks, where he was knocked back by the crying of his fellow captives and “the loathsomeness of the stench,” which made it impossible to eat anything. When he refused food from the slave traders, they violently flogged him. 72 Equiano, Interesting Narrative , 73-74. Olaudah witnessed repeated “brutal cruelty” from the slave traders, including hourly whippings for anyone who refused to eat. 73 Equiano, Interesting Narrative , 73-75.

When the slave ship set sail for Barbados, Olaudah spent weeks below decks.

The closeness of the place, and the heat of the climate, added to the number in the ship, which was so crowded that each had scarcely room to turn himself, almost suffocated us. This produced copious perspirations, so that the air soon became unfit for respiration, from a variety of loathsome smells, and brought on a sickness among the slaves, of which many died, thus falling victims to the improvident avarice, as I may call it, of their purchasers.

This wretched situation was again aggravated by the galling of the chains, now become insupportable; and the filth of the necessary tubs, into which the children often fell, and were almost suffocated. The shrieks of the women, and the groans of the dying, rendered the whole a scene of horror almost inconceivable. 74 Equiano, Interesting Narrative , 78-80.

Olaudah details an incident when, having caught fish for themselves, the white traffickers threw the extra fish they did not eat overboard, rather than give it to the kidnapped Africans. 75 Equiano, Interesting Narrative , 80-81.

He witnessed at least three kidnapped Africans attempt suicide by trying to jump off the ship and drown in the ocean rather than be subjected to a life of enslavement. One of the three men was caught and whipped “unmercifully.” 76 Equiano, Interesting Narrative , 81-82.

After weeks at sea, the ship arrived in Barbados, where Olaudah and the other captives were taken to a “merchant’s yard, where we were all pent up together like so many sheep in a fold, without regard to sex or age.” 77 Equiano, Interesting Narrative , 83-85. He was held there a few days before seeing buyers “rush” into the yard and grab the enslaved people they wanted to purchase, tearing apart families and loved ones who had survived the Middle Passage together. 78 Equiano, Interesting Narrative , 86-87. Olaudah wrote:

I remember in the vessel in which I was brought over, in the men’s apartment, there were several brothers, who, in the sale, were sold in different lots; and it was very moving on this occasion to see and hear their cries at parting. O, ye nominal Christians! might not an African ask you, learned you this from your God, who says unto you, Do unto all men as you would men should do unto you?

Is it not enough that we are torn from our country and friends to toil for your luxury and lust of gain? Must every tender feeling be likewise sacrificed to your avarice? Are the dearest friends and relations, now rendered more dear by their separation from their kindred, still to be parted from each other, and thus prevented from cheering the gloom of slavery with the small comfort of being together and mingling their sufferings and sorrows? Why are parents to lose their children, brothers their sisters, or husbands their wives? Surely this is a new refinement in cruelty, which, while it has no advantage to atone for it, thus aggravates distress, and adds fresh horrors even to the wretchedness of slavery. 79 Equiano, Interesting Narrative , 86-88.

Along with other kidnapped Africans from the same ship, Olaudah was not sold in Barbados. They were held on the island for several days, and then transported to Virginia, where they were sold into slavery. 80 Equiano, Interesting Narrative , 90-94.

Years later, in 1766, while enslaved by Robert King, a Quaker living in Montserrat, Olaudah Equiano purchased his freedom for 40 British pounds. He eventually moved to London and joined the abolitionist movement. 81 Olaudah Equiano, The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African, vol. II (Cambridge University Press, Reprint Edition, 2013), 11-19.

Back to the report

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Starting in the 15th century, when European powers initiated contact and commercial activity with Sub-Saharan Africa, and continuing throughout the following centuries, organized religion played a leading role in developing, supporting, and legislating the Transatlantic Slave Trade.

Rooted in a belief that their duty to spread Christianity justified their actions, religious organizations did not only embrace human trafficking and the enslavement of millions of Africans—they actively participated.

The Roman Catholic Church was critical to the efforts of global expansion by Portugal, Spain, and France and the creation of massive commercial enterprises built on the suffering and death of enslaved people. 110 Cottrol, Long Lingering Shadow , 55-57. In 1452 and 1455, Pope Nicholas V formally supported Spain and Portugal’s mass kidnapping and enslavement of Africans because it would help to Christianize enslaved people. 111 Carl Wise and David Wheat, “Pope Nicolas V and the Portuguese Slave Trade,” in African Laborers for a New Empire: Iberia, Slavery, and the Atlantic World , Lowcountry Digital History Initiative, updated 2016, https://ldhi.library.cofc.edu/exhibits/show/african_laborers_for_a_new_emp/pope_nicolas_v_and_the_portugu#! .

In 1548, Pope Paul III used his “apostolic authority” to declare the slave trade legal in the eyes of the church, which empowered the religious monarchies in European nations to continue to engage in Transatlantic trafficking. 112 Pius Onyemechi Adiele, The Popes, The Catholic Church, and The Transatlantic Enslavement of Black Africans 1418-1839 (Hildesheim, Zürich, New York: Georg Olms Verlag, 2017), 383-84. The “popes and their friends” accepted “gifts” of enslaved Black people shipped from Africa to Rome. 113 Davis, Inhuman Bondage , 79.

Through Transatlantic trafficking, the church systematically extended its influence. European enslavers baptized millions of enslaved people whose labor they used to amass vast wealth. 114 Arnold Bauer, The Church in the Economy of Spanish America: Censos and Depositos in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1983), 707.

The Jesuits, a religious order of the Catholic Church, justified slavery as a path to evangelization, but this did not insulate the people they enslaved from the exploitation, brutality, and dehumanization that was central to the system of chattel slavery. Like other enslavers, the Jesuits forced enslaved people to work on “Jesuit sugar plantations, cattle ranches, tobacco farms and vineyards, urban colegios, and as domestic servants.” 115 Adam Rothman, “The Jesuits and Slavery,” Journal of Jesuit Studies 8 (December 15, 2020).

During the Protestant Reformation in the 16th century, several groups of European Christians formally broke away from the Roman Catholic Church. 116 Adiele, Catholic Church, and Transatlantic Enslavement , 16. These new Protestant churches also supported Transatlantic trafficking and believed the slave trade was wholly compatible with Christianity.

Like the Roman Catholic Church, the Church of England not only promulgated an ideological apparatus to support race-based slavery, but it also was directly involved in trafficking and enslavement. The Church of England owned and operated Codrington, a profitable sugar plantation in Barbados where over 275 enslaved men, women, and children labored in hot, grueling conditions to plant, harvest, and produce sugar, which required a worker to stand over a boiling cauldron for more than 12 hours at a time. 117 Adam Hochschild, Bury the Chains: Prophets and Rebels in the Fight to Free an Empire’s Slaves (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2005), 61-68. Early death was expected and devastating injuries commonplace. Visitors to Codrington noted that hatchets were kept nearby and used to sever the limbs of enslaved people whose fingers got caught in the mill. 118 Hochschild, Bury the Chains , 63-64. Those who tried to flee were whipped, branded, and forced to wear iron collars, but records show there were numerous escape attempts. 119 Hochschild, Bury the Chains , 65.

Atlantic Worlds: Enslavement and Resistance

Part of the fascinating Atlantic gallery

The history of the transatlantic slave trade

Find out about the slave trade, resistance and eventual abolition at the Atlantic gallery.

Africa and Enslavement

Ivory, gold and other trade resources attracted Europeans to West Africa. As demand for cheap labour to work on plantations in the Americas grew, people enslaved in West Africa became the most valuable ‘commodity’ for European traders.

Slavery existed in Africa before Europeans arrived. However, their demand for slave labour was so great that traders and their agents searched far inland, devastating the region. Powerful African leaders fuelled the practice by exchanging enslaved people for goods such as alcohol, beads and cloth.

Britain became the world’s leading slave-trading country. Transatlantic slavery was especially lucrative because ships could sail with full holds on every stage of their voyage, making large profits for merchants in London, Bristol and Liverpool.

Around 12 million Africans were enslaved in the course of the transatlantic slave trade. Between 1640 and 1807, British ships transported about 3.4 million Africans across the Atlantic.

The Middle Passage

The ‘Middle Passage’ was the harrowing voyage experienced by the millions of African captives transported across the Atlantic in European ships, to work as slaves in the Americas. Conditions on board slave ships were appalling: huge numbers of people were crammed into very small spaces. Men, women and children were separated, families being torn apart.

Overcrowding, poor diet, dehydration and disease led to high death rates. 450,000 of the 3.4 million Africans transported in British ships died on the Atlantic crossing. Those who resisted by refusing food and water were beaten and force-fed. Attempts at more violent, organised rebellion were even more savagely punished. Some people preferred death to slavery and committed suicide during the voyage or later.

Visions of the Caribbean: plantation conditions

By the 16th century, Europeans had started to develop and cultivate regions in the Caribbean, North and South America. As demand for labour grew, Europeans turned to West Africa to supply an enslaved workforce.

These people were defined in law as ‘chattels’ – the personal property of their ‘owners’ – and were denied the right to live and move as they chose. Their forced labour produced commodities like tobacco, cotton and sugar, for which there was a huge European demand.

Nearly two-thirds of all enslaved people cut cane on sugar plantations. These were places of hard labour and cruel treatment with very high mortality rates. Despite this, African music, dance and religious ceremonies flourished, evolving into new hybrid cultures and traditions.

Visions of the Caribbean: resistance

Enslaved people fought to retain their families, cultures, customs and dignity. Resistance took many forms: from keeping aspects of their identity and traditions alive to escaping and plotting uprisings.

On the plantations they broke tools, damaged crops and feigned injury or illness in order to frustrate plantation owners and their ambitions for greater profits. At other times, they made bids for freedom by escaping. Sometimes these ‘runaways’ grouped together and built their own independent, self-sufficient communities of resistance, often known as ‘maroons’.

Large-scale organised uprisings were a common reaction to the cruelties of the slave system. Potential and actual armed resistance also contributed to the ending of the slave trade and eventually slavery itself.

How did the slave trade develop in Britain?

Elizabeth I believed that capturing Africans against their will 'would be detestable and call down the vengeance of Heaven upon the undertakers', yet after seeing the huge profits available she lent Royal Ships to two slaving expeditions of John Hawkins – the first English trader of enslaved people from West Africa to the Americas.

No English settlements were established in North America or in the West Indies during the reign of Elizabeth, but in the 17th century the English began to acquire territory in the New World. The English colonies expanded rapidly and the development of a plantation system and the growth of the Atlantic economy brought further demands for African labour. This increased the scale of the trade in enslaved people.

In the first third of the 18th century, Britain’s involvement in the slave trade grew enormously. In the 1710s and 1720s, nearly 200,000 enslaved Africans were transported across the Atlantic in British ships.

Abolitionism in Britain

Abolitionism was one of Britain’s first lobbying movements. The first meeting of the Society for Effecting the Abolition of the Slave Trade took place in London in May 1787. African writers and activists such as Olaudah Equiano spoke out against the trade and its inhumane treatment of Africans. High-profile figures such as William Wilberforce MP, and Thomas Clarkson also used their influence to effect its abolition.

Abolitionists argued that, in addition to stopping an immoral practice, ending the slave trade would save the lives of thousands of European sailors and open new markets for British goods. But their pro-slavery opponents pointed out how important Caribbean plantations were to Britain’s economy.

Parliament finally passed an Act to abolish the slave trade in 1807. It stated that all slave trading by British subjects was ‘utterly abolished, prohibited and declared to be unlawful’. But it did not end the institution of slavery itself and nearly 750,000 people remained enslaved in British colonies across the Caribbean.

Mobilizing public support

Abolitionists succeeded in mobilizing unprecedented public support. Through a campaign of information they demonstrated what lay behind the sugar, tobacco and coffee enjoyed by Britons. People signed petitions, attended lectures and abstained from eating West Indian sugar.

Many people who signed petitions could not vote and this was their only means of expressing their opinion to Parliament. Over 100 petitions against the slave trade were submitted to Parliament in 1788, rising to 519 in 1792. For the first time in a public political campaign, women were extensively involved, adding their voices to the calls for abolition.

The continuation of slavery

Although the British Parliament outlawed slavery in 1807, a quarter of all Africans who were enslaved were transported across the Atlantic after this date. In British colonies, the institution of slavery carried on as before, until Parliament passed an Emancipation Act in 1833. This was achieved by a combination of active resistance in the Caribbean and campaigning in Britain. Even then, full emancipation was not realized until 1838 when a period of unpaid labour ended and 800,000 people were freed across the British Caribbean. But Parliament also voted to pay the plantation owners £20 million in compensation. No payment was made to the ex-slaves.

After 1807: the Royal Navy and suppression of the slave trade

In 1808, the British West Africa Squadron was established to suppress illegal slave trading. Between 1820 and 1870, Royal Navy patrols seized over 1500 ships and freed 150,000 Africans destined for slavery in the Americas. 

Many people believed that the only way to eradicate slavery was to promote ‘legitimate’ trade and European forms of religion and government in Africa. This paved the way for colonial rule later in the 19th century.

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The Transatlantic Slave Trade and the Middle Passage

The transatlantic slave trade involved the purchase by Europeans of enslaved men, women, and children from Africa and their transportation to the Americas, where they were sold for profit. Between 1517 and 1867, about 12.5 million Africans began the Middle Passage across the Atlantic, enduring cruel treatment, disease, and paralyzing fear aboard slave ships . Of those, about 10.7 million survived, with about 40 percent of them going to work on sugarcane plantations in Brazil. Most others labored in the Caribbean, while about 3.5 percent ended up in British North America and the United States. In total, an estimated 388,000 Africans landed alive in North America and about 140,000 of these came to the Chesapeake Bay region. Most enslaved people reaching the Chesapeake Bay region before the 1670s were purchased from the English West Indies. The Royal African Company then brought about 7,000 Africans directly to Virginia between 1670 and 1698. The number of enslaved Africans imported to the colony rose steeply after 1698, when the Royal African Company lost its monopoly. The number of enslaved Africans imported into the Chesapeake Bay region peaked in the decade between 1721–1730, when 13,000 men, women, and children arrived, although it continued at robust levels until around 1780. The abolitionist movement, which began in Great Britain, helped end the British trade to the United States. The United States outlawed the importation of enslaved people through the transatlantic trade beginning in 1808. Virginia planters supported these bans, which due to a surplus of enslaved laborers positioned them as suppliers in a new, domestic slave trade .

The transatlantic slave trade was the purchase, transportation, and sale of enslaved people from Africa. These Africans were purchased by Europeans and sold in the Americas for a profit. Between 1517 and 1867, about 12.5 million Africans were forced onto the Middle Passage. On the slave ships , they suffered cruel treatment, disease, and fear. About 10.7 million survived the voyage. They were sold to work in North and South America. Most enslaved Africans ended up in the Caribbean and South America. But the number in the Virginia colony increased over time. The abolitionist movement helped end the British trade to the United States. The United States outlawed the transatlantic slave trade in 1808. By then, Virginia planters had many enslaved laborers. They could continue a profitable trade within the United States .

In This Entry

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Contributor:  Joseph C. Miller

Origins of the Transatlantic Slave Trade

Some tribes and nations in Africa experienced conflict. This led to many Africans being vulnerable to capture. Another nation in Europe, Spain, united with Portugal. The two nations began working together to buy and trade many different resources.  They also worked together to buy and sell enslaved people. They transported captives to different islands and other slave plantations. In 1619, two English ships—the  White Lion  and the  Treasurer —attacked a Portuguese ship. They robbed its cargo of about fifty enslaved Africans. A few months later, the  White Lion  arrived in Virginia. It was carrying the  “20. and odd”  survivors—the  first Africans  in the new colony.

By the 1620s Portugal had many large sugar plantations in Brazil. These plantations required many enslaved laborers. The work growing sugar cane was intense.

The Dutch took control of these sugar Plantations from 1630 until 1654. The Dutch were eventually driven out. They turned to bringing captured Africans to the English sugar plantations in Barbados and Jamaica.

The Middle Passage

The trade developed between Europe, Africa, and the Americas. It was sometimes called the “triangular trade.” On the first leg, goods from Europe were transported for trade in Africa. These goods included wine, metals such as iron and copper, and cheap muskets. The highest demand, however, was for cloth.

Inhumanity and Horrors of the Middle Passage

More than half of the enslaved Africans who landed in North America came through Charleston, South Carolina. Many came through Charleston after 1800 as cotton production became profitable. About 130,000 men, women, and children landed in the Chesapeake Bay region. Virginia planters purchased them to work in  tobacco fields .

Virginia and the Transatlantic Slave Trade

In 1673, adult enslaved people were sold to Virginia planters for low prices. Most enslaved Africans were sold to the  richest Virginians . The planters paid in tobacco. They also claimed headrights, or land grants, of fifty acres on each enslaved person. (The headright system, gave land to anyone who paid the cost of transporting an  indentured servant  to the colony. It was extended to cover enslaved laborers. Headrights for enslaved people were ended in 1699.)

The number of enslaved Africans in Virginia rose to 13,000 by 1730. The population of enslaved people no longer depended on the transatlantic slave trade. If an enslaved woman gave birth to a child, that child would be considered enslaved as well. This would make the transatlantic slave trade much less important to Virginia and the other English colonies.

End of the Transatlantic Slave Trade

In the United States, plantation owners made huge profits from owning enslaved people. These enslavers rarely found slavery to conflict with their Revolutionary ideas of liberty and equality.  Thomas Jefferson criticized Britain’s practice of selling enslaved people to colonists at high prices.

Congress passed an “Act Prohibiting Importation of Slaves,” on January 1, 1808. Rich Virginia planters supported the ban on importing slaves. But this was not because they opposed slavery. Many of them had transitioned from growing tobacco to producing things that were easier to grow. Their numbers of enslaved Africans had been increasing naturally. The invention of the cotton gin and the beginning of the Industrial Revolution created a cotton boom in the southern states. Virginia enslavers were able to be the suppliers of the enslaved labor needed to grow cotton. Planters from Georgia to Texas would be forced to purchase enslaved people from Virginia. Between 1790 and 1860, more than 1 million enslaved men, women, and children were transported from the Upper South to the Deep South.

The transatlantic slave trade involved the purchase, transportation, and sale of enslaved men, women, and children from Africa. These Africans were purchased by Europeans and transported to the Americas where they were sold for profit. Between 1517 and 1867, about 12.5 million Africans began the Middle Passage across the Atlantic. They endured cruel treatment, disease, and paralyzing fear aboard  slave ships . Of those, about 10.7 million survived, with about 40 percent of them going to work on sugarcane plantations in Brazil. Most others labored in the Caribbean, while about 3.5 percent ended up in British North America and the United States. In total, an estimated 388,000 Africans landed alive in North America. About 140,000 of these came to the Chesapeake Bay region. Most enslaved people reaching the Chesapeake Bay region before the 1670s were purchased from the English West Indies. The Royal African Company then brought about 7,000 Africans directly to Virginia between 1670 and 1698. The number of enslaved Africans imported to the colony rose steeply after 1698, when the Royal African Company lost its monopoly. The trade continued at robust levels until around 1780. The abolitionist movement, which began in Great Britain, helped end the British trade to the United States. The United States outlawed the importation of enslaved people through the transatlantic trade beginning in 1808. Virginia planters supported these bans, which, due to a surplus of enslaved laborers, positioned them as suppliers in a new,  domestic slave trade .

Portuguese mariners began patrolling the west coast of Africa in the fifteenth century, primarily in search of gold. In the process, they encountered and either purchased or captured small numbers of Africans. The first shipload of 235 captives landed in Lagos, Portugal, in 1444. After the 1470s, gold from the Akan area (modern-day Ghana) financed a second, larger stage of Atlantic slaving. The Portuguese purchased captives from the Benin area just east of the Niger River delta and sold them to labor in the gold mines of the Akan area. The Portuguese left other enslaved Africans on the small islands of the eastern Atlantic. The Portuguese and Spaniards held these islands for strategic reasons. They paid the costs of military occupation by putting Africans to work turning small farms into large sugar plantations. In this way, gold supported slaving and enslaved people produced sugar. In turn, this supported increased commercial investments in the Atlantic world.

Shortly after 1500, the Portuguese transferred the plantation model to the island of São Tomé off the coast of what is now Gabon. São Tomé had good rains and rich volcanic soil ideal for growing sugar. By the mid-sixteenth century the island’s residents had invested heavily in enslaved labor. São Tomé would be the world’s leading producer of raw sugar.

From Local to Transatlantic Trade

The first large wave of captured Africans swept across the Atlantic in the 1590s. Prior to then, the trade in captives had been relatively small. African authorities strongly preferred to sell commodities such as gold, ivory, and other natural resources. At the time, conflicts between African peoples did not result in much violence or produce many captives. An exception to this involved Saharan traders. Beginning in the tenth century, they introduced horses to sell for gold from the region next to the desert. The Africans who bought these horses deployed them to wage wars of a much greater intensity. As conflicts grew, the demand for horses exceeded the supply of gold to pay for them. The horses were used to capture Africans to sell as enslaved laborers to buy more horses. These captives were destined for markets in North Africa, but along the way the desert traders diverted some of their human cargo to Portuguese buyers.

At the same time, the death of King Henry of Portugal in 1580 led to a union with Spain. The Portuguese in West Africa became Spanish subjects with the authority to trade in American markets. By this time, the chaos in Kongo had produced thousands of refugees who were easily captured for transport to the Spanish Indies. The cost of buying these vulnerable Africans was low. European investors were able make a profit selling these captives in America for Spanish silver.

Dutch and English privateers, neither of them friends of Spain or Portugal, preyed on the ships transporting these captive Africans. In 1619, two of them—the  White Lion  and the  Treasurer —attacked the Portuguese ship  São João Bautista . They robbed it of its cargo of about fifty enslaved Africans. A few months later, the  White Lion  arrived in Virginia carrying the  “20. and odd”  survivors—the  first Africans  in the new colony. 

The trade remained relatively small until a series of unrelated events converged in the area south of the Kingdom of Kongo (present-day northern Angola). This transformed the early stream of captives for sale in the Old World into a flood of enslaved people destined for the Americas. In 1575, the Portuguese sent a military expedition to a bay near the mouth of the Kwanza River. Their intention had been to seize what they incorrectly believed to be mountains of silver in the interior. They arrived during a prolonged drought, which had caused many African communities to scatter in search of food. Some younger men survived by forming armed gangs to prey on the few communities still with crops. Some of these bandits joined the Portuguese in attacking the area around the lower Kwanza River.

By the 1620s Portugal had established large sugar plantations in Brazil. Portugal had claimed Brazil in 1500, replacing São Tomé as the world’s largest producer of sugar. These plantations required enslaved labor on a large scale to do the back-breaking work of cultivating sugar cane. However, enslaved Africans for sale in the Spanish port cities were far too expensive. Instead, the Brazilian Portuguese bought enslaved Africans from ship captains stopping along their course to the Caribbean. They also organized their own slaving ventures in West Africa.

Portuguese sugar production was interrupted when the Dutch seized northeast Brazil’s plantations from 1630 until 1654. When they were eventually expelled, the Dutch turned to supplying captive Africans to the early English sugar plantations in Barbados and Jamaica.

The so-called triangular trade that subsequently developed between Europe, Africa, and the Americas was in fact a complex series of separate trades. These were sometimes spread over several ships sailing on each of its three legs. On the first leg, manufactured goods from Europe were transported for sale or trade in Africa. These goods included wine and spirits, various metals such as iron and copper, and ammunition and cheap muskets. (The Portuguese avoided and eventually banned the sale of firearms in Angola.) The most highly sought-after material in Africa, however, was cloth, mostly Indian cottons and Chinese silks.

On the second, middle leg of the trade, goods were replaced with human cargo for the journey to the Americas. The captives were sold in the European colonies to produce the sugar, tobacco, cotton, and other raw materials that would be shipped to Europe. Captured Africans  suffered terribly  on this Middle Passage. They were often loaded onto slave ships after enduring weeks or months of forced marches, deprivation, and brutality on their way to the sea. This left them vulnerable to traumatic stress and diseases. When chained below decks, they could barely move, even to attend to bodily functions. They were routinely subjected to rough, sometimes brutal treatment by members of the crew. As the writer known only as “Dicky Sam” recounted in  Liverpool and Slavery  (1884): “The captain bullies the men, the men torture the slaves, the slaves’ hearts are breaking with despair; many more are dead, their bodies thrown into the sea, more food for the sharks.” Malnutrition, dehydration, and disease produced mortality among the captives. The death rate averaged above 20 percent in the first decades of the transatlantic trade. This rate dropped to 10 percent by 1800 or so, and to about 5 percent in the last decade of the trade.

Between 1517 and 1867, 12.5 million enslaved Africans were forced onto ships to begin the Middle Passage to America. About 10.7 million men, women, and children survived the journey. About 40 percent, mostly from Angola, landed in Brazil, where the trade continued until 1850. About 35 percent of enslaved Africans went to the non-Spanish colonies in the Caribbean. A bit more than 20 percent were sold in Spanish colonies. About 3.5 percent were sent to British North America and the United States. This was well north of the major sailing routes, where the sugar, the heart of the Atlantic economy, could not be cultivated.

The tens of thousands of voyages that comprised the transatlantic slave trade were structured as business ventures. Elite European merchants and merchant bankers provided funding and capital transfer services to British, French, and Dutch operators of ships. The Portuguese left their trade in the southern Atlantic to traders in Brazil. High losses due to mortality on the Middle Passage were a primary reason that many Triangular Trade voyages failed to turn a profit. John Newton, a British captain who publicly turned against the trade, described the whole enterprise as “a sort of lottery in which every adventurer hoped to gain a prize.”

Every national community of European merchants participated in the transatlantic slave trade. Portugal was the largest overall transporter of enslaved Africans. Great Britain became the dominant slaving power in the eighteenth century. It accounted for about 25 percent of the total, including up to half of those enslaved people delivered to North America. Spain accounted for about 15 percent of the total. The French transported about 12 percent of enslaved Africans—mostly to its West Indies islands during the eighteenth century and before the Haitian Revolution of 1791. The Dutch transported less than 5 percent.

North Americans were relatively minor players in the transatlantic slave trade. They accounted for less than 3 percent of the total trade. Most of the North American trade was conducted by Rhode Island merchants. They exported lumber and pine resin, meat and dairy products, cider, and horses to the West Indies and returned with molasses. The rum processed from this molasses was exported to Africa, to sell for enslaved captives. They then transported these captives to the West Indies to sell to sugar planters for more molasses.

The highest volumes of the transatlantic slave trade came in the 1700s. During this century more than half of the total, amounting to an average of about 50,000 enslaved Africans per year, was transported. This took place mostly from the end of the Seven Years’ War in 1763 until the end of the British trade in 1807.

More than half of the 388,000 enslaved Africans who landed alive in North America came through the port of Charleston, South Carolina. A burst of arrivals came through Charleston after 1800 as cotton production in the state took off. Anxious planters anticipated the end of slave imports in 1808. The Chesapeake Bay region was second, with an estimated 130,000 men, women, and children landing there. Some of these enslaved people, particularly before 1700, came to North America not directly from Africa but from the Caribbean. Virginia planters purchased them to work in  tobacco fields .

In the Americas, planters paid for enslaved people on credit secured by future deliveries of sugar or other products. Some captains of slave ships were reluctant to accept sugar or tobacco. They were concerned over the price they might receive when they then tried to sell it in European markets. Bills of exchange in financial centers such as London covered this risk. Generally, American buyers of captives paid captains about a quarter of what they owed immediately in cash or commodities such as sugar or tobacco. They sent the rest over the next year and a half. As a result of these delayed payments, some slave ships returned to Europe largely empty of cargo. Once home, slave-ship captains sold what commodities they carried. The investors in the voyages waited to collect the rest in payments on the credit extended.

English Trade Monopoly in West Africa

Though the number of enslaved Africans arriving in Virginia increased under the Royal African Company, it remained relatively small. In the years prior to 1670, only two to three ships, carrying perhaps 200 to 300 captives each, arrived. In the following decade, that tripled to between seven and nine arrivals, totaling as many as 2,000 enslaved captives. Between 1681 and 1690, about eleven ships carrying approximately 3,200 enslaved Africans landed in Virginia. That number decreased the following decade to five ships carrying about 1,100 enslaved Africans, probably related to King William’s War (1689–1697) with France.

In 1698, the Crown withdrew the Royal African Company’s monopoly. It had sold enslaved Africans on credit to startup planters in Barbados, who paid their debts too slowly for the company to continue to operate. With the monopoly gone, private traders swooped in, increasing the slave trade. About the same time, a series of wars on the Gold Coast and the rise of slave-trading in the southeastern region of Nigeria was occurring. This resulted in more enslaved Africans available for export to the Americas. The number of enslaved Africans being brought to Virginia rose from about 1,100 in the 1690s to 13,000 between 1721–1730. Imports of enslaved Africans remained robust for the next several decades. Though, after about 1730 the enslaved population in the Chesapeake Bay region became self-sustaining due to births to enslaved women. This would gradually decrease the importance of the transatlantic slave trade to Virginia.

The abolition movement that had begun with British Quakers, spread to the United States. It aroused popular opinion against the transatlantic trade by  reporting on the horrors  of the Middle Passage. Among other strategies, they spread an iconic image of the British slave ship  Brookes  to demonstrate the extreme crowding of the captives on the slave deck. In 1788, the British Parliament restricted the number of enslaved Africans who could be transported in given spaces on the ships. In 1806 Westminster banned trade to foreign territories, including the new United States. On March 25, 1807, Parliament ended British participation in the trade altogether.

In Britain, the stakeholders in the trade were primarily merchants invested in goods and ships. In the United States, they were plantation owners, whose profits from owning enslaved people were substantial. These enslavers rarely found slavery to be in conflict with their Revolutionary ideals of liberty and equality.  Thomas Jefferson , in an early draft of the Declaration of Independence, criticized Britain’s practice of selling enslaved people to colonists at inflated prices. Debate over the civil standing of enslaved people in the United States resulted in a constitutional compromise. This compromise allowed limited additional enslaved people to be sold into the country. Without referring specifically to enslaved Africans, Article I, Section 9, of the U.S. Constitution gave temporary control over imports to the states. It prohibited Congress from interfering with the “Migration or Importation such Persons as any of the States now existing shall think proper to admit,” for twenty years.

Congress passed an “Act Prohibiting Importation of Slaves,” which became effective on January 1, 1808. Elite Virginia planters supported the prohibition of further imports of enslaved people, but not because they opposed slavery. Rather, many of them had transitioned from growing tobacco to production of less labor-intensive wheat. For three generations or more, their holdings of enslaved Africans had been increasing naturally, creating a surplus of hands. Around the same time, the invention of the cotton gin and the beginning of the Industrial Revolution created a cotton boom in the southern states. Virginia enslavers thus found themselves positioned to become the suppliers of the enslaved labor needed to cultivate cotton. Planters from Georgia to Texas would be forced to purchase enslaved people from Virginia and other long-time slave-holding states. Between 1790 and 1860, more than 1 million enslaved men, women, and children were transported in a large and profitable domestic trade from the Upper South to the Deep South. Whether through the transatlantic trade or through the domestic trade of enslaved people, the human toll of the slave trade in terror, death, and widespread social disruption is difficult to fathom.

Portuguese mariners began patrolling the west coast of Africa in the fifteenth century, primarily in search of gold. In the process, they encountered and either purchased or captured small numbers of Africans, with the first shipload of 235 captives landing in Lagos, Portugal, in 1444. After the 1470s, gold from the Akan area inland from the so-called Gold Coast (modern-day Ghana) financed a second, larger stage of Atlantic slaving. The Portuguese purchased captives from the Benin area just east of the Niger River delta and sold them to labor in the gold mines of the Akan area. On their way back to Europe, the Portuguese left other enslaved Africans on the small islands of the eastern Atlantic, especially Madeira and the Canaries. The Portuguese and Spaniards held these islands for strategic reasons and paid the costs of military occupation by putting Africans to work turning small farms into large sugar plantations. In this way, gold begat slaving and slaves begat sugar, which, in turn, supported increased commercial investments in the Atlantic world.

Shortly after 1500, the Portuguese transferred the plantation model to the equatorial island of São Tomé off the coast of what is now Gabon, which boasted good rains and rich volcanic soil ideal for growing sugar. By the mid-sixteenth century the island’s residents had invested heavily in enslaved labor and made São Tomé the world’s leading producer of raw sugar.

The first large wave of captive Africans swept across the Atlantic in the 1590s. Prior to then, the trade in captives had been relatively small because African authorities strongly preferred to sell extracted commodities, such as gold, ivory, and other natural resources. At the time, conflicts between African peoples did not result in much violence or produce many captives. An exception to this involved Saharan traders who, beginning in the tenth century, introduced horses to sell for gold from the region adjoining the desert. The Africans who bought these horses deployed them to wage wars of a much greater intensity. As conflicts escalated, the demand for horses exceeded the supply of gold to pay for them, and the mounts were used to capture Africans to sell as slaves to buy more horses. These captives were destined for markets in North Africa, but along the way the desert traders diverted some of their human cargo to Portuguese buyers, who then sold them in established Iberian markets, which was how the first cargo of enslaved people came to be sold at Lagos, Portugal.

The trade remained relatively small until a series of unrelated events converged in the area south of the Kingdom of Kongo (present-day northern Angola) to transform the early stream of captives for sale in the Old World into a flood of enslaved people destined for the Americas. In 1575, the Portuguese sent a military expedition to a bay near the mouth of the Kwanza River. Their intention had been to seize what they incorrectly believed to be mountains of silver in the interior. They arrived in the midst of a prolonged drought, which had caused many African communities to disperse in search of food. Some younger men survived by forming armed gangs to prey on the few communities still with crops, and some of these bandits joined the Portuguese in attacking the area around the lower Kwanza River, then under the influence of a military leader called the Ngola.

At the same time, the death of King Henry of Portugal in 1580 led to a dynastic union with Spain. The Portuguese in West Africa became Spanish subjects with the authority to trade in Spain’s American markets. By this time, the chaos in Kongo had produced thousands of refugees who were easily captured for dispatch to the Spanish Indies. The cost of buying these desperately vulnerable Africans was low, so European investors were able make a profit selling these captives in America for Spanish silver.

Dutch and English privateers, neither of them friends of Spain or Portugal, preyed on the ships transporting these captive Africans. In 1619, two of them—the  White Lion  and the  Treasurer —attacked the Portuguese ship  São João Bautista , robbing it of its cargo of about fifty enslaved Africans. A few months later, the  White Lion  arrived in Virginia carrying the  “20. and odd” survivors—the  first Africans  in the new colony.

The Production of Sugar

By the 1620s Portugal had established sizable sugar plantations in Brazil, which it had claimed in 1500, replacing São Tomé as the world’s largest producer of sugar. These plantations required enslaved labor on a large scale to do the back-breaking work of cultivating sugar cane. However, enslaved Africans for sale in the Spanish port cities were far too expensive. Instead, the Brazilian Portuguese bought enslaved Africans from ship captains stopping along their course to the Caribbean, while also organizing their own slaving ventures in West Africa.

Portuguese sugar production was interrupted when the Dutch seized northeast Brazil’s plantations from 1630 until 1654. When they were eventually expelled, the Dutch turned to supplying captive Africans to the early English sugar plantations in Barbados and Jamaica in the West Indies.

The so-called triangular trade that subsequently developed between Europe, Africa, and the Americas was in fact a complex series of separate trades, sometimes spread over several vessels sailing on each of its three legs. On the first leg, manufactured goods from Europe were transported for sale or trade in Africa. These goods included wine and spirits, various metals such as iron and copper, and ammunition and cheap muskets. (The Portuguese avoided and eventually banned the sale of firearms in Angola.) The category of goods most in demand in Africa, however, was cloth, mostly Indian cottons and Chinese silks.

On the second, middle leg of the trade, goods were replaced with human cargo for the journey to the Americas, where the captives were sold in the European colonies to produce the sugar, tobacco, cotton, and other raw materials that would be shipped to Europe on the final leg of the triangle. Captive Africans suffered terribly on this Middle Passage, often loaded onto slave ships after enduring weeks or months of forced marches, deprivation, and brutality on their way to the sea, leaving them vulnerable once onboard the ships to traumatic stress and communicable diseases. When chained below decks, they could barely move, even to attend to bodily functions. “The closeness of the place, and the heat of the climate, added to the number in the ship, which was so crowded that each had scarcely room to turn himself, almost suffocated us. … the air soon became unfit for respiration from a variety of loathsome smells, and brought on a sickness among the slaves, of which many died,” wrote Olaudah Equiano of his time on a slave ship following his capture ( The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano , 1789).

Captives were routinely subjected to rough, sometimes brutal treatment by members of the crew, whom they outnumbered by ten or more to one. As the writer known only as “Dicky Sam” recounted in Liverpool and Slavery (1884): “The captain bullies the men, the men torture the slaves, the slaves’ hearts are breaking with despair; many more are dead, their bodies thrown into the sea, more food for the sharks.” Malnutrition and dehydration, both aggravated by dysentery, smallpox, and other afflictions, produced mortality among the captives that averaged above 20 percent in the first decades of the transatlantic trade, which dropped to 10 percent by 1800 or so, and to about 5 percent in the last decade of the trade.

Between 1517 and 1867, 12.5 million enslaved Africans were forced onto ships to begin the Middle Passage to America. About 10.7 million men, women, and children survived the journey. Of these, about 40 percent, mostly from Angola, landed in Brazil, where the trade continued until 1850. About 35 percent of enslaved Africans went to the non-Spanish colonies in the Caribbean and a bit more than 20 percent were sold in Spanish colonies. About 3.5 percent were sent to British North America and the United States, which lay well north of the major sailing routes and where the sugar at the heart of the Atlantic mercantile economy could not be cultivated.

The tens of thousands of voyages that comprised the transatlantic slave trade were structured as business ventures. Elite European merchants and merchant bankers provided funding and capital transfer services to British, French, and Dutch operators of ships, while the Portuguese left their trade in the southern Atlantic to traders in Brazil. High losses due to slave mortality on the Middle Passage were a primary reason that many Triangular Trade voyages failed to turn a profit. John Newton, a British captain who publicly turned against the trade, described the whole enterprise as “a sort of lottery in which every adventurer hoped to gain a prize.”

Every national community of European merchants participated in the transatlantic slave trade. Portugal was the largest overall transporter of enslaved Africans. Great Britain became the dominant slaving power in the eighteenth century, accounting for about 25 percent of the total, including up to half of those enslaved people delivered to North America. Spain, which entered the trade directly only in the nineteenth century to support the belated development of sugar and coffee in Cuba, eventually accounted for about 15 percent of the total. The French transported about 12 percent of enslaved Africans—mostly to its West Indies islands during the eighteenth century and before the Haitian Revolution of 1791—and the Dutch less than 5 percent.

North Americans were relatively minor players in the transatlantic slave trade, accounting for less than 3 percent of the total trade. Most of the North American trade was conducted by Rhode Island merchants, who exported lumber and pine resin, meat and dairy products, cider, and horses to the West Indies and returned with molasses, which they distilled into very high-proof rum. This they exported to Africa, primarily Upper Guinea and the Windward Coast, to sell for enslaved captives, which they then transported to the West Indies to sell to sugar planters for more molasses.

The highest volumes of the transatlantic slave trade came in the 1700s. During this century more than half of the total, amounting to an average of about 50,000 enslaved Africans per year, was transported, mostly from the end of the Seven Years’ War in 1763 until the end of the British trade in 1807. (The source for these precise numbers is the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database, a collection of the known details of almost 36,000 slaving voyages, about 80 percent of the total, which allow reasonable estimates for the undocumented remainder.)

Slightly more than half of the 388,000 enslaved Africans who landed alive in North America came through the port of Charleston, South Carolina. A burst of arrivals came through Charleston after 1800 as cotton production in the state took off and anxious planters anticipated the end of slave imports in 1808. The Chesapeake Bay region was second, with about a third, or an estimated 130,000 men, women, and children disembarking there. Some of these enslaved people, particularly before 1700, came to North America not directly from Africa but from the Caribbean, where Virginia planters purchased them to work in tobacco fields .

In the Americas, planters or their brokers paid for slaves on credit secured by future deliveries of sugar or other commodities. Some slave captains were reluctant to accept sugar or tobacco out of concern over the price they might receive when they then tried to sell it in European markets, and bills of exchange drawn on merchant-bankers in financial centers such as London covered this risk. Generally, American buyers of captives paid captains about a quarter of what they owed immediately in cash or commodities such as sugar or tobacco and sent the rest over the next year and a half. As a result of these delayed payments, some slave ships returned to Europe largely empty of cargo. Once home, slave-ship captains sold what commodities they carried, and the investors in the voyages waited to collect the rest in payments on the credit extended.

In 1660, King Charles II of England chartered the Company of Royal Adventurers Trading to Africa, granting its investors a monopoly on English trade in West Africa, then mostly for gold. After falling into debt, it reorganized and obtained a new charter in 1672 as the Royal African Company. Again structured around the quest for gold, the company carried enslaved captives to the Americas as a concession to the interests of the Crown in securing strategic island anchors in Barbados and Jamaica. The company purchased African captives from Senegambia and on the Gold Coast and established direct routes to English colonies in the Caribbean and North America.

Prior to 1672, direct shipments of enslaved captives to the Chesapeake Bay region were rare. Beginning in 1673, however, the company offered to sell adult slaves to Virginia planters for £18 sterling. These  sales  were not made at public auction or directly to planters but to intermediaries, usually local merchants who served as sales agents. As a result, nearly all enslaved Africans ended up in the hands of the  richest Virginians . These planters paid in tobacco and claimed headrights, or land grants, of fifty acres each on each of them. (The headright system awarded land to anyone who paid the cost of transporting an  indentured servant  to the colony and was extended to cover enslaved laborers. Headrights for enslaved laborers were terminated in 1699.)

Though the number of enslaved Africans arriving in Virginia increased under the Royal African Company, it remained relatively small. In the years prior to 1670, only two to three ships, carrying perhaps 200 to 300 captives each, arrived. In the following decade, that tripled to between seven and nine arrivals, totaling as many as 2,000 enslaved captives. Between 1681 and 1690, about eleven ships carrying approximately 3,200 enslaved Africans landed in Virginia. That number decreased the following decade to five ships carrying about 1,100 enslaved Africans, probably related to King William’s War (1689–1697) with France.

In 1698, the Crown withdrew the Royal African Company’s monopoly after it had sold enslaved Africans on credit to startup planters in Barbados, who paid their debts too slowly for the company to continue to operate. With the monopoly gone, private traders swooped in, increasing the slave trade. About the same time, a series of wars on the Gold Coast and the rise of the slave-trading Aro Confederacy in southeastern Nigeria resulted in more enslaved Africans available for export to the Americas. As a result, the number of enslaved Africans being brought to Virginia rose from about 1,100 in the 1690s to 8,600 between 1701–1710 and to 13,000 between 1721–1730. Imports of enslaved Africans remained robust for the next several decades, although after about 1730 the enslaved population in the Chesapeake Bay region became naturally self-sustaining due to births to enslaved women, which would gradually lessen the importance of the transatlantic slave trade to Virginia.

The abolition movement that had begun with British Quakers spread to the United States. It aroused popular opinion against the transatlantic trade by reporting on the horrors  of the Middle Passage by, among other strategies, spreading an iconic image of the British slave ship  Brookes to demonstrate the extreme crowding of the captives on the slave deck. In 1788, the British Parliament restricted the number of enslaved Africans who could be transported in given spaces on the ships, and in 1806 Westminster banned trade to foreign territories, including the new United States. On March 25, 1807, Parliament ended British participation in the trade altogether.

     In Britain, the stakeholders in the trade were primarily merchants invested in goods and ships. In the United States, they were plantation owners, whose profits from owning slaves were substantial and who seldom found slavery to be in conflict with their Revolutionary ideals of liberty and equality. Thomas Jefferson , in an early draft of the Declaration of Independence, criticized Britain’s practice of selling slaves to colonists at inflated prices, and debate over the civil standing of individuals enslaved in the new United States resulted in a constitutional compromise allowing limited additional numbers to be sold into the country. Without referring specifically to enslaved Africans, Article I, Section 9, of the U.S. Constitution ceded temporary control over imports to the states by prohibiting Congress from interfering with the “Migration or Importation such Persons as any of the States now existing shall think proper to admit,” for twenty years.

At the first opportunity, on March 2, 1807, Congress passed an “Act Prohibiting Importation of Slaves,” which became effective on January 1, 1808. Elite Virginia planters supported the prohibition of further imports of slaves, but not because they opposed slavery. Rather, many of them had transitioned from growing tobacco to production of less labor-intensive wheat, and for three generations or more their holdings of enslaved Africans had been increasing naturally, creating a surplus of hands. Around the same time, the invention of the cotton gin and the beginning of the Industrial Revolution created a cotton boom in the southern states. Virginia enslavers thus found themselves positioned to become the suppliers of the enslaved labor needed to cultivate cotton, as absent new supplies of enslaved laborers from Africa, planters from Georgia west to Texas would be forced to purchase enslaved people from Virginia and other long-time slave-holding states. Between 1790 and 1860, more than 1 million enslaved men, women, and children were transported in a large and very profitable domestic trade from the Upper South to the Deep South. Whether the transatlantic trade or the domestic trade in enslaved people, the human toll of the slave trade in terror, death, and widespread social disruption is difficult to fathom.

“Voyages: The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database”

• African American History
• Antebellum Period (1820–1860)
• Colonial History (ca. 1560–1763)
• Revolution and Early Republic (1763–1823)
• Coombs, John C. “The Phases of Conversion: A New chronology for the Rise of Slavery in Early Virginia.” William and Mary Quarterly 68, no. 3 (July 2011): 332–360.
• Eltis, David and David Richardson. Atlas of the Transatlantic Slave Trade . New Haven, Connecticut: Yale University Press, 2010.
• Harms, Robert. The Diligent: A Voyage through the Worlds of the Slave Trade. New York: Basic Books, 2002.
• Miller, Joseph C. Way of Death: Merchant Capitalism and the Angolan Slave Trade, 1730­–1830. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1988.
• 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 Books, 2007.
• Thomas, Hugh. The Slave Trade: The History of the Atlantic Slave Trade, 1440–1870 . New York: Simon and Schuster, 1997.
• Thornton, John K., and Linda Heywood. Central Africans, Atlantic Creoles, and the Foundation of the Americas, 1585–1660 . New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007.
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The Transatlantic Slave Trade

Between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries, the Transatlantic Slave Trade brought twelve million enslaved Africans across the Atlantic Ocean to the New World as part of a broad exchange of trade goods between England, West Africa, South America, the West Indies, and the United States. While the largest numbers of slaves were sent to South America, particularly Brazil, and the West Indies, smaller numbers arrived in the United States where Americans purchased them for labor. Most often from the west and central portions of the African continent, these enslaved people were kidnapped, forced to endure extreme violence, ripped from family and familiar language and culture, and treated as property. They endured the horrors of the Middle Passage, the journey by ship from West African slave trading ports to the New World during which an estimated two million captives died. Once in the United States, enslaved Africans were sold at auctions across the country, from the rice plantations of the South Carolina coast to the small businesses and farms of the rural Northeast. Both England and the United States outlawed the importation of slaves through slave trading in 1807. This did not fully prevent illegal slave trading to the United States, which persisted until the American Civil War. This primary source set include documents, photographs, artwork, and maps that tell the story of the slave trade and its impact.

• Franky Abbott, Digital Public Library of America

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• Colonization and Settlement (1585-1763)
• World History
• African Americans

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1 A New Assessment of the Transatlantic Slave Trade

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This chapter presents a new assessment of the transatlantic slave trade, including the organization and publication of the massive amount of new data on slave-trade voyages, the production of accessible reference to summary statistics derived from these data, and sustained scholarly attention to several branches of the slave trade. The reassessment has been constructed around the national flags that slave traders used to cross the Atlantic. The Transatlantic Slave Trade: An Expanded and Online Database (TSTD2) permits a firmly rooted understanding of the relative importance of the Dutch in the transatlantic slave trade. The annual breakdowns for the participation of each national group across 350 years also provide a basis for estimating the departure of slaves from Africa and the arrival of slaves in the Americas. TSTD 2 will shift attention away from the overall assessment of the slave trade and the thousands of ports that were involved in the business.

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The British Countryside’s Forgotten History of Slavery

Britons tend to downplay the empire’s slave-trading history. but its links to virginia tobacco are all over the landscape..

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The Irish Sea churns against St. Bees Head. This is northern England’s most westerly tip, in a part of Cumbria once known as Cumberland. Here, giant cliffs face the sea; beyond it lies the Atlantic and North America. Today this is an established heritage coast , its cliffs crowded with seabirds and rare species; the sea below is a marine conservation zone.

This article is adapted from The Countryside: Ten Rural Walks Through Britain and Its Hidden History of Empire by Corinne Fowler (Scribner, 432 pp., $30, June 2024).

The coast is part of a gigantic coalfield, and coal seams run for 14 miles from St. Bees north to the coastal town of Maryport. Between them lies the Georgian town of Whitehaven. Once a huddle of fisherman’s cabins and thatched cottages, Whitehaven became a major port with sweeping streets and generous mansions belonging to wealthy merchants. Nowadays, Whitehaven styles itself as the place where the Lake District meets the sea. The town’s gentility has faded, and the peeling stuccoed houses rub shoulders with boarded-up shops.

Remote as Whitehaven was from Britain’s urban centers, the isolated coal town nonetheless became the nation’s second-largest tobacco importer and its fifth-biggest slave-trading port. From the 1680s, Whitehaven’s townspeople became tobacco traders, plantation owners, and slavers. In the fullness of time, these colonial figures became magistrates, customs officials, industrialists, and politicians. They climbed the social ranks, married into wealthy families, and gained power and political influence. Transatlantic profits were reinvested in local infrastructure, much of which still stands today.

The British tend to associate the nation’s slavery past with faraway plantations in places such as Louisiana or well-known slave-trading ports such as Liverpool. Yet Britain’s country estates, fields, and hamlets were everywhere altered by imperial wealth of all kinds, whether from the West Indies, America’s southern states, or India. Landownership, for instance, is among empire’s most significant legacies in rural Britain: In the 18th and 19th centuries, colonial profits intensified the process of enclosure, accounting for significant land sales whereby landless locals lost their right of access to common land. Many a British hedgerow was laid with colonial wealth, and many a quintessentially English-looking village church was built with the proceeds of empire. The Whitehaven coast is a prime example of these hidden histories of empire, since its tobacco and slavery history forever altered its built heritage.

A painting depicts an English Navy officer kidnapping an enslaved woman on Barbados Pier, from John Mitford’s “Adventures of Johnny Newcome in the Navy,” London, 1819. Charles Williams illustrationFlorilegius/Universal Images Group via Getty Images

One sunny November day in 2022, I took a walk along the coast, beginning seven miles south of Whitehaven at the village of St. Bees, with Peter Kalu, a writer from Manchester. Peter knows the place well. A decade before our walk, he’d visited the area to read some papers about Barbados in Whitehaven’s local archive, where he’d stumbled across a copy of a 1770s diary about plantation life in Barbados and, for the first time in his life, encountered the words and thoughts of a slave owner. His response was to start writing historical fiction about British slavery. This was no easy challenge, for his personal relationship to colonial history is complicated: His mother is Danish, his father Nigerian. “The invader and the looted inhabitant,” he told me with a wry smile, though there’s no doubt where his sympathies lie.

As a writing mentor and editor, Peter has had a galvanizing effect on the region’s literary culture. History, race, and class are prominent themes in his writing, which spans poetry, fiction, folktales, plays, songs, and film scripts. His crime novel Yard Dogs , for instance, references Manchester’s cotton history and the origins of its wealth in the slave trade and exploited local labor.

The morning of our walk was bright. As we ambled along the beach toward the cliffs, Peter told me about a poem he’d recently written and performed for some schoolchildren. It was about a boomerang, reversing in mid-flight and coming back to smack you in the face. The boomerang was a metaphor for colonialism, which returns with its consequences (looted museum objects, controversial statues, repressed histories). The metaphor well describes his first encounter with the words of that 18th-century enslaver in Whitehaven’s archives. “There I was,” he said, “the son of a Nigerian father, hit between the eyes by an account of plantation violence.”

The diary belonged to a man called Joseph Senhouse, who was born in 1741 in Maryport on the Whitehaven coast, where the Senhouses dominated trade and held sway as landowners, in customs, and as developers and manufacturers. Joseph’s older brother William was active in the colonial trade. William became surveyor general of customs in Barbados in the 1770s and acquired a sugar plantation. Following in his footsteps, Joseph became collector of customs on the West Indian island of Dominica, where he owned a coffee plantation.

Sitting in the Whitehaven archives, Peter was stunned by Joseph Senhouse’s account of his visit to his brother’s Barbadian estates. “What affected me most,” he told me, “was the thingification of Black people.” What Peter meant was that, even when detailing upsetting incidents, Joseph Senhouse appeared to find it all a curious good yarn. He describes the suicide of an enslaved man who, threatened with punishment for absenteeism, jumped into a vat of boiling cane sugar.

Britain’s Racism Isn’t America’s

The United Kingdom needs to examine its own bigotries.

The Indian Anti-Colonial Movement Never Ended

It’s where we actually are in history.

Before the area’s leading families entered the transatlantic trade, they made their fortune through coal exports. In the early 17th century, Whitehaven was the territory of the Lowther family. Coal formed the bedrock of their wealth, as they monopolized its extraction, transportation, and sale to Ireland.

During those early coal years, a trade was developing far away in colonial Virginia that would soon transform Whitehaven. English colonists were cultivating a new strain of tobacco to suit European tastes, and tobacco soon drove the colony’s economic development. By the 1620s, plantations were being cleared, and port towns and warehouses springing up. So valuable did tobacco become that its leaves were known as “brown gold.” As the century wore on and plantations became more established, the rising demand for labor saw the increased transportation of enslaved laborers to Virginia.

Meanwhile, the Lowther coal trade was expanding. This burgeoning industry turned Whitehaven from a fishing village into a major coaling port and a planned town designed by John Lowther, the heir to the family’s coalfields and estate. Alongside his wealth, Lowther obtained power. In 1664, he became a member of Parliament for Cumberland, a seat he held for three decades. A member of the Admiralty, Sir John (he had also picked up a knighthood) knew that colonial commerce was everywhere. His head of collieries was a man named John Gale, who owned a Maryland tobacco plantation and fed Lowther information about Whitehaven’s tobacco trade. The Gales were helped into colonial trade by the Whitehaven-born slaver Isaac Milner, who was a key networker in London’s slavery business.

Alive to potential colonial profits, Sir John invested in the South Sea and East India Companies and in the 1660s explored the possibility of investing in the Royal African Company, set up by the newly reestablished Stuart monarchy and London merchants. Refounded in 1672 after heavy initial losses, the company charter lists Lowther as a member. The charter permitted the company to establish forts and factories on the West African coast, and—as with the East India Company—to maintain a standing army. The company was also handed a monopoly on the increasingly lucrative trade in trafficking people from West Africa. Colonial investments would form a significant portion of the Lowther family’s wealth across the generations.

By this point, other regional families were involved in colonial affairs, including the Senhouses, with their links to Barbados and Dominica, and the Curwens, connected to the East India Company, who presided over nearby Workington. Through the expanding port of Whitehaven, local people became well informed about colonial affairs in Virginia, Maryland, India, and Africa—and the opportunities that presented themselves in these far-flung places.

Residential properties in Whitehaven on Dec. 8, 2022. Oli Scarff/AFP via Getty Images

A few miles into our walk, as Peter and I headed north along the clifftops toward Whitehaven, we returned to the topic of writing. Being a Black writer in Britain, Peter reflected, is like being “a stranger at the gates.” It’s not just that Britain, like many other former empires, has tended to avoid, or even deny, the basic historical facts of colonialism. Rather, he continued, there is “a racial empathy gap,” in particular with slavery history. Writers like Toni Morrison have, he explained, said more or less the same. Peter described the problem he faced in his historical fiction: of somehow representing black-skinned people to groups of White readers who might well see themselves as “universal,” he said, quoting Morrison directly now, or “race-free.”

Slavery, of course, was central to the tobacco trade. And tobacco made Whitehaven rich. In the 1680s, a 94-ton ship called the Resolution entered Whitehaven port loaded with tobacco packed into large barrels, or hogsheads, marking the beginning of the town’s colonial trade. Tobacco warehouses were soon built at Whitehaven port to weigh, inspect, and store the hogsheads. The ships kept coming. In 1693, customs officers logged 10 vessels from Virginia; 10 more arrived the following year, rising to 20 in 1697. In 1699, a clay pipe-house was opened, and a tobacco processing plant began work in 1718.

By the 1740s, Whitehaven was second only to London for tobacco imports: “tobacco,” opined one local official, was “the very life and soul of Whitehaven.” The heyday of Whitehaven’s tobacco trade opened up opportunities, and not only for local merchants. Many worked on ships, became apprenticed clerks, or found positions in booming businesses such as iron forges or fisheries to supply food to the growing population.

By the early 18th century, as it became a hub of colonial trade, the town made its almost inevitable entry into the slave trade. Local merchants found investors for slaving ships. The Royal African Company maintained its monopoly on slave-trading, but there were many independent merchants and sea captains who, setting themselves up in provincial ports, wanted to get in on the lucrative slave trade. In Whitehaven, a temporary decline in tobacco trade coincided with this increase in slave-trading.

The Whitehaven slave trade developed along its existing trade routes for coal and tobacco. In 1716, the Whitehaven Galley left the harbor loaded with coal, which was sold in Dublin. There, the ship was filled with goods such as Irish linen, salt beef, candles made from Irish tallow, and other provisions. From Dublin the ship sailed to West Africa, where its goods were sold or traded. Crossing the Atlantic from West Africa with its cargo of enslaved people, Whitehaven Galley put in at Montserrat, Jamaica, and Honduras, where it loaded up for the return journey with ivory, logwood, and anatta dye. Likewise in 1759, the locally built Betty cleared port, sailing to the Sierra Leone estuary; later, it disembarked 210 enslaved people in Charleston, where many Whitehaven tobacco merchants had connections.

Whitehaven’s slave-trading business lasted some 60 years, petering out by the late 1760s, decades before the abolition of slavery in Britain. It’s thought that there were insufficient quality goods made locally to trade in West Africa (hence the stopovers for Irish linen and tallow), while merchants were ultimately dissuaded from a trade that gave uncertain financial returns. In other words, there was nothing particularly moral about Whitehaven’s turn away from the slave trade: The reasons were purely economic. Although many locals claim that Whitehaven had a minor slave-trading history, the town was once Britain’s fifth-largest slave-trading port. Its merchants trafficked more than 5,739 people and caused at least 906 deaths on transatlantic voyages.

Transatlantic traders pumped money into many local businesses, including ironworks and ropemaking. They invested heavily in shipbuilding, too: Transatlantic vessels and slaving ships

were built and repaired just north of Whitehaven. Sail-makers operated from the town, and the Lowther family leased premises to shipwrights. Local cloth traders expanded across Cumbria to supply the colonial trade, especially along Africa’s west coast.

Just as Whitehaven’s harbor expanded, so, too, did the town. In the lifetimes of Sir John Lowther and his son James, the local population had increased from 250 to well over 3,000. This growing population needed infrastructure. The building of houses and factories, and the constant upgrading of the harbor, provided jobs, as did the local brickworks, owned by Walter Lutwidge, an Irish-born slaver, tobacco merchant, and lighthouse-builder.

With the footpath now bringing us inches from the cliff edge, we walked in single file. We crossed a bracken-covered hill, and the path broadened into a track past old mineworks. As the coastline descended to sea level, we arrived at Whitehaven harbor. In the distance, we could see the marina and the climb to Lowther Castle, a three-story castellated building. The harbor itself was eerie. A white lighthouse at its entrance was dwarfed by the seaweed-covered harbor walls.

Beside the harbor was Whitehaven’s Beacon Museum. We popped in to see a large goblet that commemorates a slave ship called the King George . It is engraved with the Royal Coat of Arms and depicts a sailing ship with the words: “Success to the African Trade of Whitehaven.”

We wandered into the town. Today, Whitehaven remains the most complete Georgian town in Europe, and 268 of its buildings appear on Historic England’s list of the most important historic constructions. The streets are wide, the squares generous, the houses evenly designed. Through it runs Lowther Street, arrow-straight from Lowther Castle to the port, a statement of the family’s dominance.

We passed the Rum Story Museum, but having previously looked in, I didn’t have the heart to suggest we go inside. The museum does not yet close the “racial empathy gap.” Although it acknowledges the connection between rum production and human enslavement, the museum primarily celebrates the Jefferson family, which set up Whitehaven’s rum cellars in the early 19th century by trading with Virginia and the West Indies. Today you can enter the old, barrel-filled cellars of their base at 27 Lowther Street to view rooms with displays of tropical forests, sailing ships, rum bottles, and enchained Africans.

A disused mining ventilation chimney is seen close to Whitehaven near the site of a proposed coal mine on Oct. 4, 2021. Jon Super/AP

As we walked up Lowther Street, Peter shared his discomfort with nostalgic visions of English rural life. “The African continent was robbed,” he said, “and the fingerprints of the English countryside are all over the crime scene. No amount of warm beer, nuns on bicycles, and thatched roofs can obscure that.”

As Peter knew well, Whitehaven’s traders and enslavers did not just bring tobacco and sugar back with them. They brought enslaved people, too. The town’s history shows how the triangular trade, as it is sometimes called (British goods to West Africa, enslaved people to the Caribbean, then plantation produce back to Britain) was far more complicated than the three points suggests. Enslaved people were often trafficked from island to island and from continent to continent.

We reached the tower of St. Nicolas, a sandstone church that glows pink at sundown. Standing beneath the tower, we surveyed the elegant old square. The main, rebuilt church building was closed, but we wanted to visit the site because at least 66 people of African—and sometimes Indian—descent were baptized, married, or buried at St. Nicolas and at churches in Maryport, Workington, and St. Bees.

I had a copy of local archivists’ list of parish record entries, and Peter and I perused the names. In 1753, the parish register of St. Nicolas recorded that “Samuel, Son of a Female Negro Slave call’d Powers, a native of Carolina in North America” was baptized there. This brief record notes that he was connected to a family in the Cumbrian town of Kirby Lonsdale. In 1758, St. Nicholas Church also saw the baptism of a man whose name and identity followed the now-established tradition of renaming enslaved people after places in the British Isles: “Thomas Whitehaven,” reads the entry, “a Negro of ripe years.”

Eight years later, also at St. Nicholas, the burial took place of “Othello, a Black of Mr. John Hartley,” the slaver: “Othello” reflected the equally common practice of giving enslaved people literary names. Tiny fragments such as these testify to enslaved people’s exclusion from the historical narrative. So many unanswerable questions sprang to mind: Why were they here? What were their lives like? What did they think of Whitehaven and how did they change it? These glimpses of them are mediated by official figures.

By the time the act to abolish the slave trade was passed in 1807, the legacy of slavery had long since been felt along the Whitehaven coast, which was proportionately more multiracial in the 18th century than it is in the 21st. When, in 1833, the Slavery Abolition Act was passed, a further Act of Parliament empowered commissioners to pay compensation to enslavers for their loss of property—but not the enslaved. In Whitehaven, the Hartley family claimed for 794 enslaved people in five Jamaican estates, which mostly produced sugar, molasses, rum, and pimento. Major slave owners, the Hartleys were respected townsmen, both manufacturers and bankers, and the compensation money was duly paid into the Hartleys and Co. Bank.

To anyone versed in British slavery compensation records, these Whitehaven stories feel familiar. “But what really counts is how places tell their stories,” Peter said. “You can tell a lot by looking at which stories get bigged-up and which are minimized or ignored.”

I thought of the National Trust’s description of the Whitehaven coast, which illustrates how celebrations of the landscape can obscure historical truths. Whitehaven’s mining heritage is mentioned, but the description focuses overwhelmingly on flora and fauna, including work by the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds to care for puffins and other seabirds. The sandstone cliffs, the Trust description reads, are among Britain’s tallest. There is no mention of tobacco or slave-trading at all.

Copyright © 2024 by Corinne Fowler. Originally published in Great Britain in 2024 by Allen Lane as Our Island Stories . From the forthcoming book The Countryside: Ten Rural Walks Through Britain and Its Hidden History of Empire by Corinne Fowler to be published by Scribner, an Imprint of Simon & Schuster, LLC. Printed by permission.

Books are independently selected by FP editors. FP earns an affiliate commission on anything purchased through links to Amazon.com on this page.

Corinne Fowler is a professor of colonialism and heritage at the University of Leicester. She is the author of The Countryside: Ten Rural Walks Through Britain and Its Hidden History of Empire . Twitter:  @corinne_fowler

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History | September 15, 2022

The Real Warriors Behind ‘The Woman King’

A new film stars Viola Davis as the leader of the Agojie, the all-woman army of the African kingdom of Dahomey

Meilan Solly

Associate Editor, History

At its height in the 1840s, the West African kingdom of Dahomey boasted an army so fierce that its enemies spoke of its “ prodigious bravery .” This 6,000 -strong force, known as the Agojie, raided villages under cover of darkness, took captives and slashed off resisters’ heads to return to their king as trophies of war. Through these actions, the Agojie established Dahomey’s preeminence over neighboring kingdoms and became known by European visitors as “ Amazons ” due to their similarities to the warrior women of Greek myth .

The Woman King , a new movie starring Viola Davis as a fictionalized leader of the Agojie, tells the story of this all-woman fighting force. Directed by Gina Prince-Bythewood, the film takes place as conflict engulfs the region and the specter of European colonization looms ominously. It represents the first time that the American film industry has dramatized this compelling story.

As the Hollywood Reporter ’s Rebecca Keegan writes, The Woman King is “the product of a thousand battles” fought by Davis and Prince-Bythewood, both of whom have spoken out about the obstacles the production team faced when pitching a historical epic centered on strong Black women.

“The part of the movie that we love is also the part of the movie that is terrifying to Hollywood, which is, it’s different, it’s new,” Davis tells Keegan. “We don’t always want different or new, unless you have a big star attached, a big male star. … [Hollywood studios] like it when women are pretty and blond or close to pretty and blond. All of these women are dark. And they’re beating … men. So there you go.”

From the origins of the Agojie to Dahomey’s eventual fate, here’s what you need to know about the true history behind The Woman King ahead of its arrival in theaters on September 16.

Is The Woman King based on a true story?

In short, yes, but with extensive dramatic license. Though the broad strokes of the film are historically accurate, the majority of its characters are fictional, including Davis’ Nanisca and Thuso Mbedu ’s Nawi, a young warrior-in-training. (Nanisca and Nawi share names with documented members of the Agojie but are not exact mirrors of these women.) King Ghezo (played by John Boyega) is the exception; according to Lynne Ellsworth Larsen , an architectural historian who studies gender dynamics in Dahomey, Ghezo (who reigned 1818 to 1858) and his son Glele (who reigned 1858 to 1889) presided over what’s seen as “the golden age of Dahomean history,” ushering in an era of economic prosperity and political strength.

The Woman King opens in 1823 with a successful raid by the Agojie, who free captives bound for enslavement from the clutches of the Oyo Empire , a powerful Yoruba state in what is now southwestern Nigeria. Dahomey has long paid tribute to the Oyo but is beginning to assert itself under the leadership of Ghezo and General Nanisca. A parallel plotline finds Nanisca, who disapproves of the slave trade after experiencing its horrors personally, urging Ghezo to end Dahomey’s close relationship with Portuguese slave traders and shift to production of palm oil as the kingdom's main export.

The real Ghezo did, in fact, successfully free Dahomey from its tributary status in 1823. But the kingdom’s involvement in the slave trade doesn’t align as neatly with the historical record. As historian Robin Law notes , Dahomey emerged as a key player in the trafficking of West Africans between the 1680s and early 1700s, selling its captives to European traders whose presence and demand fueled the industry—and, in turn, the monumental scale of Dahomey’s warfare.

Though the majority of individuals taken prisoner by Dahomey were enslaved abroad, a not-insignificant number remained in the kingdom, where they served on royal farms, in the army or at the palace. In truth, Ghezo only agreed to end Dahomey’s participation in the slave trade in 1852, after years of pressure by the British government , which had abolished slavery (for not wholly altruistic reasons ) in its own colonies in 1833 . Though Ghezo did at one point explore palm oil production as an alternative source of revenue, it proved far less lucrative, and the king soon resumed Dahomey’s participation in the slave trade.

In response to concerns about how her movie will depict Dahomey’s engagement with European slave traders, Prince-Bythewood told the Hollywood Reporter , “We’re going to tell the truth. We’re not going to shy away from anything. But also we’re telling a part of the story which is about overcoming and fighting for what’s right.”

Portraying the Agojie, through Nanisca’s actions, as critics of the slave trade makes for a “nice story,” says Larsen in an interview. “Do I think it’s historically accurate? I’m skeptical.” She adds, “These women are symbols of strength and of power. But … they’re [also] complicit in a problematic system. They are still under the patriarchy of the king, and they are still players in the slave trade.”

Maria Bello, an actress and producer who co-wrote the story The Woman King ’s script is based on, first learned about the Agojie during a 2015 trip to Benin. Recognizing the subject’s cinematic appeal, she persuaded producer Cathy Schulman to find a studio willing to finance the project. Prince-Bythewood and Davis joined the team soon after. “It was a constant push and fight to convince people that we deserve a big budget, that we deserved to tell a story like this,” Prince-Bythewood tells the Los Angeles Times .

That the film was greenlit at all likely stems from the blockbuster success of 2018’s Black Panther , which testified to the demand for entertainment created by and featuring Black creatives. The movie’s Dora Milaje regiment was inspired by the Agojie .

“For so long, Hollywood has only ever framed Africa in stereotypical ways,” Aje-Ori Agbese , an expert on African cinema at the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley, tells Ms. magazine . “So [ The Woman King ], centered on African women and African history, will generate a conversation. We have Black Panther to thank for that.”

Who were the Agojie?

The first recorded mention of the Agojie dates to 1729 . But the unit was possibly formed even earlier, toward the beginning of Dahomey’s existence, when King Huegbadja (reigned circa 1645 to 1685) created a corps of woman elephant hunters . Alternatively, Queen  Hangbe , who briefly ruled as regent following the death of her brother in the early 18th century, may have introduced the women warriors as part of her palace guard. Either way, the Agojie reached their peak in the 19th century, under Ghezo, who formally incorporated them into Dahomey’s army. Thanks to the kingdom’s ongoing wars, Dahomey’s male population had dropped significantly, creating an opportunity for women to replace men on the battlefield.

“More perhaps than any other African state, Dahomey was dedicated to warfare and slave-raiding,” wrote Stanley B. Alpern in Amazons of Black Sparta: The Women Warriors of Dahomey , the first full-length English-language study of the Agojie. “It may also have been the most totalitarian, with the king controlling and regimenting practically every aspect of social life.”

Dahomey’s standing army was an anomaly in and of itself, as most other African kingdoms disbanded their forces when not actively at war. The fact that the Agojie and their male counterparts wore uniforms also set them apart, establishing the Dahomean military as an organized, highly visible fighting force.

“They’re meant to have a public face,” says Larsen. “They wanted to … be feared by their neighbors. This was a slave-trading kingdom, so warfare was part of their annual cycle. They needed to gather humans to be part of this heinous trans-Atlantic slave trade,” as well as for human sacrifices to posthumously deified kings.

The Agojie’s ranks included volunteers and forced conscripts alike. “Regiments were recruited from slaves, some of them captured as early in age as 10 years old, also the poor, and girls who were rebellious,” said Terri Ochiagha , an expert on colonial and postcolonial Nigeria at the University of Edinburgh, in the 2018 Smithsonian Channel documentary series “ Epic Warrior Women .” In The Woman King , Nawi ends up in the army after refusing to marry an elderly suitor.

All of Dahomey’s women warriors were considered ahosi , or wives of the king. They lived in the royal palace alongside the king and his other wives, inhabiting a largely woman-dominated space. Aside from eunuchs and the king himself, no men were allowed in the palace after sunset.

As Alpern told Smithsonian magazine in 2011, the Agojie were considered the king’s “third-class” wives, as they typically didn’t share his bed or bear his children. Because they were married to the king, they were restricted from having sex with other men, although the degree to which this celibacy was enforced is subject to debate . In addition to enjoying privileged status, the warriors had access to a steady supply of tobacco and alcohol. They also had enslaved servants of their own.

To become an Agojie, recruits underwent intensive training, including exercises designed to harden them to bloodshed. In 1889, French naval officer Jean Bayol witnessed Nanisca (who likely inspired the name of Davis’ character in The Woman King ), a teenager “who had not yet killed anyone,” easily pass a test of wills. Walking up to a condemned prisoner, she reportedly “swung her sword three times with both hands, then calmly cut the last flesh that attached the head to the trunk. … She then squeezed the blood off her weapon and swallowed it.”

Another common form of training involved mock assaults that found recruits scrambling across towering walls of acacia thorns. In the words of a British traveler who examined the barriers, “I could not persuade myself that any human being, without boots or shoes, would, under any circumstances, attempt to pass over so dangerous a collection of the most efficiently armed plants I had ever seen.” The warriors bore the pain without complaint, and the bravest among them received acacia thorn belts marking their stoicism.

The Agojie’s divisions consisted of five branches: blunderbuss or artillery women, elephant hunters, musketeers, razor women and archers. Surprising the enemy was of the utmost importance. Warriors snuck up on villages at or before dawn, taking captives and decapitating those who resisted. Though European accounts of the Agojie vary widely, what “is indisputable … is their constantly outstanding performance in combat,” wrote Alpern in Amazons of Black Sparta . With the rest of the Dahomean army, these women warriors were “the scourge and terror of the whole surrounding country, always at war and generally victorious,” as an American missionary later recounted.

What happened to the Agojie?

Dahomey’s military dominance started to wane in the second half of the 19th century, when its army repeatedly failed to capture Abeokuta , a well-fortified Egba capital in what is now southwest Nigeria. An 1851 battle with the Egba, who’d settled in the region following the decline of the Oyo Empire, resulted in the deaths of up to 2,000 Agojie; in 1864, King Glele, who succeeded Ghezo a few years earlier, sought to avenge his father’s defeat at Abeokuta but was forced to retreat after just an hour and a half of fighting. Dahomean forces continued to target Egba villages until the early 1890s, when war with the French threatened the kingdom’s very existence.

Dahomey’s encounters with European colonizers had historically revolved mainly around the slave trade and religious missions . As the Scramble for Africa ramped up, however, tensions between Dahomey and France escalated. In 1863, the French declared the neighboring kingdom of Porto-Novo a colonial protectorate, angering Glele, who considered Porto-Novo a vassal of Dahomey. Glele also clashed with the French over the port city of Cotonou .

As Larsen articulates, the existence—and dominance—of Dahomey’s women warriors upset the French’s “understanding of gender roles and what women were supposed to do” in a “civilized” society. The women’s “flaunting of ferocity, physical power and fearlessness was manipulated or corrupted as Europeans started to interpret [it] in their own context of what they felt societies should be,” she says. For the French, the Agojie were simply “more fuel for their civilizing mission ,” which sought to impose European ideals on African countries.

The First Franco-Dahomean War began on February 21, 1890, just two months after the accession of Glele’s son Kondo, who took the name Béhanzin upon claiming the throne. On March 4, the Dahomean army attacked the French at Cotonou, only to fall to the Europeans’ vastly superior firepower. Nanisca, the teenager who’d left such an impression on French officer Bayol the previous year, decapitated the enemy’s chief gunner but died on the battlefield. Upon seeing Nanisca’s body, Bayol wrote that a “cleaver, its curved blade engraved with fetish symbols, was attached to her left wrist by a small cord, and her right hand was clenched round the barrel of her carbine covered with cowries.”

After facing a similar defeat at the Battle of Atchoupa on April 20, Dahomey agreed to a peace treaty assenting to French control over Porto-Novo and Cotonou. The lull in warfare lasted less than two years—an intermediary period that Béhanzin spent equipping his army with weapons equal to, or at least better matched with, the French’s. According to Alpern, upon receiving news of the French’s declaration of war, the Dahomean king said , “The first time, I was ignorant of how to make war, but now I know. … If you want war, I am ready. I wouldn’t stop even if it lasted 100 years and killed 20,000 of my men.”

Béhanzin proved true to his word. Over the course of seven weeks in fall 1892, Dahomey’s army fought valiantly to repel the French. The Agojie participated in 23 separate engagements during that short time span, earning the enemy’s respect for their valor and dedication to the cause. As one marine noted , “[N]either the cannons, nor the canister shot, nor the salvo fire stops them. … It is really strange to see women so well led, so well disciplined.” Though sources disagree on the number of women warriors who fought in the Second Franco-Dahomean War , Alpern cites 1,200 to 2,500 as a likely range.

At the village of Adégon on October 6, the Agojie suffered arguably their worst losses yet, with just 17 soldiers returning from an initial force of 434. Béhanzin’s brother Sagbaju Glele, who lived until the 1970s, told a local historian that the battle brought a moment of clarity for Dahomey’s courtiers, who now realized the inevitability of their kingdom’s destruction. The Dahomean army made a final stand at Cana in early November. The last day of fighting, reported a French marine colonel, was “one of the most murderous” of the entire war, beginning with the dramatic entrance of “the last Amazons … as well as the elephant hunters whose special assignment was to direct their fire at the officers.” The French officially seized the Dahomey capital of Abomey on November 17.

Between 2,000 and 4,000 Dahomean soldiers—including both men and women—died during the seven-week war. Of the roughly 1,200 Agojie in fighting shape at the beginning of the war, just 50 or 60 remained ready for battle by its end. Comparatively, the French side lost 52 Europeans and 33 Africans on the battlefield.

After the war, some of the surviving Agojie followed Béhanzin into exile in Martinique or served his brother, a puppet king installed by the French. Others tried to reenter society, to varying degrees of success. Still others toured Europe and the United States, performing dances and battlefield reenactments at “ living exhibitions ” that played into racist stereotypes of African people. At the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago, visitors to the “ Dahomey Village ” were welcomed by a pair of juxtaposed paintings: an Agojie holding up an enemy’s severed head and a white colonizer raising his helmet. “You have these parallel images of what was considered barbaric and what the civilizers were here to correct,” says Larsen.

Last year, Leonard Wantchekon , an economist at Princeton University and native of Benin who leads research seeking to identify the Agojie’s descendants, told the Washington Post that French colonization proved detrimental to women’s rights in Dahomey, with colonizers barring women from political leadership (in addition to serving as warriors, ahosi could become royal cabinet ministers) and educational opportunities.

“The French made sure this history wasn’t known,” he explained. “They said we were backward, that they needed to ‘civilize us,’ but they destroyed opportunities for women that existed nowhere else in the world.”

Nawi, the last known surviving Agojie with battlefield experience (and the probable inspiration for Mbedu’s character), died in 1979 , at well over 100 years old. But Agojie traditions continued long after Dahomey’s fall, with descendants of the warrior women sharing stories about their formidable ancestors and participating in religious rituals. When actress Lupita Nyong’o visited Benin for a 2019 Smithsonian Channel special , she met a woman identified by locals as an Agojie who’d been trained by older warriors as a child and kept hidden within a palace for decades.

Speaking with History.com , Wantchekon emphasizes the central role played by women in Dahomean society. “When we push back against [colonialist] misconception[s] and embrace the culture of gender equality that was thriving in Benin and places like it before colonization,” he says, “it is a way to embrace the legacy of this exceptional group of African female leaders that European history tried so hard to erase.”

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Meilan Solly | | READ MORE

Meilan Solly is Smithsonian magazine's associate digital editor, history.