transatlantic slave trade essay questions

7 key questions about the transatlantic slave trade – answered

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

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Why was it Africans who were enslaved?

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

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

Learn more:

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

Why did the slave trade last so long?

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

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

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

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Why did the west turn against slavery.

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

How did slavery tie into the global economy?

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

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

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

What happened to slavery after abolition?

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

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

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

Was the slave trade a holocaust?

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

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

Have reparations been made since abolition?

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

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

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

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

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Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History Essays

The transatlantic slave trade.

Necklace: Pendant

Figure: Seated Portuguese Male

Pipe: Rifle

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

October 2003

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

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

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

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

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

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

Further Reading

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

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

Additional Essays by Alexander Ives Bortolot

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

Related Essays

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

List of Rulers

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

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Jamelle Bouie

We Still Can’t See American Slavery for What It Was

By Jamelle Bouie

Opinion Columnist

The historian Marcus Rediker opens “ The Slave Ship: A Human History ” with a harrowing reconstruction of the journey, for a captive, from shore to ship:

The ship grew larger and more terrifying with every vigorous stroke of the paddles. The smells grew stronger and the sounds louder — crying and wailing from one quarter and low, plaintive singing from another; the anarchic noise of children given an underbeat by hands drumming on wood; the odd comprehensible word or two wafting through: someone asking for menney, water, another laying a curse, appealing to myabecca, spirits.

An estimated 12.5 million people endured some version of this journey, captured and shipped mainly from the western coast of Africa to the Western Hemisphere during the four centuries of the trans-Atlantic slave trade. Of that number, about 10.7 million survived to reach the shores of the so-called New World.

It is thanks to decades of painstaking, difficult work that we know a great deal about the scale of human trafficking across the Atlantic Ocean and about the people aboard each ship. Much of that research is available to the public in the form of the SlaveVoyages database. A detailed repository of information on individual ships, individual voyages and even individual people, it is a groundbreaking tool for scholars of slavery, the slave trade and the Atlantic world. And it continues to grow. Last year, the team behind SlaveVoyages introduced a new data set with information on the domestic slave trade within the United States, titled “ Oceans of Kinfolk .”

The systematic effort to quantify the slave trade goes back at least as far as the 19th century. For example, in the 1888 edition of the second volume of his “History of the United States of America, From the Discovery of the American Continent,” the historian George Bancroft estimates “the number of negroes” imported by “the English into the Spanish, French, and English West Indies, and the English continental colonies, to have been, collectively, nearly three million: to which are to be added more than a quarter of a million purchased in Africa, and thrown into the Atlantic on passage.” He adds later, “After every deduction, the trade retains its gigantic character of crime.”

In 1958, the economic historians Alfred H. Conrad and John R. Meyer transformed the study of slavery — and of economic history more broadly — with the publication of “The Economics of Slavery in the Ante Bellum South.” Their methods, which relied on statistical data and mathematical analysis, revolutionized the field.

The origins of SlaveVoyages lie in this period and, specifically, in the work of a group of scholars who, a decade later, began to collect data on slave-trading voyages and encode it for use with a mainframe computer.

“It goes back to the late 1960s and the work of Philip Curtin,” David Eltis, an emeritus professor of history at Emory and a former co-editor of the SlaveVoyages database, told me. “He did this book called ‘The Atlantic Slave Trade: A Census,’ part of which involved computerizing — which was quite a dramatic step in those days — a list of slave voyages for the 19th century. And he sent me, in response to a cold call, a box of 2,313 IBM cards, one card for each voyage. And that was the starting point.”

Over the next two decades, working independently and collaboratively, historians in the United States and around the world would turn this archival information on the trans-Atlantic trade into data sets representing more than 11,000 individual voyages, a significant accomplishment even if it represented only a fraction of the trade in human lives from the 15th century to its end in the 19th century.

Later, beginning in the 1990s, those scholars began to integrate this data — which encompassed the British, Dutch, French and Portuguese slave trade — into a single data set. By the end of the decade, the first SlaveVoyages database had been released to the public as an (expensive) CD-ROM set including details from more than 27,000 voyages.

It is hard to exaggerate the significance of this work for historians of slavery and the slave trade. An arrival to and departure from port tells a story. To know when, where and how many times a ship disembarked is to know a little more about the nature of the specific exchange as well as the slave trade as a whole. Every bit of new information fills in the blanks of a time that has long since passed out of living memory.

After nearly 10 years as physical media, SlaveVoyages was introduced to the public as a website in 2008 and then relaunched in 2019 with a new interface and even more detail. As it stands today, the site, funded primarily by grants, contains data sets on various aspects of the slave trade: a database on the trans-Atlantic trade with more than 36,000 entries, a database containing entries on voyages that took place within the Americas and a database with the personal details of more than 95,000 enslaved Africans found on these ships.

The newest addition to SlaveVoyages is a data set that documents the “coastwise” traffic to New Orleans during the antebellum years of 1820 to 1860, when it was the largest slave-trading market in the country. The 1807 law that forbade the importation of enslaved Africans to the United States also required any captain of a coastwise vessel with enslaved people on board to file, at departure and on arrival, a manifest listing those individuals by name.

Countless enslaved Africans arrived at ports up and down the coast of the United States, but the largest share were sent to New Orleans. This new data set draws from roughly 4,000 “slave manifests” to document the traffic to that port. Those manifests list more than 63,000 captives, including names and physical descriptions, as well as information on an individual’s owner and information on the vessel and its captain.

Because of its specificity with regard to individual enslaved people, this new information is as pathbreaking for lay researchers and genealogists as it is for scholars and historians. It is also, for me, an opportunity to think about the difficult ethical questions that surround this work: How exactly do we relate to data that allows someone — anyone — to identify a specific enslaved person? How do we wield these powerful tools for quantitative analysis without abstracting the human reality away from the story? And what does it mean to study something as wicked and monstrous as the slave trade using some of the tools of the trade itself?

Before we go any further, it is worth spending a little more time with the history of the trans-Atlantic slave trade itself, at least as it relates to the United States.

A large majority of people taken from Africa were sold to enslavers in either South America or the Caribbean. British, Dutch, French, Spanish and Portuguese traders brought their captives to, among other places, modern-day Jamaica, Barbados, Cuba, Puerto Rico, Brazil and Haiti, as well as Argentina, Antigua and the Bahamas. A little over 3.5 percent of the total, about 389,000 people, arrived on the shores of British North America and the Gulf Coast during those centuries when slave ships could find port.

In the last decades of the 18th century, moral and religious activism fueled an effort to suppress British involvement in the African slave trade. In 1774, the Continental Congress of rebelling American states adopted a temporary general nonimportation policy against Britain and its possessions, effectively halting the slave trade, although the policy lapsed under the Confederation Congress in the wake of the Revolutionary War. Still, by 1787, most of the states of the newly independent United States had banned the importation of slaves, although slavery itself continued to thrive in the southeastern part of the country.

From 1787 to 1788, Americans would write and ratify a new Constitution that, in a concession to Lower South planters who demanded access to the trans-Atlantic trade, forbade a ban on the foreign slave trade for at least the next 20 years. But Congress could — and, in 1794, did — prohibit American ships from participating. In 1807, right on schedule, Congress passed — and President Thomas Jefferson, a slave-owning Virginian, signed — a measure to abolish the importation of enslaved Africans to the United States, effective Jan. 1, 1808.

But the end to American involvement in the trans-Atlantic slave trade (or at least the official end, given an illegal trade that would not end until the start of the Civil War) did not mean the end of the slave trade altogether. Slavery remained a big and booming business, driven by demand for tobacco, rice, indigo and increasingly cotton, which was already on its path to dominance as the principal cash crop of the slaveholding South.

Within a decade of the invention of the cotton gin in 1793, annual cotton production had grown twentyfold to 35 million pounds in 1800. By 1810, production had risen to roughly 85 million pounds per year, accounting for more than 20 percent of the nation’s export revenue. By 1820, the United States was producing something in the area of 160 million pounds of cotton a year.

Fueling this growth was the rapid expansion of American territory, facilitated by events abroad. In August 1791, the Haitian Revolution began with an insurrection of enslaved people. In 1803, Haitian revolutionaries defeated a final French Army expedition sent to pacify the colony after years of bloody conflict. To pay for this expensive quagmire — and to keep the territory out of the hands of the British — the soon-to-be-emperor Napoleon Bonaparte sold what remained of French North America to the United States at a fire-sale price.

The new territory nearly doubled the size of the country, opening new land to settlement and commercial cultivation. And as the American nation expanded further into the southeast, so too did its slave system. Planters moved from east to west. Some brought slaves. Others needed to buy them. There had always been an internal market for enslaved labor, but the end of the international trade made it larger and more lucrative.

It is hard to quantify the total volume of sales on the domestic slave trade, but scholars estimate that in the 40-year period between the Missouri Compromise and the secession crisis, at least 875,000 people were sent south and southwest from the Upper South, most as a result of commercial transactions, the rest as a consequence of planter migration.

New, more granular data on voyages and migrations and sales will help scholars delve deeper than ever into the nature of slavery in the United States, into specifics of the trade and into the ways it shaped the political economy of the American republic.

But no data set, no matter how precise, is complete. There are things that quantification can obscure. And there are, again, ethical questions that must be asked and answered when dealing with the quantitative study of human atrocity, which is what we’re ultimately doing when we bring statistical and mathematical methods to the study of slavery.

To think about the slave trade in terms of vessels and voyages — to look at it as columns in a spreadsheet or as points in an online animation — is to engage in an act of abstraction. Historians have no choice but to rely, as Marcus Rediker writes, on “ledgers and almanacs, balance sheets, graphs and tables.” But it carries a heavy cost, dehumanizing a reality that, he writes, “must, for moral and political reasons, be understood concretely.”

Consider, as well, the extent to which the tools of abstraction are themselves tied up in the history of the trans-Atlantic slave trade. As the historian Jennifer L. Morgan notes in “ Reckoning With Slavery: Gender, Kinship, and Capitalism in the Early Black Atlantic ,” the fathers of modern demography, the 17th-century English writers and mathematicians William Petty and John Graunt, were “thinking through problems of population and mobility at precisely the moment when England had solidified its commitment to the slave trade.”

Their questions were ones of statecraft: How could England increase its wealth? How could it handle its surplus population? And what would it do with “excessive populations that did not consume” in the formal market? Petty was concerned with Ireland — Britain’s first colony, of sorts — and the Irish. He thought that if they could be forcibly transferred to England, then they could, in Morgan’s words, become “something valuable because of their ability to augment the population and labor power of the English.”

This conceptual breakthrough, Morgan told me in an interview, cannot be disentangled from the slave trade. The English, she said, “are learning to think about people as ‘abstractable.’ By watching what the Spanish and what the Portuguese have been doing for 200 years, but also by doing it themselves, saying, ‘Oh, I can take Africans from here and move them to there, and then I can use them for my own purposes.’”

Embedded in this early project of quantification — Morgan notes in her book that Graunt “mounted what historians and political scientists agree was the first systematic use of demographic evidence to understand a contemporary sociopolitical problem” — is an objectification of human life.

Compounding these problems is the extent to which we rely on the documentation of slaveholders for our knowledge of the enslaved.

Writing of enslaved women on Barbados, the historian Marisa J. Fuentes notes in “ Dispossessed Lives: Enslaved Women, Violence, and the Archive ” that “they appear as historical subjects through the form and content of archival documents in the manner in which they lived: spectacularly violated, objectified, disposable, hypersexualized, and silenced. The violence is transferred from the enslaved bodies to the documents that count, condemn, assess, and evoke them, and we receive them in this condition.”

She continues: “Epistemic violence originates from the knowledge produced about enslaved women by white men and women in this society, and that knowledge is what survives in archival form.”

The traders, enslavers, officials and others who documented the slave trade did so in the context of legal and commercial relationships. For them, the enslaved were objects to be bought and sold for profit, wealth and status. If an individual’s “historical” life is shaped by the documents and images they leave behind, then, as Fuentes writes, most enslaved women, men and children live (and have lived) their historical lives as “numbers on an estate inventory or a ship’s ledger.” It is in that form that they are then shaped by “additional commodification” — used but not necessarily understood as having been fully alive.

“The data that we have about those ships is also kind of caught in a stranglehold of ship captains who care about some things and don’t care about others,” Jennifer Morgan said. We know what was important to them . It is the task of the historian to bring other resources to bear on this knowledge, to shed light on what the documents, and the data, might obscure.

“By merely reproducing the metrics of slave traders,” Fuentes said, “you’re not actually providing us with information about the people, the humans, who actually bore the brunt of this violence. And that’s important. It is important to humanize this history, to understand that this happened to African human beings.”

It’s here that we must engage with the question of the public. Work like the SlaveVoyages database exists in the “digital humanities,” a frequently public-facing realm of scholarship and inquiry. And within that context, an important part of respecting the humanity of the enslaved is thinking about their descendants.

“If you’re doing a digital humanities project, it exists in the world,” said Jessica Marie Johnson, an assistant professor of history at Johns Hopkins and the author of “ Wicked Flesh: Black Women, Intimacy, and Freedom in the Atlantic World .” “It exists among a public that is beyond the academy and beyond Silicon Valley. And that means that there should be certain other questions that we ask, a different kind of ethics of care and a different morality that we bring to things.”

I have some personal experience with this. Years ago, I worked with colleagues at Slate magazine on an infographic that showed the scale and duration of the trans-Atlantic slave trade, using data from the SlaveVoyages website. Plotted on a map of the Atlantic Ocean, it represented each ship as a single dot, moving from its departure point on the African coast to its arrival point in the Americas. As time goes on — as the 16th century becomes the 17th century becomes the 18th century becomes the 19th century — the dots grow overwhelming.

What I did not appreciate at the time was how we, the creators, would lose control of our creation. People encountered the infographic in ways we could not anticipate and that lay outside of our imagination. It was repurposed for schools and museums, used for personal projects and in exhibitions. Inevitably, some of these people would contact us. They would want to know more: about the ships, about the journeys, about the people. And we couldn’t answer them.

When I think back to the creation of that infographic, I wonder whether we had shown the care demanded of the data. Whether we had, in creating this abstraction, re-enacted — however inadvertently — some of the objectification of the slave trade.

One way to address this problem is to ensure that the audience understands the context. “I want to make sure that Black people in the audience feel like they are not being assaulted again by the information in the project or by the methods behind the project or any of that,” Johnson said, speaking of SlaveVoyages and other public work around slavery. “Everything from the colors on a website to the metadata itself is reshaped if we decide that the people in the audience should not feel harmed” and “should not be re-assaulted by their experience in this project or on this site.”

The new addition to SlaveVoyages, “Oceans of Kinfolk,” was made with these questions and concerns in mind. “You can use quantitative methodologies to learn about enslaved people, to learn about their experience,” said Jennie Williams, who collected and compiled the data as a doctoral student at Johns Hopkins and helped integrate it into the database as a postdoctoral research fellow at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Williams is also a friend, with whom I have discussed this work for years.

The slave traders who documented their cargo for federal authorities — producing the manifests that were the foundation of Williams’ work — were obviously not interested in the lives and experiences of their captives, except as cargo. They had no intention of preserving their identities as people. But despite this indifference, Williams said, that is essentially what happened.

These records are unique, Williams explained. If you look at bills of sale, she said, “most people are not identified by last name. If you look at fugitive ads, which I looked at 11,000 of and did a comparison with the manifests, which is also my dissertation, most people are not listed by last name. That is because slaveholders did not recognize enslaved people’s last names. They knew they had last names — they did not care.”

But, she continued: “If you asked an enslaved person ‘what is your name,’ they responded with a first and last name much more commonly than you would see in the other records. And so, manifests, compared to all other records of enslaved people I’ve seen, have a much higher proportion of last names in them.”

That fact makes this data important for genealogists and others interested in their family histories. “If Black families are able to reach or to trace their genealogy back to the 19th century, they very rarely get past 1870,” the year of the first federal census after slavery, Williams said. “This is not a database of everybody, but if I can get people to know about it, it is potentially useful for millions of people, because 63,000 people have millions of descendants.”

David Eltis concurred. “It’s quite rare to have this big body or big cache of names for enslaved people in the United States,” he said. “A person can go back and find something from the early 19th century, find a person with a possible connection. And that is simply not possible for the trans-Atlantic material. You can’t go back to Africa.”

If part of the ethical task for quantitative researchers of slavery is to preserve the humanity of the enslaved despite the nature of the sources, then connecting this data to Black genealogists is one way to underscore the fact that these were real people with real legacies.

“I could barely sleep the first night,” said Carlton Houston, a descendant of one of the 63,000 captives listed as part of the coastal trade to New Orleans, speaking of when he first saw the document listing his ancestor Simon Wilson, a young man sold for the purpose of “breeding” more people. “It was so compelling to see. Here’s the manifest, here’s this name, to have this visual in your head of these young people, chained on a boat, not really knowing where they were going.”

“There was not much for him to look forward to, you know, just this abysmal world that they lived in,” Houston added. “And yet, they survived, and didn’t give up.”

As for the sources themselves, it may be possible to use their physicality — the fact that these ledger books, bills of sale and fugitive slave ads are real, tangible objects — to tell stories about the humans involved in this centuries-long nightmare, to use the means of objectifying others to undermine the objectification itself.

“There is a strange way in which the everydayness of the document helps you understand the extraordinary imbalance of power and the wrongness,” Walter Johnson, a professor of history and African and African American studies at Harvard, said. “If somebody smudges the ink on a ledger, you have to imagine a person writing that. And once you imagine a person writing that, you’re imagining the extraordinary power that those words on a page have over somebody’s life. That somebody’s life and their lineage is actually being conveyed by that errant pen stroke. And then that takes you to a moment where you have to imagine those people.”

Indeed, the very banality of this material can help us understand how this system survived, and thrived, for so long. “I am not a historian of slavery because I want to spend my time understanding massive moments of spectacular violence,” Jennifer Morgan told me. “I actually want to understand tiny moments of violence, because that’s what I see as adding up to a kind of numbness — a numbness of empathy, a numbness to human interconnection.”

All of this is to say that with the history of slavery, the quantitative and the qualitative must inform each other. It is important to know the size and scale of the slave trade, of the way it was standardized and institutionalized, of the way it shaped the history of the entire Atlantic world.

But as every historian I spoke to for this story emphasized, it is also vital that we have an intimate understanding of the people who were part of this story and specifically of the people who were forced into it. It is for good reason that W.E.B. Du Bois once called the trans-Atlantic slave trade “the most magnificent drama in the last thousand years of human history”; a tragedy that involved “the transportation of 10 million human beings out of the dark beauty of their mother continent into the newfound Eldorado of the West” where they “descended into Hell”; and an “upheaval of humanity like the Reformation and the French Revolution.”

The future of SlaveVoyages will include even more information on the people involved in the slave trade, enslaved and enslavers alike. “We would like to add an intra-African slave trade database because there is a lot of movement of enslaved people on the eastern side of the Atlantic,” David Eltis said. He also told me that he can imagine a merger with scholars documenting the slave trade across the Indian Ocean, the roots of which go back to antiquity and whose more modern form was concurrent with the trans-Atlantic trade. “We’re really leaning into territory which was unimaginable back in 1969,” he said.

We may not have many statues of the enslaved — we may not have anywhere near enough letters and portraits and personal records for the millions who lived and died in bondage — but they were living, breathing individuals nonetheless, as real to the world as the men and women we put on pedestals.

As we learn from new data and new methods, it is paramount that we keep the truth of their essential humanity at the forefront of our efforts. We must have awareness, care and respect, lest we recapitulate the objectification of the slave trade itself. It is possible, after all, to disturb a grave without ever touching the soil.

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Jamelle Bouie became a New York Times Opinion columnist in 2019. Before that he was the chief political correspondent for Slate magazine. He is based in Charlottesville, Va., and Washington. @ jbouie

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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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What was the trans-Atlantic Slave Trade?

During the 15th to the 19th century, merchants from Europe used captured African people to sell as slaves in America by sailing them across the Atlantic Ocean.

This trade in human beings, known as the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade, made America and Europe wealthy, but damaged millions of African lives, as well as their communities in Africa.  

Slavery was not new at this time, as it had existed in almost all human cultures throughout history.

Buying and selling other people was central to ancient Rome and Greece and had also existed in Africa.

The Trans-Atlantic slave trade began in the 15th century when Portugal had begun exploring the west coast of Africa while trying to find a sea-route to India.

These Portuguese explorers kidnapped local people and took them back to Europe as slaves.

After Columbus ' first voyage to the New World, the Spanish began transporting Africans to the Americas in the early 16th century. 

Most of these enslaved people came from the west coast of Africa, in the areas of modern Nigeria and Cameroon.

Over the next four hundred years, over ten million Africans would be taken and sold in this manner.

How and why Africans were captured

The early European slave traders simply kidnapped Africans they could, sometimes tricking victims onto ships by offering to trade with them.

Later, slavers made deals with African tribes who agreed to attack enemy tribes and trade any captives in return for expensive European products, like clothes and weapons.

During this time, slave traders built small prisons along the coast of Africa, where captives could be held until the slave ships arrived to pick them up.

While imprisoned, the African victims were branded with a red-hot iron to indicate their slave status.

The role of African tribes in the capture of other Africans can often seem confusing.

There are a number of reasons that tribal chiefs may have done this:

• Traditional African society had used slavery to punish people for committing crimes, to pay off debts, or as a result of being captured in war.
• European merchants were offering to sell them the latest technology and luxury goods, so it was economically attractive to sell their captives.
• Tribal chiefs may have simply acted to boost their own power, by using European firearms to defeat their enemies.

The Middle Passage

The most notorious element of the trans-Atlantic slave trade was the ship journey from the coast of Africa to the Americas.

This stretch of water was known as the 'Middle Passage' and was particularly brutal for the victims. 

Since the slave traders' main aim in selling other humans was to make as much money as possible, they treated the captive Africans as 'things' rather than people.

On the coast of Africa, the ships would be filled with as many Africans as they could fit in, even if this meant that there was no room for them to move at all during the duration of the journey.

This resulted in horrific conditions on slave ships.

Many Africans did survive to reach the Americas. Historians estimate that only three quarters of those who entered a ship in Africa exited it in the Americas. 

Those that didn't reach their destination may have died from disease, starvation, killed by the harsh treatment by the ship's crew, or were simply thrown overboard if the slave traders needed to reduce numbers.

In the New World

Once the slave ships reached the Americas, the slaves were then sold to landowners for use on their plantations.

European colonists in the new world were growing crops like sugar, cotton, and tobacco, which could be sold for huge profits.

However, these goods required a lot of manual labour to grow and harvest. Therefore, the farmers relied upon slave labour.

As the victims were slaves, they were not paid for their work, which meant that the landowners made a much larger profit when they sold their crops.

African slaves worked long hours, often for six days every week, and were forced to live in poor housing with limited food. 

It was common for them to suffer significant injuries during their work or die due to starvation or beatings from their owners.

The higher the death rate, the higher the demand for more slaves, which only encouraged slave traders to capture more Africans.

Consequences of the slave trade

The removal of millions of people from the continent of Africa over 400 years devastated the growth and development of many parts of the region.

This led to a decline in population growth, technological development and standard of living.

By the time the European powers began colonizing parts of Africa, the local kingdoms were already weakened, which made the process of colonization easier.

By the 19th century, almost all of Africa had been claimed by one of the European nations.

Also, the long-term impact of treating people of African descent as slaves continued to influence the thinking of many people of European descent in the Americas.

This led to laws that disadvantaged African Americans in particular in North America, even after the slave trade was formally abolished in the 19th century. 

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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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Transatlantic Slave Trade Essay

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

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

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

The Slave Trade “left many societies underdeveloped and disorganized” (Bush 62). This development also weakened several communities in Africa and Asia. The Slave Trade affected the economic stability of every targeted society. This situation made such societies more vulnerable to colonialism. This slave trade produced different racial groups in many countries across the globe. The trade also produced long-term effects such as poverty, inequality, and discrimination. Many descendants of these slaves are currently facing most of these challenges. The Slave Trade presented numerous lessons to different societies. Many societies enacted new laws in order to safeguard the rights of every minority group.

Imperialism

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

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

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

Works Cited

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

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

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Slave trade - bonny question.

Question 2) Find the total number of shipments to VA from Bonny including mean average numbers. Bonny is a port located in the most eastern part of the Gulf of Guinea. It was considered to be a favorable place for transacting slave purchases. It attractiveness included: The ability to purchase yams for feeding the slaves on the middle passage, The predictability of slave availability based on the agricultural calendar The organized slave trade with slaves brought to market from non-coastal areas after harvest And, the stability of the government, which allow the trades to provide trade goods to the slave merchants prior to receiving the slaves without pawnship as collateral. Between 1727-1769 X ships arrived in Virginia. Of these, seven ships came from Bonny, carrying 1,453 slaves for a mean average of 208 per ship. Like question one, there are some ambiguities to question two: shipments of what and what are the geographical boundaries of Bonny.….

Slave Trade - SC Question

Port Negros # of ships Average/ship Africa (Calabar) 5 Congo 1 Gambia and Gold Coast 3 Gambia and Grain Coast 2 Angola 14 Gambia 7 Coast of Guinea 1 Windward and Gold Coast 4 Sierra Leone 1 Windward Coast 1 Senegal 2 Windward and Rice Coast 1 Windward and Grain Coast 1 Gambia and Windward Coast 1 Gold Coast 2 Grain and Gold Coast 1 Totals 10506 47 Mean average per port Weighted mean average per ship Based upon the article "Shipboard Revolts, African Authority, and the Atlantic Slave Trade," by David Richardson and Stephen Behrendt's article "Markets, Transaction Cycles, and Profits: Merchant Decision Making in the British Slave Trade" one could possibly account for the range of slaves per ship and the variations between ports. The slave trade was a business dependent upon the matching of supply and demand in several industries. The ability to secure a vessel, sailors, carpenters and coopers determined, the timing of a ship's departure, the size of the ship, the number of slaves which could be transported and the amount of goods available to trade. Slave trading was also dependent upon the agricultural activities in both….

Slave Trades in the Americas

Slave trade of Indians and blacks began with Columbus but the overall slave trade was much worse and lasted later in history in razil Summary of slave trade in razil Quick Facts about Slave Trade in razil Firm connections with slavery in highlands People involved included Portugese, Luso razilians and the slaves themselves Like Columbus, killing and enslavement of indigenous peoples was common Some slaves escaped and hid in mocambos and quilombos Renegade Indians and escaped slaves created headaches for Portuguese Major epicenter of razil slave trade was Sao Paulo Major townships for slavery were Santos and Mogi das Cruzes Very different townships but slave trade was similar iii. Perosnal connections and friends rather than strangers Valongo, although not long-lasting, was for slave trading only Summary of slave trade in United States a. Differences from razil were easily apparent Did not start with Americans, but rather Spanish/ritish, etc. ii. Slave trade continued with Americans post-revolution iii. Slave traders were commonly privateers and strangers b. ig names….

Bibliography

Barcia, Manuel. 2008. "A Not-So-Common Wind" Slave Revolts in the Age of Revolutions in Cuba and Brazil." Review: A Journal Of The Fernand Braudel Center 31, no. 2: 169-

193. SocINDEX with Full Text, EBSCOhost (accessed October 12, 2015).

Burin, Eric. 2012. "The Slave Trade Act of 1819: A New Look at Colonization and the Politics

of Slavery." American Nineteenth Century History 13, no. 1: 1-14. Academic Search

Slave Trade in and Between

Discussion The focus of this work has been to answer the questions of: (1) How was the slave trade practiced in Europe and Africa before 1550, in comparison to the slave trade in and between the two regions after 1550?' And (2) 'What were the main differences between the two periods in terms of their origins, motivations and effects on African society?' These two time periods, before 1550 and after 1550 have been shown in this work to have been quite different quite simply due to the fact that prior to 1550 slaves were sold to the 'Old World' of Europe however, following approximately 1550, the slave trade business was concentrated on selling slaves to the 'New World' or that of the American continent from which arose an accelerated need and increase in the demand for slaves. Another factor influencing the slave trade business was that African slave traders began to realize that….

Bailey, Ann Caroline. African voices of the Atlantic slave trade: beyond the silence and the shame. Beacon Press, 2005

Petre-Grenouilleau, Oliver. From slave trade to empire: Europe and the colonization of Black Africa, 1780s-1880s. Routledge, 2004.

Sesay, Amudu. Africa and Europe: from partition to interdependence or dependence? Routledge, 1986.

Emmer, P.C. The Dutch slave trade, 1500-1850. Berghahn Books, 2006.

Evolving Slave Trade

Slave Trade The author of this report is asked to answer several questions about the trans-Atlantic slave trade. First, there is the question of how important to African society and to the African economy the slave trade was. Second, there is the question of what roles the slaves served in African societies. Lastly, there will be a comparison of slavery in West Africa and the European slavery model that involved coercive labor. While most examples and depictions of slavery nowadays relate to historical events, the effects and lessons of slavery still ring quite loudly to this very day. When it comes to the difference between the African model of slavery and the European model for the same, there was a stark difference. Indeed, African slaves were looked upon more as dependents rather than property. Put another way, African slaves could eventually "grow" and move beyond their slave state and become integrated into….

Colorado. 'Slavery In Africa'. Autocww.colorado.edu. N.p., 2015. Web. 26 Aug. 2015.

Atlantic Slave Trade Racist or Economic The

Atlantic Slave Trade Racist or economic? The Atlantic slave trade took place across the Atlantic Ocean. It took place during the sixteen to the nineteenth century. The majority of the slaves moved during this incident were the black Africans. These Africans were significantly from the continent. The Europeans bought these slaves from the Africans. They then sent the slaves to North and South America (Muhommad). Different perspectives have been presented below (iencek). The racist view Numerous attempts were made to rationalize the slave trade by its proponents. They hence looked to completely alienate and dehumanize the African race that was misused as slaves. These slaves were labeled the "Black cattle." The African race hence was looked down upon. The traces of this perception are found till date. In the earlier stages there was no discrimination done by colonial settlers. There was no difference in the genre of work done by any race be it whites,….

Works Cited

Melville-Myers, Dr. Ival. "The translatic slave trade." 1999. www.portal.unesco.org. .

Muhommad, Patricia M. "The trans-Atlantic slave trade." 2000.  http://www.auilr.org . .

Wiencek, Henry. An Imperfect God: George Washington, His Slaves, and the Creation of America. Thorndike Press, 2004.

How Did the Vikings Conduct the Slave Trade in the West

Vikings and the Slave Trade Vikings were Norse explorers who traveled around the waters of the North Atlantic raiding, trading, pirating, and colonizing lands wherever their boats could travel. They are historically known as a rough group of individuals with raucous personalities and innate brutality. They are credited with having been the first to discover the New orld and to have reached locations which had not seen foreign invaders before the arrival of the Vikings. Between the 8th and 11th centuries AD, Norsemen and their Viking warriors traveled far and wide, forever changing history in Scandinavia and the rest of Europe and North America as well.[footnoteRef:1] One of the commodities the Vikings traded in was people. The Viking slave-traders were prolific in their activities, capturing people when they invaded and then selling them. More than any other commodity, slaves were how the Vikings were able to trade for goods and services….

Works Cited:

Brink, Stefan. The Viking World . New York, NY: Routledge, 2008.

Downham, Clare. "The Viking Slave Trade." History Ireland. 17. no. 3 (2009): 15-17.

Ferguson, Robert. The Vikings: A History. Toronto, Canada: Penguin, 2009.

Graham-Campbell, James. The Viking World. London, England: Francis Lincoln, 2001.

African Slave Trade -- Equiano's

3). The first division consists of men; married women make up the second division; the third division is "young men" and "maidens" are seen in the fourth (Equiano, p. 4). To Europeans who thought all African native cultures were simplistic and barbaric, the dances that Equiano describes certainly must have stirred creative interest because the dances reflected "some interesting scene of real life" such as "some rural sport" and they were accompanied with "many musical instruments" (Equiano, p. 4). The way in which Equiano employs religious values into his book is also very effective and no doubt made a powerful impression on readers -- not necessarily scholars and intellectuals but also average people with spiritual backgrounds and beliefs -- which, of course, gave some momentum to the antislavery movement. On pages 69-70, after reviewing some of the brutal cruelty visited upon slaves in the est Indies, Equiano wonders why, since….

Equiano, Olaudah. Equiano's Travels: The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano

or Gustavus Vassa the African. New York: Frederick a. Praeger, 1967.

Transatlantic Slave Trade Graphic History Book

Rafe Blaufarb and Liz Clarke’s Inhuman Traffick: The International Struggle against the Transatlantic Slave Trade: A Graphic History accomplishes what few authors or historians could do: tell the tale of one of the most perplexing and gruesome issues in history using the medium graphic non-fiction. There are clear reasons why the authors would have wanted to approach their subject in this unique way. One is simply that no other author or historian had done this before, and the transatlantic slave trade does need to be retold and revisited again and again so that modern readers recognize its ramifications and reverberations. In fact, retelling the story of the transatlantic slave trade also inspires social justice activism, as readers will realize that patterns of slavery still exist: from the sex trade to economically expedient human trafficking. Another reason why The International Struggle against the Transatlantic Slave Trade: A Graphic History is important is that….

The Economics of the Slave Trade

Atlantic Slave Trade From 1650 Onward Although slavery had existed throughout human history, the Atlantic slave trade possessed certain unique qualities which gave rise to an equally unique and economically profitable form of slavery from the 17th century onward. The Atlantic slave trade was also called the Triangle Trade: "Ships carried European manufactures to Africa and exchanged them for slaves, who were then taken to the Americas, where they were traded for sugar, molasses, cotton, tobacco, indigo and other goods, which were brought back to Europe."[footnoteRef:1] Although the Portuguese began the trade, it was primarily the economies of the U.S. and Great ritain which generated its development. [footnoteRef:2] [1: William Hardy, "The Rise and Fall of the Slave Trade," Open University, February 25, 2014, http://www.open.edu/openlearn/history-the-arts/history/the-rise-and-fall-the-slave-trade (accessed December 28, 2015)] [2: Ibid.] The slave trade was fueled by the creation of a 'cash crop' system whereby slaves were used not simply to….

"1807: Congress abolishes the African slave trade." History.com. 2009.

 http://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/congress-abolishes-the-african-slave-trade  (accessed December 28, 2015)

"The Development of the Trade." New York Public Library.

http://www.inmotionaame.org/migrations/topic.cfm;jsessionid=f8302520121451320645041?migration=1&topic=2&bhcp=1 (accessed December 28, 2015)

Sugar Slave Trade in Caribbean

Sugar When it comes to the slave trade, there are many facets, periods and facts surrounding slavery and how it progressed that can be explored, nitpicked and analyzed. However, that overall subject is rather broad and without focus, one could literally write a book about the subject and not run out of fresh material to look at or use. However, the author of this report would avoid that by focusing on the middle passage, the sugar trade that occurred during the same and why slavery was the common choice to facilitate the sugar trade rather than focus on the use of indentured servants or even paid labor. While the fairly easy answer is that the subjugation and exploitation of blacks allowed for good labor for free other than the movement and control of the slaves. Analysis Even with the fairly obvious reasons why slaves were the tool of the trade used to….

Great Blacks in Wax. (2016). National Great Blacks in Wax Museum. Greatblacksinwax.org. Retrieved 23 March 2016, from  http://www.greatblacksinwax.org/Exhibits/middle_pass.htm 

Michigan. (2016). Sugar in the Atlantic World -- Case 6 Sugar and Slavery. Clements.umich.edu. Retrieved 23 March 2016, from  http://clements.umich.edu/exhibits/online/sugarexhibit/sugar06.php 

PBS. (2016). Africans in America/Part 1/The Middle Passage. Pbs.org. Retrieved 23 March 2016, from  http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/aia/part1/1p277.html

Atlantic Slave Trade History

Describe the Neirsée incident. What upset France? What upset Britain? What was unfair about the capture of the slaves? Although Britain and France were formally attempting to dismantle the trans-Atlantic slave trade, the global economy had come to depend on it. The Neirsée incident of 1828 reveals the difficulties inherent in dismantling the slave trade due to the interconnectedness of the global economy. For several years prior to this incident, Britain had outlawed the trafficking of slaves, which is why the British Navy decided to intervene and capture the ship. Yet Britain did not have an international mandate to suddenly outlaw slave trafficking altogether. The human cargo on board the Neirsée was worth far too much to the businesspeople involved on both sides of the Atlantic, both in colonial territories and in Africa. In Inhuman Traffick, Blaufarb relies on primary sources from Britain and France to demonstrate what occurred before, during,….

Wilberforce Anti'slavery Campaign

Discussion thread: leadership guided changeAfter reading the Case Study of Wilberforce Anti-slavery Campaign, suggest Christian Strategies for managing change in the public sector. Apply at least 1 biblical passage that speaks to change. Explain why you picked the passage and what it means to you.Although the British Empire abolished the slave trade during the early 1800s, it required another 16 years after the passage of the 1807 Slave Trade Act for the Wilberforce Anti-Slavery Campaign to commence (Colonialism and politics of Empire, 2023). The founder of the campaign, William Wilberforce, is little known today but his efforts to end the slave trade in Britain place him among the ranks of other great leaders who stood up for what was right even when it was unpopular or even dangerous to do so. In this regard, Manning (2007) reports that, An 18th-century man who could join their ranks but of whom people….

Colonialism and politics of Empire. (2023). The Times (United Kingdom), 24.

Manning, D. (2007, July 24). Anti-slavery saga a tribute to principle. The Nelson Mail, 19.

William Wilberforce. (2023). Hull History Center. Retrieved from https://www.hullhistory centre.org.uk/research/research-guides/william-wilberforce.aspx#:~:text=Wilberforce% 20led%20the%20campaign%20for,back%20with%20their%20own%20propaganda.

African Slave Trade

Resistance and Complicity It is impossible to understand or write about Africa's history without considering its relationship with continents like Europe and America. It is imperative that a discussion of the subject concentrate on Africans' pivotal shaping of world history (Lindsay, 2007). Europeans (i.e., Englishmen, Dutchmen, the Portuguese, and the French) contributed only superficially to shaping Africa's history during the Atlantic era's first two centuries, engaging in merchandizing and goods transportation between sea coasts. Only after 1640 did the Europeans, in what is known as the 2nd Atlantic Era (1640-1800s), begin demanding slaves and raw materials, commencing their cruel influence on the economic freedom of the continent. They effectively influenced or overpowered particular communities on the continent through several layers of partnerships strategically created with natives, rather than through military strength. African currency's gradual devaluation attained by introducing European currency in the form of copper coins, Gatling guns and repeating rifles….

Slave Population in the U S

" And as for this article's information on mortality among slaves in South America, "Death rates among slaves in the Caribbean were one-third higher than in the south...and sometimes Latin American slaves were forced to wear iron masks to keep them from eating dirt or drinking liquor." It was cruel to force slaves in Latin America to produce their own food "in their free time" (Digital History), but that was what was expected of them. So while slaves were dying in huge numbers due to the difficulties of working in the mines and in the sugar cane plantations in Brazil, many slaves in America were actually working indoors in kitchens, doing domestic work, helping white mothers raise the white children. They received, by all accounts, ample food to eat, and even were treated with some dignity in some instances. hile there were no doubt numerous instances of brutality on the part of….

Cooper, Joseph. The Lost Continent: Slavery and the Slave-Trade in Africa in 1875. London:

Frank Cass & Co. LTD, 1968.

Digital History. "African-American Voices: American Slavery in Comparative Perspective."

2006). Retrieved Dec. 2, 2007, at http:/ / the.net/encyclopedia/article/wahl.slavery.us.

Research Paper

Literature - African

Question 2) Find the total number of shipments to VA from Bonny including mean average numbers. Bonny is a port located in the most eastern part of the Gulf of…

Port Negros # of ships Average/ship Africa (Calabar) 5 Congo 1 Gambia and Gold Coast 3 Gambia and Grain Coast 2 Angola 14 Gambia 7 Coast of Guinea 1 Windward and Gold Coast 4 Sierra Leone 1 Windward Coast 1 Senegal 2 Windward and Rice Coast 1 Windward and Grain Coast 1 Gambia and Windward Coast 1 Gold Coast 2 Grain and Gold…

Black Studies

Slave trade of Indians and blacks began with Columbus but the overall slave trade was much worse and lasted later in history in razil Summary of slave trade in razil Quick…

Discussion The focus of this work has been to answer the questions of: (1) How was the slave trade practiced in Europe and Africa before 1550, in comparison to the…

Slave Trade The author of this report is asked to answer several questions about the trans-Atlantic slave trade. First, there is the question of how important to African society and…

Atlantic Slave Trade Racist or economic? The Atlantic slave trade took place across the Atlantic Ocean. It took place during the sixteen to the nineteenth century. The majority of the slaves…

Drama - World

Vikings and the Slave Trade Vikings were Norse explorers who traveled around the waters of the North Atlantic raiding, trading, pirating, and colonizing lands wherever their boats could travel. They…

Mythology - Religion

3). The first division consists of men; married women make up the second division; the third division is "young men" and "maidens" are seen in the fourth (Equiano,…

American History

Rafe Blaufarb and Liz Clarke’s Inhuman Traffick: The International Struggle against the Transatlantic Slave Trade: A Graphic History accomplishes what few authors or historians could do: tell the tale of…

Atlantic Slave Trade From 1650 Onward Although slavery had existed throughout human history, the Atlantic slave trade possessed certain unique qualities which gave rise to an equally unique and…

History - European

Sugar When it comes to the slave trade, there are many facets, periods and facts surrounding slavery and how it progressed that can be explored, nitpicked and analyzed. However,…

Describe the Neirsée incident. What upset France? What upset Britain? What was unfair about the capture of the slaves? Although Britain and France were formally attempting to dismantle the trans-Atlantic…

Discussion thread: leadership guided changeAfter reading the Case Study of Wilberforce Anti-slavery Campaign, suggest Christian Strategies for managing change in the public sector. Apply at least 1 biblical passage…

Resistance and Complicity It is impossible to understand or write about Africa's history without considering its relationship with continents like Europe and America. It is imperative that a discussion of…

Literature - Latin-American

" And as for this article's information on mortality among slaves in South America, "Death rates among slaves in the Caribbean were one-third higher than in the south...and sometimes…

The Black Box of Race

In a circumscribed universe, Black Americans have ceaselessly reinvented themselves.

M y daughter Maggie gave birth to Ellie, my granddaughter, by C‑section on a Saturday afternoon in November of 2014. That evening, my son‑in‑law, Aaron, came over for a warm hug and a celebratory shot of bourbon. I listened to Aaron’s play‑by‑play of the events, and after a decent pause, I asked the question that I had wanted to ask all along:

“Did you check the box?”

Without missing a beat, my good son‑in‑law responded, “Yes, sir. I did.”

“Very good,” I responded, as I poured a second shot.

Aaron, a young white man, had checked the “Black” box on the form that Americans are required to complete at the time of the birth of a child.

Now, my daughter’s father’s admixture—in other words, mine—is 50 percent sub‑Saharan African and 50 percent European, according to DNA tests. My son‑in‑law is 100 percent European. Because Maggie is 75 percent European, Ellie will test about 87.5 percent European when she spits in the test tube.

Eleanor Margaret Gates‑Hatley, who looks like an adorable little white girl, will live her life as a “Black” person, because her father and mother checked the “Black” box. That choice will define so very many of Ellie’s encounters with the world—from how her college application is read to how her physician assesses her risks for certain medical conditions. And she will be destined, throughout her life, to face the challenge of “proving” that she is “Black,” simply because her self‑styled “race man” grandfather ardently—and perhaps foolishly—wished for her racial self to be socially constructed that way.

Read: How did we get here?

Such is the absurdity of the history of race and racial designations in the United States, stemming from “the law of hypodescent,” the proverbial “one‑drop rule.” Perhaps Eleanor will choose to dance the dance of racial indeterminacy, moving effortlessly back and forth across the color line. Or maybe she will claim a social identity that reflects her European ancestry. Or maybe she will keep a photograph of her grandfather in her pocketbook and delight in refuting—or affirming, as the case may be—the laughable, tragic arbitrariness of the social construction of race in America. The most important thing is that this be her choice.

T he “black box” has become a powerful symbol for me. In the event of a plane crash, of course, the black box is what survives—a record of the truth amid disastrous circumstances. The black box is something you can’t see inside—it has inputs and outputs, but its internal workings are not comprehendible. Above all it is a metaphor for the circumscribed universe within which people of African descent have been forced to construct a new identity on this side of the Atlantic.

The Yale legal scholar Stephen L. Carter defined his own box in this way:

To be black and an intellectual in America is to live in a box. So, I live in a box, not of my own making, and on the box is a label, not of my own choosing. Most of those who have not met me, and many of those who have, see the box and read the label and imagine they have seen me.

In Carter’s usage, the black box is a place of identity confinement through predefinition, akin to the late literary critic Barbara Johnson’s definition of a stereotype as “an already read text.” The Black face enters the room, and at a glimpse, the viewer knows all that they need to know about the person wearing the mask of Blackness. Good luck, Carter is suggesting, shedding any of those connotations.

And yet a great portion of the history of African Americans consists of the marvelous and ingenious means by which they have navigated their way in and out of the box in which they’ve been confined.

Perhaps the first black box was the definition of Africa as “the Dark Continent,” a metaphor for the color of its inhabitants’ skin as well as for their supposed benightedness. This metaphor was used to justify the second, even crueler black box, within which people of African descent found themselves placed by Europeans—the dreadful transatlantic slave trade, responsible for perhaps the largest forced migration in human history. It was the repository of all the racist stereotypes employed to justify the enslavement of a continent of human beings and then, subsequent to the abolition of slavery, to justify the rollback of Reconstruction and the rise of Jim Crow segregation.

The author Henry Box Brown literalized this trope by escaping from slavery in 1849 by being shipped from Richmond to Philadelphia in a box measuring three feet, one inch long; two feet, six inches high; and two feet wide. The box was labeled this side up to keep Brown upright, but the instruction was often ignored, meaning Brown spent hours of his trip upside down, drinking water from a beef bladder and breathing through three drilled holes.

B ut the black box was also, somehow, a place of creativity, a universe of culture mysteriously and inexplicably produced, and often unintelligible to those outside it. Frederick Douglass recognized this when he mused about the “Sorrow Songs”—spirituals composed by enslaved men and women. “They would make the dense old woods, for miles around, reverberate with their wild songs, revealing at once the highest joy and the deepest sadness.” These songs were composed in code, music set “to words which to many would seem unmeaning jargon, but which, nevertheless, were full of meaning to themselves.” Douglass himself confessed he did not understand: “They told a tale of woe which was then altogether beyond my feeble comprehension.”

In 1884, this magazine published a long article called “ The Negro Problem, ” by the Harvard professor Nathaniel Southgate Shaler, a paleontologist and geologist as well as a strong proponent of scientific racism and eugenics. Shaler’s white-supremacist discourse fell squarely into the school of thought imposed on the Black community that was used well into the 20th century to justify the eradication of rights gained by African Americans during Reconstruction. Thirteen years later, also in this magazine, W. E. B. Du Bois wrote, “Being a problem is a strange experience.” His essay, “ Strivings of the Negro People ” (which he would revise slightly for his 1903 book, The Souls of Black Folk ), described the “Negro Problem” label as a kind of black box:

The ‘shades of the prison-house’ closed round about us all: walls strait and stubborn to the whitest, but relentlessly narrow, tall, and unscalable to sons of night who must plod darkly against the stone, or steadily, half hopelessly watch the streak of blue above.

(The writers of these two Atlantic essays knew each other: Shaler was Du Bois’s professor at Harvard. Perhaps paradoxically, Du Bois expressed gratitude to Shaler for defending his presence in class against the protests of a southern student.)

It was to free himself and the race from the bounds of this box that Du Bois and many others wrote and spoke so prolifically, addressing the subject again and again. For Ralph Ellison, in Invisible Man , the black box is both a boxing ring in which two blindfolded Black boys are forced to beat each other senseless and also the hole in which Ellison’s protagonist hides from a world that seeks to impose upon him its masks of identity, where he types the manuscript that we eventually are surprised to learn we are reading over his shoulder.

But being doomed to fight against racism could also be a trap. As Du Bois’s fellow Harvard graduate and sometime ideological foe, the philosopher Alain Locke, put it , even “the thinking Negro” inside a black box forged “in the mind of America” is forced “to see himself in the distorted perspective of a social problem. His shadow, so to speak, has been more real to him than his personality.”

More recently, Terrance Hayes’s poem “The Blue Seuss” explores the metaphor of the black box. It begins:

Blacks in one box Blacks in two box Blacks on Blacks stacked in boxes stacked on boxes Blacks in boxes stacked on shores Blacks in boxes stacked on boats in darkness Blacks in boxes do not float Blacks in boxes count their losses

Blacks in voting booths are Blacks in boxes Blacks beside Blacks in rows of houses are Blacks in boxes too

A s a professor , I try to teach my students about how Black people have sought to escape from this box. But even more important, I endeavor to expose them to the long tradition of Black discourse, and the often disregarded fact that Black people have been arguing with one another about what it means to be Black since they began to publish their thoughts and feelings in the latter quarter of the 18th century.

When Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. had the audacity to insert himself into the morality of American involvement in the Vietnam War, for example, even—or especially—several of his fellow leaders of the civil-rights movement told him that he was out of bounds, demanding that he redirect his concerns to issues relevant to those doomed to dwell within the black box, advice that the good reverend boldly ignored.

The moral is that there never has been one way to be Black; that African Americans are as varied and as complex in their political and religious beliefs as any other group. And they have voiced those internal differences with great fervor and passion, stunning eloquence, and vehemence, often even subjecting those Black thinkers with whom they disagree to the nastiest and pettiest ad hominem attacks.

These debates within and about the African American tradition have for too long been opaque to most Americans, in the same way that the songs of his enslaved sisters and brothers remained opaque to Frederick Douglass. Too often, we talk about “the Black community” as if it were a village composed of a unitary group, one with shared experiences and unified views. Reflecting on what binds Black Americans together and on what distinguishes individuals and subcultures within that tradition has never been more crucial than at this contested and polarized moment, with its focus on identity and identity politics, and Americans’ lazy predisposition to think of every group as monolithic.

But the tradition of Black thought is most correctly described as a series of contentions, many of them fiery ones. And fire, as the greatest Black intellectuals have always known, can generate light as well as heat.

The “right” answer about how to escape the black box has never been formulated, precisely because there never has been, and never will be, one right answer to that haunting question.

Consider this paradox: The very concept of “race” is the child of racism. “Blackness” was an arbitrary category invented by Europeans and Americans in the Enlightenment to justify the horror show of Black subjugation. The human beings who suddenly became “Black” were then forced to play a complex game of “representation” to claim some space in the world, and that vexed process evolved into a rich legacy of self‑definition within this diverse community composed of every type of person living on the planet Earth—some 50 million of them in this country alone—connected by their relationship to this proverbial black box, a metaphysical construct invented to justify an economic order in which their selfhood could be objectified, their subjectivity robbed, and their labor stolen.

T hey created this legacy of self-definition, in no small part, by using the master’s tool: writing.

During the Enlightenment, Black authors such as Ignatius Sancho, John Marrant, and Olaudah Equiano managed to forge successful careers against all the odds. Others were less fortunate. Despite her unprecedented fame, the poet Phillis Wheatley died in obscurity and poverty in 1784. Jacobus Capitein, a formerly enslaved man from the Gold Coast, defended his doctoral dissertation (which argued that the Bible did not oppose slavery) at the University of Leiden in 1742. He returned home, founded a school, and, after falling from Dutch grace, was buried in an unmarked grave. We can begin to understand how he was seen by his contemporaries through the words a fellow student at Leiden inscribed in the foreword to Capitein’s dissertation: “See this Moor, his skin is black, but white his soul … He will bring faith, hope and love to the Africans, so they will, whitened, honour the Lamb.”

The small, elite group of Black intellectuals wrote very few words about the matter of their “Blackness” in a world still wrestling with who and what they were, and what the relation between “Blackness” and “whiteness” could possibly be in European economies defined by the trade in Black human beings. No matter how brilliant an individual of color might be, no matter how much fame, respect, or financial success he might achieve, he was standing on a trap door.

Thus was the fate of Angelo Soliman.

Soliman was born around 1721, likely in what is now Nigeria. According to the scholars Iris Wigger and Spencer Hadley, he was stolen from his family as a child and forced into slavery in Italy, where he became the property of the imperial governor of Sicily, Count Lobkowitz. When the count died, Soliman became a servant to a prince in Vienna, dressed in exotic styles as a so‑called court Moor. The prince dismissed Soliman when, without permission, he married an aristocratic widow. Nevertheless, Soliman’s stature only increased, and his black box began to crack open.

From the November 2023 issue: Black success, white backlash

He continued to move in aristocratic circles, rejoined the royal court as an educator under the prince’s successor, and joined a Masonic lodge that counted Mozart and Haydn among its members. Soliman became the grand master of this lodge and gave its rituals a more scholarly bent, so much so that he is still celebrated in Masonic lore as Angelus Solimanus, the “Father of Pure Masonic Thought.” He spoke multiple languages. He may well have been the most prominent Black person in Europe at the time.

In death none of this mattered. Soliman died on November 21, 1796. Despite the pleas of his daughter, Josephine, Soliman would not receive a proper Christian burial. Instead, his body fell into the hands of the director of the Royal Natural History Collection, Abbé Simon Eberlé, who had hatched his heinous plan while Soliman was still alive, petitioning the government for the “cession of the corpse.” What followed was horrific.

As Wigger and Hadley write, Eberlé “ordered a death mask to be created before Soliman’s skin was removed and prepared for exhibition with a stuffing compound. The so created figure was then dressed up as a ‘savage’ in a loin cloth, with an ostrich feather crown and glass beads, and presented to the public in the midst of taxidermised exotic animals.”

In the ultimate humiliation, Soliman was placed on display at the museum, a debased artifact trapped behind glass. As late as 1806, this perverse specter of European primitivism and anti‑Black racism was still proudly on display—a literal realization of permanent suspension in a black box. Eventually it was moved to a warehouse, which burned in the October Revolution of 1848.

The quest for culture and individual identity in the face of such history is an argument without end. Like all truly great arguments, it is a story of ceaseless creativity and reinvention, without which any attempt to understand America is not just incomplete but absurd.

This essay is adapted from the forthcoming book The Black Box: Writing the Race .

​When you buy a book using a link on this page, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.

Digital Mapping and SlaveVoyages

A mixed-methods approach for analyzing the african diaspora (college level).

Greg O'Malley | Daniel Story | Jeffrey Erbig

Historical Source Gallery Walk

Middle school lesson plan.

Andrew Allio | Greg O'Malley

Slave Voyage Data Analysis Investigations

New Orleans Slave Trade and Twelve Years a Slave

The Transatlantic Slave Trade: Document Based Questions

Researching the Transatlantic Slave Trade

High school lesson plan.

David Eltis | Christine Kadonsky

Database Exercise

Middle or high school lesson plan.

Brian Hamilton

Finding Historical Evidence

Slave Trade Memorial

Michael Poreda

The Countries of the Slave Trade

Kristine Leach

One Country's Slave Trade

The 1808 Slave Trade Abolition Deadline

Heather Dahl

Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Essay

The transatlantic trade refers to a portion of the global slave trade conducted across the Atlantic Ocean to America transporting captured, kidnapped, and enslaved Africans. It was conducted between the 16 th  and the 19 th  century before being abolished by many nations worldwide. Million and 12 million Africans were transported from their places to America to work in different areas (Helg, 19). The transatlantic slave trade was the second of the three stages of the worldwide triangular trade where wine, textile, and arms were moved from Europe to Africa for colonization and support for the slave trade. The second stage was shipping enslaved people to America from Africa to work in the industries and the farmlands created in America (Helg, 17). The slave trade can be traced back to the 1480s, with the Portuguese ships transporting Africans to Madeira Islands and Cape Verde for use as enslaved laborers (Helg, 22). Spanish conquistadors took enslaved Africans to the Caribbean after 1502; however, the merchants from Portugal continued to dominate the slave trade until the 1650s operating from the Congo-Angola area along the African West Coast (Helg, 22). The business was all around, and for more than 300 years, 10.5 million Africans were torn from their families to America (Helg, 17,19). Therefore, this essay aims at articulating the impact of the trans-Atlantic slave trade on Africa, Europe, and America; the paper will examine how the trade led to the impoverishment of Africa while enriching the European nations and America.

The impact of the Trans-Atlantic slave trade on Africa

Various researchers in Africa have documented several adverse effects of the trans-Atlantic slave trade on Africa’s economy, social structures, and institutions in West Africa and the African continent. The demand for enslaved people rose sharply in the 17 th  century as the Chesapeake tobacco plantations and the sugar plantations in the Caribbean expanded (Helg, 26). Thus, it robbed Africa of its energetic population, as strong men and women in their prime age were captured and shipped to Europe and America to provide free labor in plantations and industries. Furthermore, the trade led to political instability and social fragmentation. It increased lawlessness, and violence, as it provided incentives to warlords, who would capture and sell their fellow Africans to Europe and America (BBC, 2019).

The rapid depopulation of the African population due to the trade made agricultural development difficult. The continent lacked an energetic population to work in the agriculture sector because most people left behind were primarily dependent people, disabled, and elderly who could no longer contribute to the economic group (BBC). Moreover, the constant fear of being captured as enslaved made most men and women keep hiding, thus slowing economic development, especially in west African countries. The trade also changed the cultural landscape of African societies, as women had to assume roles played by men as most of them got captured and sold to slavery in Europe and America (BBC). With many family members being taken to slavery, communities lost their leaders and role models, thus leading to many hardships and instabilities, which is still evident in most West African countries, the most affected nations in Africa during the slave trade. The trade also left most African families in poverty and hunger as those left behind could not cater for themselves.

Furthermore, the trans-Atlantic trade led to many African deaths during their capturing and transit due to disease, hunger, and while trying to escape (Helg, 18). However, it’s also evident that the trade also benefited Africans; for instance, the Europeans brought valuable products such as clothes for Africans to wear and iron bars which revolutionized agriculture. However, guns brought by the Europeans only benefited specific communities’ trade as opposed to the African continent in general. For example, the increased demand for enslaved people and the availability of weapons as guns led to the emergence of powerful African kingdoms. They raided and camptured other communities through their powerful militaries, whom they sold to the Europeans and American merchants as enslaved people (Lecture Notes, 20). Therefore, it is arguable that Africa’s current underdevelopment results from trans-Atlantic trade.

The impact of trans-Atlantic trade on Europe and America

The trans-Atlantic trade is the most devastating human-forced migration in human history. Many Africans were forcefully shipped to Europe and America to work as butlers, domestic workers, cleaners, plantations, and many other positions (Whatley et al., 98). During this period slave trade became a lucrative business. Most of the goods the Europeans were exporting to Europe from Africa previously as many European merchants could earn more income from transporting and selling Africans as enslaved people in different parts of Europe and America (Manning, 46). Nonetheless, although the trade adversely affected Africa, it’s evident that Europe and America benefited positively from it because, as Africa’s economic, political, and social structures were deteriorating, the Europeans and Americans were becoming much more robust and more complex (Manning, 46).

Europe’s and America’s rapid economic growth can be attributed to the increased agricultural plantation, which usually benefited from the Africans, free labor. For example, it is believed that America’s economic strength was built by the enslaved people, who provided the country with free forced labor for centuries (Helg, 17). Moreover, countries such as Portugal developed their economy, social, and political structures, with gold and the free labor acquired from the enslaved Africans. Furthermore, owning many enslaved people became a form of wealth to the Europeans, considering that the value of their property depended on the number of enslaved people an individual was holding.

Furthermore, Europeans could acquire valuable goods such as coffee, tobacco, and sugar from Africa, which would then be shipped to Europe and America for consumption and trade. Ironically, the money accumulated from those products was then used to acquired more African slaves (Helg, 21). The enslaved people were the core drivers of the trade operations as coffee and sugar were needed for consumption and trade. Furthermore, most people captured during the trade were of prime-age, who worked in plantations and industries, eventually leading to more economic growth in European countries and America ((BBC). The trade led to enormous wealth generation among most individuals and companies dealing in the slave trade or benefiting from the free labor provided by the enslaved people in Europe and America. Europeans continued making weapons to conquer the world and enhance their boundaries.

Furthermore, the economic growth that Europe and America experienced due to free labor provided to the enslaved Africans led to the country’s technological advancement, especially in warfare, agriculture, and other sectors of the economy. Thus, making them powerful nations globally, as Africa lost its dominance in the world (BBC). While on the negative side slave trade created a notion that African-Americans, being of enslaved Africans’ ancestry, are not equal to white men, a notion that has caused the African American community much pain and misery in the United States due to racial discrimination and prejudice. Many African Americans are still losing their lives at the hands of racist Americans who believe inferior.

In conclusion, the trans-Atlantic slave trade was one of the most dehumanizing experiences that enslaved Africans had to go through. Furthermore, the trade had positive and negative impacts on Africa, Europe, and America. Africa was negatively impacted by trade, both economically, politically, and socially. The trade led to slow development in Africa on the economic side, as most of her resources and labor were shipped to Europe and America. While on the political ground, the trade led to insecurity and political instabilities that most African countries still experience today, leading to the emergence of warlords in the continent (Lecture Notes, 12).

Furthermore, the trade led to the collapse of social aspects of African communities as families were torn apart and increased poverty rates in most African countries whose resources got exploited by the Europeans. However, it’s evident that the trade greatly benefited Europeans and Americans who could acquire cheap labor and raw materials for their plantations and industries. The trade also weakened Africa and opened her to colonization. Therefore, its evident that the trans-Atlantic trade is responsible for the economic underdevelopment experienced by Africa today.

Works Cited

BBC. “Implications of the Slave Trade for African Societies – Revision 1 – Higher History – BBC Bitesize.”  BBC Bitesize , 2019, www.bbc.co.uk/bitesize/guides/zxt3gk7/revision/1.

Helg, Aline. Slave no more: self-liberation before abolitionism in the Americas.  UNC Press Books, 2019.

Lecture Notes. Absolute Power: Way Before 1619, Europe, Africa and the Making of the Atlantic World.

Manning, Patrick.  Slavery and African Life.  Cambridge: Cambridge Up, 2000.

Whatley, Warren C., and Rob Gillezeau. “The Fundamental Impact of the Slave Trade on African Economies.”  Economic Evolution and Revolution in Historical Time , 2011, pp. 86–110, www-personal.umich.edu/~baileymj/Whatley_Gillezeau.pdf.

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