transatlantic slave trade essay

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)

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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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World History Project - Origins to the Present

Course: world history project - origins to the present   >   unit 5, read: the transatlantic slave trade.

• BEFORE YOU WATCH: Impact of the Slave Trade - Through a Ghanaian Lens
• WATCH: Impact of the Slave Trade - Through a Ghanaian Lens
• READ: Domingos Álvares (Graphic Biography)
• READ: Race and Coerced Labor Part I - People as Property in the Americas
• READ: Race and Coerced Labor Part II - Motivations and Justifications

The Transatlantic Slave Trade

First read: preview and skimming for gist, second read: key ideas and understanding content.

• According to the article, what was the status of enslaved people in some parts of Africa prior to the involvement of the Europeans?
• What was the status of enslaved people in the medieval Muslim world?
• In what context did Europeans start the transatlantic slave trade?
• How did the transatlantic slave trade cause an increase in wars in Africa?
• What goods moved across the triangular trade?
• According to the article, how did the transatlantic slave trade contribute to the Industrial Revolution?

Third read: evaluating and corroborating

• What is slavery? Given the range of types of slavery in different societies discussed in this article, is it useful to use the same term for all of these different kinds of status? Why or why not?

Pre-Columbian slave trade (pre-sixteenth century CE)

Origins and overview of the transatlantic slave trade (sixteenth to nineteenth century ce), middle passage, want to join the conversation.

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The Transatlantic Slave Trade

THE TRANSATLANTIC SLAVE TRADE

A Guided History by Felipe Chamon

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INTRODUCTION

With New World exploration becoming more prominent, it had to be more profitable. When Europeans discovered that tobacco, sugar cane, and cotton could easily be transported across the Atlantic, Europeans realized that they could market these goods, especially because these products were difficult to get in Europe. This led to the need for more slaves, as these crops were very physically demanding to produce, which prompted to the creation of the transatlantic slave trade. The slave trade provided to be very successful for Europe, specifically France and England, as their profits from the New World skyrocketed and helped with starvation.

The current research on this topic includes discussions on the transatlantic slave trade, the benefits Europe received from the slave trade, the triangular trade, the impact the trading would have on slavery in the future, the harsh conditions the slaves faced during their journeys and in the New World, and the transportation itself. The sources below include primary sources, secondary sources, maps, vignettes, and definitions. It was the most difficult to locate primary sources, especially in comparison to secondary sources.

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APPLIED HISTORY

Jeimer Vos. “Voyages and Applied History.” Database. Voyages , 2007.  http://www.slavevoyages.org/assessment/essays# .

In this source, the author explains the importance of the database it is found on, which is devoted to providing resources on the transatlantic slave trade. The author also says that knowing more about this subject is important as well. In it, the author discusses that through a study directed by LaSalle Bank Corporation, historians were able to trace a connection between African slavery in America to the ancestors of modern Dutch banks. Through this discovery, historians were able to find more information about the transatlantic slave trade in general. This source is not very in depth, so it would not be best to focus on it much, but it could be used to explain the importance of studying the transatlantic slave trade.

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DEFINITIONS

“Slave Trade.” Encyclopedia Britannica. Accessed April 25, 2017. https://www.britannica.com/topic/slave-trade .

This source provides background information on slave trading in general. It discusses early instances of slave trading, such as with the Iranians, before citing a few noteworthy historical examples of slave trading. The last section discusses the transatlantic slave trade and how slaves were traded in the Caribbean for the rum that would be traded to get more slaves in Africa. This source also briefly touches on sex slavery. This source is a great place to start, but it should not be referenced multiple times, as there is not much information.

“Transatlantic Slave Trade | Slavery.” Encyclopedia Britannica . Accessed April 25, 2017. https://www.britannica.com/topic/transatlantic-slave-trade .

This source gives a broad explanation of the transatlantic slave trade, hitting many key points. It discusses the origins, stating that it was created for a triangular trade , in which Europe gave Africa textiles so that Africa could give the New World slaves so that in turn, the slaves could provide the sugar and other products that were very labor-intensive to get for the Europeans. It then touches on the brutality in which the slaves were treated during the trading, and even cites a revolt. It ends by discussing the future of slavery in both American and British history. This source is an excellent source, especially as one begins to do research. However, it does not include many specific examples, so it should be used as only a starting point.

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PRIMARY SOURCES

Wesley, John. Thoughts Upon Slavery: By John Wesley, A.M. W. Whitestone, 1775

This writer is writing about his viewpoints on the treatment of slaves throughout history, but especially the slaves from Africa, as the transatlantic slave trade was occurring during his lifetime. He first begins by describing the history of slavery, and then he discusses the African people of the Gold Coast and the Slave Coast. He describes how they live their daily lives peacefully, doing no harm to anyone. He then discusses how they are just people, and it is unfair for them to be treated so horribly for having a different skin color. He cites religious beliefs, and asks if this is really what God wanted. Throughout this essay, the writer is arguing that slavery should not happen as it is inhumane. This is a really great primary source to use, as it captures the viewpoint of someone who is against slavery and knows the treatment of slaves while it was happening, such as the branding.

Mitford, John, ed. “THE CORRESPONDENCE OF WILLIAM WILBERFORCE, &c. 2 Vols.”  The Gentleman’s Magazine: And Historical Review, July 1856-May 1868; London , September 1840, 227-41. http://search.proquest.com.ezproxy.bu.edu/docview/8482759/abstract/7CAADD4E3DE6    4279PQ/1 .

This source is an interesting primary source. The writer is providing evidence of different letters he received trying to sway his decision on a vote for a reform regarding slavery. This vote was critical, and there were subtle threats of a war depending on his vote. While it is a fascinating read, it seems to be only a portion of a larger document that is not completely included in this correspondence, thus, it is a bit ambiguous. While there are interesting quotes throughout the correspondence, it is not the best resource available.

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Daniel Domingues da Silva. “Catherine Zimmermann-Mulgrave: A Slave Odyssey.” Database.  Voyages , August 2007. http://www.slavevoyages.org/assessment/essays# .

This article tells the story of Catherine Zimmermann-Mulgrave. It tells of how she was captured on the way to school with some friends in 1833, led to the “Heroína,” and eventually shipwrecked. However, she eventually made it back to Africa as a teacher and a wife to a missionary. This article is a good resource to get a clear picture of the story of one slave, but it is not narrow enough that it should be cited often. However, there is a description of how a slave was beaten for attempting suicide, which is not referenced in the other sources.

Daniel Domingues da Silva. “Ayuba Suleiman Diallo and Slavery in the Atlantic World.” Database.  Voyages , July 2007. http://slavevoyages.org/assessment/essays# .

This article tells the story of Ayuba Suleiman Diallo. It explains how he was making a trade for slaves in return for cows in Africa, only to be captured and sold as a slave to the same people who gave him the cow while returning home from that trade. He later went on to become educated when he met Thomas Bluett when trying to escape slavery in Maryland. Eventually, he made it back to Africa. This is a good resource to get an understanding of one slave’s perspective, but it does not really discuss the slave trade on a macro level.

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SECONDARY SOURCES

Reinsch, Paul S. “The Negro Race and European Civilization.” American Journal of Sociology 11.2 (1905): 145-167. Web. 29 Mar. 2017.

This essay describes different race based civilizations, specifically civilizations populated by marginalized others. It specifically looks at the impact that these civilizations had on European civilizations, but also looks at slave culture in North and South America. It looks specifically at how physical features of white people, black people, and mixed race people impact the perception of others. While this essay is very interesting and touches on sociological and physiological factors that came into play when Europeans and Africans came into contact, it does not really touch on the slave trade itself and any of the commercialism that came with it.

Eltis, David and David Richardson. Extending the Frontiers: Essays on the New Transatlantic Slave Trade Database . United States: Yale University Press, 2008.

This book is one of the best sources about this topic. The first few pages include maps which illustrate the transatlantic slave trade, and the first chapter describes it in depth. It is then broken up into three sections, and the first and third are incredibly extensive about the transatlantic slave trade that took place in Africa and the New World. However, the most relevant section is the second, which discusses the impact the slave trade had on Europe, specifically with the French, the Dutch, and the Germans. This book would be the best place to begin researching about this topic, as it has a plethora of information about it.

Strickrodt, Silke. Afro-European Trade in the Atlantic World: The Western Slave Coast, C. 1550-C. 1885 . Western Africa Studies. Boydell & Brewer, 2015.

This book is about the relations between Western Africans and Europeans from around 1550 until 1885. This area of Western Africa was called the Slave Coast, as it produced a lot of slaves that went off into the New World. This book provides a really interesting perspective on the slave trade from the insight of the African civilizations at the time. While this book has some interesting information about the slave trade, it is not as Eurocentric as other sources, so it would be best to focus on those as opposed to this one.

Eltis, David. “A Brief Overview of the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade.” Database. Voyages , 2009.  http://www.slavevoyages.org/assessment/essays# .  

This essay is really insightful into the full history of the transatlantic slave trade. It focuses on both the viewpoints of Africans and Europeans, and it brings up discussions on the middle passage and resistance. This source is excellent in terms of providing a discussion on a subject that was not very prominent in other sources: race. After giving an overarching historical documentation on the transatlantic slave trade, it explains how slavery affected the concept of racial identity. The essay closes out by examining the abolition that would eventually come to happen. This source is really insightful, and would be a great source to begin with, as it is narrow enough to give a good understanding but still broad enough that one would need to do more research.

Stephen D. Behrendt. “Seasonality in the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade.” Database. Voyages , 2008. http://www.slavevoyages.org/assessment/essays# .

In this essay, the author is discussing the seasonal patterns of slave voyages, as there were patterns of embarkation and disembarkation that intrigued this author. After doing some research, the author discovered that slaves would embark from Africa around the harvest time, as the farmers did not need much intensive labor, so it would give the slaves enough time to get to the New World if they embarked during harvest season. This author also examines elements that pertain to agriculture, such as rainfall and the labor inputs for each crop. While this is an interesting essay, there is not much information that can be obtained, as it relates more to Africa and the New World and does not discuss Europe as much.

Oscar Grandio Moraguez. “Dobo: A Liberated African in Nineteenth-Century Havana.” Database. Voyages , n.d. http://www.slavevoyages.org/assessment/essays# .

In this essay, the author tells the story of Dobo, who entered Cuba as an enslaved ten-year-old boy. Through the help of the database, the author was able to reconstruct Dobo’s story, and it is an account of his life, from slavery to emancipation to being enslaved once again to death. Dobo’s story is an interesting story to read in the sense that it can provide a more detailed view of slavery from one specific slave, as opposed to a broad scope. While this story can definitely be used in some capacity, one should not focus so much on this, as it is very narrow.

Richard B. Allen. European Slave Trading in the Indian Ocean, 1500-1850 . Indian Ocean Studies. Ohio University Press, 2014.

As a precursor to British Imperialism, the author reminds the reader that there was also excessive slave trading in the Indian Ocean, which is often forgotten when compared to the transatlantic slave trade. He explains that Europeans were trading slaves in the Indian Ocean as early as 1500. The author structures this book somewhat chronologically, with the first section starting with 1500, and the last one starting with 1774. However, it is also structured thematically, as some sections overlap. While this source does not discuss the transatlantic slave trade in depth, it still discusses Europe’s impact on slave trading in general, and would be useful to look into. However, one should not prioritize this book over some other sources.

Blackwood, John, ed. “Agriculture, Commerce, and Manufactures:” Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine; Edinburgh 67, no. 413 (March 1850): 347-76.  http://search.proquest.com.ezproxy.bu.edu/docview/6447312/abstract/DF44F9AAFB414   F70PQ/1 .

While this article touches upon agriculture and commerce, as the title would suggest, it does not focus much on the connection these subjects have with the transatlantic slave trade. This source may be useful to get an understanding of the legislature that went into agriculture, but it would not be very useful otherwise.

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“Introductory Maps.” Database. Voyages , n.d.  http://www.slavevoyages.org/assessment/intro-maps .

These maps provide an interesting insight into different aspects of the slave trade. Not only do they showcase the scope of the trade, but this collection also includes maps indicating wind patterns and ports involved in the slave trade. Maps 6, 7, and 8 also include statistics in regards to where slaves embarked and disembarked. There is not a lot of great information to take from these maps, but they can be used as a supplemental resource to visually understand the trade.

http://www.slavevoyages.org/static/images/assessment/intro-maps/01.jpg

“African Names Database.” Database. Voyages , n.d. http://www.slavevoyages.org/resources/names-database .

While this source does not provide much information about the impact of the slave trade, it does show some interesting statistics about the number of slaves transported across the Atlantic during the height of the slave trade. This database also allows the user to search by aspects such as gender, height, age, and time frame, which can allow for more information to be discovered. While this may be an interesting source to look at, it does not have the most useful information, but does provide important statistics.

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The story of East Africa’s role in the transatlantic slave trade

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Foundation essay: This article is part of a series marking the launch of The Conversation in Africa. Our foundation essays are longer than usual and take a wider look at key issues.

The recent discovery of the remains of the Portuguese slave ship São José off Cape Town has brought East Africa’s role in the transatlantic slave trade to public attention. But the São José was merely one of a large number of slave vessels that either rounded the Cape or put into Table Bay for refreshment.

The sinking of the São José two days after Christmas in 1794 marked the end of a bad year for the slave trade at the Cape of Good Hope. In April that year, a second vessel, the French ship Jardinière, had gone down off Cape Agulhas. Around 185 slaves had reached shore but many had then escaped or had died of their exertions. Only 125 were finally auctioned at Stellenbosch.

In France, the republicans had outlawed slavery and the slave trade. In Britain, a chorus was rising in many parts of the country in opposition to a trade that wrenched 80,000 people every year from their homes in Africa and brought them to the Americas.

Slave rebellions

After a decade of peace, Britain and France were once again at war and ships laden with slaves were a prime target for both warships and privateers. All this made a bad situation only worse as the major market for East African slaves was in a state of high rebellion. Slaves had taken over large parts of St Domingue, an island in the West Indies that, a decade later, would become the independent republic of Haiti.

The plundering and burning of the sugar plantations in France’s wealthiest colony had destroyed the established market for East African slaves in the Americas. The Sao José was thus a pioneer, hoping to find a new market for East African slaves in Brazil. This was no easy matter, as traders in Angola and the Congo monopolised the sale of slaves to Portuguese America.

East Africa was a late participant in the transatlantic slave trade . It was only in the 1770s that a regular trade in slaves to the French islands of Mauritius and Réunion began from points on the East African coast. Small numbers of slaves had been carried around the Cape for more than a century. But as planters on St Domingue cried out for labour, this trade became more profitable and systematic, particularly as the French king agreed to subsidise the shipment of slaves to the island.

West-Central Africa bore the brunt of this demand. But as the price of slaves rose, traders looked further afield for their human merchandise. So, although it took around 120 days to get from Mozambique to St Domingue, and almost 30% of slaves died on this long Middle Passage, it quickly became a profitable route.

A triangular trade developed as ships sailed from French ports such as Bordeaux and Nantes to buy slaves in East Africa. The slaves were then taken to St Domingue and exchanged for tropical produce like sugar, coffee and indigo. The size of these vessels grew in the 1780s and some had the capacity to carry up to 1000 slaves.

Rebellions were frequent and slave ships carried large crews and the firepower needed to suppress any resistance. The East Africa slave trade reached its peak in 1789-90 when about 46 ships, carrying more than 16,000 slaves, circumnavigated the Cape. Almost all were bound for the sugar and coffee plantations of northern St Domingue.

Many French slavers stopped at the Cape during this time as the colony run by the Dutch East India Company provided them with a break in the long Middle Passage. Ships’ captains often sold part of their human cargo at the Cape to rid them of slaves least able to survive the Atlantic crossing. It also made space for new stocks of fresh food and water.

Cape colony and slavery

New crewmen could be enlisted at the Cape to replace those who were injured or sick, or who had died or deserted in the tropics. Cape Town also served as a site at which information could be obtained about the state of the market for slaves on the coast, and from which news about misdemeanours at sea could be forwarded to France for prosecution.

Some French ships sold their entire cargo of slaves at the Cape while others provided the settlement with sugar, coffee and rice, and an assortment of commodities, most notably ivory and gold, to be shipped northwards to Europe.

Perhaps most importantly, slaves could go ashore and exercise at the Cape before embarking on the gruelling transatlantic leg of the crossing. Dutch East India Company officials disliked this as they saw slaves as carriers of small pox and other diseases and feared that, once ashore, slaves could escape official controls and be sold illegally.

Officials were also disturbed by the entry into Cape Town of hundreds of near naked slaves, many of them diseased or infirm. The first leg of the long Middle Passage, from Mozambique to Cape Town, lasted around 35 days and resulted in a high mortality rate. Emaciated and exhausted captives failed to adapt to their conditions of incarceration.

Many slaves had been seized or sold deep in the interior. They arrived on the coast in a condition that became increasingly desperate when they were locked in the hold of the ship as it patrolled the coast for weeks or months looking to buy slaves. Jammed into slave decks often scarcely a metre high, held by iron shackles, and kept in a naked condition to prevent the proliferation of lice, slave ships had the look of floating dungeons.

Forced to consume unfamiliar food and weakened by their exertions, many slaves contracted intestinal infections or the dysentery that drained them of their last reserves of energy. Unable to wash or oil the skin, they were prey to the flies that carry craw craw, a malady that induces severe inflammation of the skin and sometimes river blindness.

Dutch ease slave monopoly

The slave uprising that started in northern St Domingue in August 1791 tolled the end of this French trade in people. A year later, in an act of desperation, the Dutch East India Company abandoned its monopolistic hold on trade and allowed individuals to bring slaves to the Cape for sale.

The São José was perhaps an early product of this new liberal attitude to trade. But it was only two years later, once the British had taken hold of the Cape, that a cosmopolitan group of merchants at Mozambique Island opened a new trade in slaves with the Americas, this time with both Rio de Janeiro and the Spanish vice-royalty at Rio de la Plata.

The British eventually outlawed the importation of slaves to the Cape in 1808 and initiated a policy of freeing slaves in the colony. As such, close to 10,000 slaves were liberated at the Cape. They worked alongside the descendants of another 30,000 shipped to the colony from Madagascar and mainland Africa and an equal number of earlier arrivals from south Asia and the Indonesian archipelago.

Despite the ban on importing slaves, vessels carrying this human cargo continued to dock off Cape Town until 1824, when this practice was finally prohibited. This left the Cape with a number of families that had benefited from slavery and the slave trade. But it also left the colony with a far larger population of slaves who, after their emancipation in 1833, would have to take charge of their lives and build a future for their descendants.

• Dutch East India Company
• Emancipation
• Slave Trade
• Foundation essays Africa
• Slave rebellion
• African history

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Slavery, Racism, and the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Essay

Slavery is a practice which dates back thousands of years. Conversely, racial discrimination is more appropriately defined by the mental and concrete conduct of the tormenter and the oppressed and their environmental context. Racism essentially defines the revulsion and trepidation that people keep on mankind with different skin colors.

The advent of the trans-Atlantic slave trade in the early modern period gives evidence of how old slavery is. Europeans who arrived in Africa came with the impression that they are much superior to Africans. This wont angle clearly signifies how to a degree slavery arose from racism. Africans were seen as lesser human beings who were incapable of much advancement. They were viewed as uncouth and vulgar, traits which differed from the White generations. Colonizers hence used this claim to justify their being slaves.

Africans were seen as less than ordinary human beings who did not merit equal consideration, therefore could not be treated as humanely as the others. There was widespread suspicion, which eventually led to substantial abuse, which further intensified the determination of the Whites to have laborers.

The more the White population increased the more demand for labor in plantations and the existing manufacturing industries. In England, for example, the staff was thoroughly Black; hence the appearance of the idea of Africans being slaves. Their children inherited this image, and the slavery convention gradually became fortified.

By the 17 th century, Africans were convincingly seen as assets to be transacted. They were part of the transactions including other stuff in trade. Ciphers were formulated in an attempt to control slaves. Laws which were formulated later in the century endeavored to establish punctilious preeminence over Black people. This form of racism was bent to ensure that Blacks resigned to their fate of being slaves.

These codes gave them no hope of ever acquiring sovereignty. Blacks were not seen as worthy of the privileges of liberty for which they were demanding. Whites constantly oppressed Africans in order to self-enhance their ego. This self-centered psychology and bigoted personality are what resulted in slavery in various countries. This impacted other colonies who strived to pass Black descendants through these ideologies.

Presently, African Americans in America comprise the greater percentage of the prison population. They are among the most poor, uneducated and unemployed. Police are also more likely to kill a Black man than a White individual. The innate fear and hatred that we have on the success of other skin colors indicate the extraordinary existance of racism.

Discrimination is part of the process of oppression. Differences in inherited characteristics, for example, skin color, have been used traditionally used to classify the oppressed as less inferior.

In the context of the Atlantic Slave Trade, it could be argued that racism in the New World arose from slavery. Bigotry was an outcome of slavery at the onset of early entrepreneurship. Slavery existed as a system of trade before America began its conquests, long before racism could be defined. Classical roman empires were based on the slave trade which had no relations to the skin color of people. Slaves were mainly from countries which had been conquered, or victims of war.

There was no interest on the ethnic attribution of the slaves, as their sole purpose was to provide. Humans were classified as either cultured or heathen. Hence, a White person could be considered as barbaric therefore less accomplished while a wise black being could be viewed as more productive.

The civilization process could not have been that rapid had the spirit and input of slaves not have been integrated in maturity. The trans-Atlantic slave trade, which lasted hundreds of years, is credited for the massive migration of Blacks and the intensification of the slave trade. It was the initiation of globalization of the new world. This resulted in Africans being transacted as property by Americans and Europeans leading to their exploitation and eventually prejudice.

The trade was all-inclusive, leading to an outsized economic framework for the coordinating countries. Religious, legal and philanthropic grounds justified forced labor. The culture and religion of many African communities were affected through this trend hence disadvantaging the intensification of success in the continent.

Africa could not compete effectively with other continents, predominantly America and Europe who were growing their economies through forced labor. The world viewed Africa as a continent of slaves who were doomed to be second-rate to other races. Slavery thus resulted in the background of racial discrimination, with the Whites stereotyping Blacks as being substandard.

These stereotypes were so severe that even Whites who were much poorer than some Blacks were seen as superior and deserving better treatment. The color of their skin exempted them from slavery and ensured their receipt of essential civil rights. The Blacks were keenly supervised in plantations, for fear of revolts. This fear of a revolution gradually grew tensions between the two races; the slave and the lord, leading to the formation of ethnic distinctiveness in the western countries.

These new distinctions destabilized the resistance of the White generation to slavery. Whites who were once slaves got incorporated into more benign forms of paid employment. Slavery was subsequently exclusively related to any Black person. Any African was thus seen as a potential slave, incase an individual was not one already. The cultural boundaries were thus opened by slavery in the new world.

Slavery lasted for the many years due to its profitability. The affluent became richer as the sweat of the unpaid slaves expanded their farms. The trans-Atlantic transactions of slaves were also promoted by some African leaders who collaborated with Whites in capturing slaves. This portrays an imperfect image for Africans who are seen to have encouraged the trade.

The domestic disturbance successfully eradicated slavery in the United States. Unfortunately, the effect on slavery was exceedingly minimal. Just as it was created to explain forced labor, racism was fashioned to classify Blacks as second-rate citizens.

During colonization, the super powers exploited different territories in search of cheap raw materials to maitain their industries. They made decisions for the populace in the invaded territories thus signifying their superiority. Racism continued in order to justify the mistreatment during the trans-Atlantic traffic.

The development of African children who learn about their inferiority at a tender age is undoubtedly influenced. Leaders were taught how to administer power by practicing dictatorship.

Changing this understanding in order to promote democracy in African countries thus becomes extremely difficult. Europeans and Americans therefore have no weight to disparage the administration criteria of Africans heads of state. This employment of political force has affected many countries, increasing distraught conditions like paucity and food shortage.

The above arguments suggest that racism was made my man in order to justify certain actions like slavery. This means that racial segregation can be eliminated through reducing the feelings of supremacy. The relationship of discrimination and private enterprises is immensely valid. In any capitalistic setting, racism must always be involved. Capitalism is the source of ethnic segregation, and its abolishment will unquestionably eradicate racism.

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1. IvyPanda . "Slavery, Racism, and the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade." March 2, 2024. https://ivypanda.com/essays/slavery-racism-and-the-trans-atlantic-slave-trade/.

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IvyPanda . "Slavery, Racism, and the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade." March 2, 2024. https://ivypanda.com/essays/slavery-racism-and-the-trans-atlantic-slave-trade/.

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Extending the Frontiers: Essays on the New Transatlantic Slave Trade Database

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This book examines the various essays based on the transatlantic slave trade database that contains 34,850 voyages, well over half of which contain information which was unavailable in 1999. A reassessment of the transatlantic slave trade is based on new information and interpretations for branches of the trade that have received less attention than they should. A new database to identify the coastal origins of vessels that were captured and condemned in the courts of mixed commission in Sierra Leone and Havana is used and detailed information now available on the Africans onboard those vessels is then exploited to construct a profile of enslaved peoples not previously possible. Traditional historiography argues for the central importance of Angola as a source of slaves arriving in nineteenth-century Cuba. The Dutch role in the early modern Atlantic world and North German slave trade are explained well. The book also examines some of the broader influences on and effects of the slave trade. Brazilian slave traffic within a broader geographic context is exhibited. There is a great need for similar work on slaves arriving in the Caribbean and the North American mainland, where captives have tended to disappear from the view of the historian after disembarking. The new estimates of the transatlantic traffic are combined with recent research on the intra-American slave trade and population data to reevaluate the demographic experience of Caribbean slave populations.

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Transatlantic Slave Trade and Its Effects

Introduction, triangular trade, human toll, economics of slavery, and effects, works cited.

The transatlantic slave trade is the forced export of African slaves from Africa to the colonies of the New World and European countries. Its beginning dates back to the middle of the 15th century, when the first Portuguese, who were led by Prince Henry the Navigator, reached the West African coast. This slavery that lasted for more than 400 years deprived people of their rights in society, being owned as property that belongs to a master. The triangular trade route was used by the slavers to transport Africans and force them to work primarily on plantations and mines. This paper focuses on the key issues of the transatlantic slave trade to provide its detailed understanding.

By the middle of the 17th century, the trade route was finally formed, and it received this name because it consisted of three separate paths in the form of a triangle. The first journey began from the ports of Europe when ships went to the shores of Africa with a cargo of various goods proposed for conducting slave trade operations. The main places where trade was carried out were Cape Verde Islands, Angola, the western part of Nigeria, and the coast of the Gulf of Guinea and Benin (Borucki et al. 434). The European traders with the support of states created a whole network of trading posts and markets that specialized in the trade of living “goods”, who went to the door of no return. For the most part, it was the exchange, although there were cases of buying slaves for cash. Among the exchange goods from the Europeans, there were fabrics, glass beads, and other jewelry, as well as knives and axes. Paper, rum, and other alcoholic beverages, as well as firearms and supplies to them, may also be noted among valued products.

After the completion of all the trading operations, the caravels with a cargo of slaves on board went to the next stop of the triangle. The European colonies in the New World had specially designed factory fortified posts. This part of the journey was represented by the Middle Passage with its brutality and unsanitary conditions (Marques 114). In America, slaves were in great demand, especially for work on plantations and, to a lesser extent, in mines and other processing enterprises. After selling off all the goods, the merchants purchased a shipment of colonial goods with money they received and returned to Europe. In particular, tobacco, cocoa, sugar, coffee, mahogany, and so on were the key goods they purchased (Marques 144). Thus, the triangle closed, and after the sale of goods brought from the New World, it was possible to calculate the profits.

During the entire existence of the transatlantic slave trade, approximately 10-12 million slaves were brought to the European colonies in America, while another 2.5-3 million died during transportation (Saidian 13). Their largest source was the Slave Coast, from which about five million slaves were taken out. Moreover, most of them were brought after the independence of the United States, when a new democratic state needed large quantities of labor for cotton plantations. Before the American Revolutionary War, the export of slaves to America had reached 100 thousand persons a year. The main centers of the slave trade were the cities of Boston, New Orleans, and Charleston.

The conditions of transportation of slaves were terrible even by the standards of that time. The journey from the coast of Africa to the New World took from six to twenty weeks, depending on the weather, the experience of the captain and navigator, and season. All this time, the slaves were in the holds and lived chained. Their meals usually consisted of boiled rice, and when the ship finally entered the American port, not all slaves lived to this point. The loss of a quarter of the so-called “cargo” was quite common. Many enslaved people integrated their culture into their new place of living, especially in North America.

Speaking of the economics of slavery, it is essential to state that it was profitable for developed countries despite the costs of maritime affairs. For example, France accounted for six percent of return for investors, which represented a ten percent benefit (Saidian 251). To initiate voyages to Africa, several merchants purchased parts of various ships so that at least some of them returned with profits. The British Empire was the most profitable since its colonies included Barbados, Jamaica, and Trinidad. As for the economic impact of the identified slavery on Africa, significant damages cannot be disputed. The population decline, which refers to transformations demographic impact, and the inability to build an internal economy may be opposed to some financial advantage received by the African elite that sold slaves overseas (Rönnbäck 172). In exchange for people, Africa received goods that had no or little stimulation to its general development. The slave trade destroyed what Africa has achieved over the millennia without giving anything in return.

Both America and Europe received the greatest benefits from the slave trade. The foundations of today’s US economic power were laid during that period by thousands of Africans. The psychological and physical consequences of the transatlantic slave trade were severe to Africans, whose lives were evaluated. As wars continued to capture the slaves, people became increasingly callous. The slave trade corrupted the Europeans and gave rise to greater greed. The sudden outbursts of the uprisings of desperate slaves only multiplied their hardships and entailed new bloodshed.

The moral decay, deformity of the psyche, the consciousness of complete security for the evil caused to other people, and the degradation of both slave traders and slaves were critical. However, the worst legacy left by the slave trade is racism (Saidian 105). The notion of the superiority of the White population appeared due to trade slavery, and it was abolished only in the 19th century. One of the most evident examples is carimbo that meant brand marking slaves so that they can always be recognized. Even though the legacy of racism was canceled the racial discrimination remains a social problem in the US.

To conclude, the transatlantic slave trade was an unprecedented economic, social, and political disaster in the history of humanity. It bled the whole of Africa and placed it outside of civilization, also making Americans and Europeans morally degraded. The slave trade impeded the development of the main spheres of social production, such as agriculture and crafts. It contributed to the exchange, trade, and inclusion of Africa in the world market in a destructive manner. While the transatlantic slave trade lasted for more than four centuries, its consequences are still sound and critical to modern society.

Borucki, Alex, et al. “Atlantic History and the Slave Trade to Spanish America.” The American Historical Review , vol. 120, no. 2, 2015, pp. 433-461.

Marques, Leonardo. The United States and the Transatlantic Slave Trade to the Americas, 1776-1867 . Yale University Press, 2016.

Rönnbäck, Klas. “The Transatlantic Slave Trade and Social Stratification on the Gold Coast.” Economic History of Developing Regions , vol. 30, no. 2, 2015, pp. 157-181.

Saidian, Siyavush. The Transatlantic Slave Trade: Slavery Comes to the New World . Greenhaven Publishing, 2017.

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StudyCorgi. (2021, July 12). Transatlantic Slave Trade and Its Effects. https://studycorgi.com/transatlantic-slave-trade-and-its-effects/

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9 Facts About the Transatlantic Slave Trade

By: John Harris

Published: May 2, 2023

The Atlantic slave trade constituted one of the worst crimes against humanity in recorded history. Over the course of four centuries, a cruel and thriving economy developed around enslaving and transporting millions of African people across the Atlantic Ocean—known as the “Middle Passage.” Here are nine lesser-known facts about slave trade:

1. The Atlantic slave trade was the largest oceanic forced migration in history.

Humans have a long history of slave trading, often over vast distances, but nothing has rivaled the Atlantic slave trade in size. Between the early 1500s and the 1860s, slave traders forced some 12.5 million men, women, and children aboard transatlantic slave ships on Africa’s shores. This number does not include the millions more who died during the journey from the interior to the coast or who perished before a slave ship arrived to carry them away.

2. ‘Triangle Trade’ is only partially accurate.

Most of us learned in school that slave ships followed a triangular route from Europe, Africa, the Americas and back to Europe. But major variations existed. Thousands of voyages began in the Americas, continued to Africa and returned to the Americas. The Rio de Janeiro (Brazil) – Luanda (Angola) – Rio de Janeiro journey formed the largest single route in the entire slave trade. Other voyages originated in U.S. ports like Newport, Rhode Island and Charleston, South Carolina, and brought captives to the Americas on their return.

3. Many slave traders were women.

While most slave traders were men, hundreds of women invested in the trade, according to slavevoyages.org. In Britain, France and the Netherlands, widows of slave-trading husbands commonly took over their investments. One of the last-ever slave traders, American Mary Watson, dispatched her own ships from New York in the 1850s and early 1860s. After Abraham Lincoln’s administration shut down the slave trade in the U.S., Watson attempted to establish a new base in Spain in 1862 but died of tuberculosis.

4. Enslaved people fought the slave trade.

Captives endured tremendous violence and trauma during the Atlantic crossing. According to slavevoyages.org, an estimated 15 percent died. Slave traders did everything in their power to prevent their captives from fighting back, arming themselves and shackling their human “cargo.” But captives resisted. Rebellions occurred on at least 10 percent of voyages, usually when ships were on or near the African coast. While they rarely succeeded, these revolts had a broader impact. By forcing slave traders to take extra precautions like increasing the number of sailors on board ships, rebels drove slave traders’ costs higher and reduced the number of voyages put to sea. By some scholars’ estimates, this prevented about 1 million captives from enduring the Middle Passage.

5. Slaves not only fought the slave trade; they helped end it.

Books and movies often depict the antislavery movement as being led by political leaders like Britain’s William Wilberforce. While such men played vital roles in the abolition of the slave trade, its earliest and most consistent opponents were enslaved people themselves. Their opposition proved crucial, as evidenced by the revolt that took place on the French Caribbean colony of Saint Domingue, one of the largest destinations for slave ships in the 1700s. In the 1790s, enslaved people there rebelled against the institution of slavery and later against French colonial rule. And they won. By 1804, they had defeated France (and its leader Napoleon Bonaparte ), and ensured that the slave trade and slavery itself would never be resurrected. They renamed their country Haiti, the name by which we know the country today.

6. The slave trade continued to flourish, even after countries legally banned it.

By the late 1700s, many countries questioned the legitimacy of the slave trade. By the 1830s, every slave-trading nation in Europe and the Americas banned the traffic, either through international treaties or via their own national laws. But many powers, including Brazil and Spain, did so reluctantly and under diplomatic pressure. They had little intention of seriously enforcing their bans. The slave trade continued to produce profits—in fact, even more so in the 1800s—and traffickers paid large bribes to government officials to ignore their crimes. Most of the captives who endured the illegal slave trade in the 1800s went to Brazil and the Spanish island of Cuba. Many were transported under the American flag and on U.S.-built ships, which the U.S. authorities had little interested in policing. In total, slave traders smuggled 1.65 million captives aboard illegal slave ships in the 1800s—13 percent of the entire slave trade, according to slavevoyage.org. The last slave ship to cross the Atlantic Ocean arrived in Cuba in the late 1860s.

7. The Atlantic slave trade was global.

The Atlantic slave trade rippled out far beyond the Atlantic Ocean . European slave traders sourced fabrics from South Asia and cowrie shells from the Maldives in the Indian Ocean to trade for enslaved Africans. Parts of non-Atlantic Africa also participated in the slave trade. Some slave ships carried captives from Mozambique on Africa’s eastern coast to the Americas. In some parts of the Americas, enslaved people mined metals like silver and gold, which slave owners sometimes traded to China.

8. The slave trade transformed the world.

The slave trade radically changed lives, economies, environments and cultures. First, of course, it devastated millions of enslaved people. In addition to the 1 to 2 million who died during the Middle Passage, survivors usually faced lifelong enslavement and hard labor in the Americas.

The slave trade also reinforced racial hierarchies in the Americas and Europe that upheld the oppression of Black people for centuries. Closely intertwined with capitalism, industrialization and imperialism, the trade strengthened those economic and political systems, enriching enslavers and societies on both sides of the Atlantic. And it transformed ecosystems and environments, transporting invasive species like mosquitoes from Africa to the Americas and forcing enslaved people to clear trees to cultivate cash crops like sugar and cotton for global markets.

On a cultural level, enslaved Africans made a huge mark on the Americas—unsurprising given the richness and extraordinary diversity of African cultures and the fact that more enslaved Africans crossed the Atlantic Ocean than Europeans until the 1820s. African influences permeate language, music, religion, food and medicine across the Americas.

9. Enslaved people have stories to tell.

Historians continue to gather information about captives and to tell their stories. New databases such as slavevoyages.org/past/database and enslaved.org/ contain names and other information about tens of thousands of enslaved people. One individual who has received lots of attention recently is Oluale Kossola (later known by the name Cudjo Lewis), who has a remarkable story. Captured in 1860 by Dahomey warriors in modern-day Benin and brought to Alabama in 1860, Kossola journeyed aboard the Clotilda, the last slave ship to arrive in the United States. Kossola survived the Middle Passage and slavery in the American South before joining with fellow Clotilda captives and forming a new settlement called Africatown, Alabama. This town still exists today.

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