Trade route
Ships from Europe and the Americas forcibly carried an estimated 12.5 million enslaved Africans across the Atlantic; about 1.8 million died on the voyage. Textiles, guns and metal goods bought captives on the African coast, and sugar, tobacco and cotton grown by enslaved people went back to Europe.
The Atlantic slave trade, also referred to as transatlantic slave trade (or trans-Atlantic slave trade), involved the transportation by slave traders of enslaved African people to the Americas. This trade was operated by slave ships from both Europe and the New World. Some voyages used the triangular trade route and its Middle Passage, particularly in the early phases. Europeans established a coastal slave trade in the 15th century, and trade to the Americas began in the 16th century, lasting well into the 19th century.
Most of the people transported in the transatlantic trade were from Central and West Africa. In contrast to other slave trades, those who were taking slaves from Africa generally purchased their cargoes from West and Central African slave merchants. This applied to Europeans in the transatlantic trade and Arab slave traders supplying their own markets. While Europeans were involved in some raiding, this was uncommon and discouraged. The Portuguese built barracoons in their African slaving bases to gather newly purchased captives ready for the next ship to arrive. Northern Europeans operated some forts as African bases, originally for trading in gold, but later for slaves. However, the usual approach of North European slave traders was to use their ship as a base in which to gather their cargo. This meant these ships spent much longer on the African coast than Portuguese vessels, and the first slaves the slavers bought endured longer confinement on board.
The Americas had, after Australia, a much lower population density than other inhabited continents. Exploitation by the European conquerors of these lands needed a workforce, but the sparse indigenous population was shrinking due to European diseases. Demand for labour could not be met by Europeans, who were reluctant to emigrate at this early stage. The solution was the same as was used for the sugar plantations of Madeira and the Canary Islands c. 1450: slaves brought from sub-Saharan Africa.
African slaves were sold in the Americas to work on coffee, tobacco, cocoa, sugar, and cotton plantations, rice fields, as well as in gold and silver mines, the construction industry, cutting of timber for ships, and as skilled labor or domestic servants. The first enslaved Africans sent to the English colonies were classified as indentured servants, with legal standing similar to contract-based workers from Britain and Ireland. However, by the middle of the 17th century, this had become a racial caste system of chattel slavery, in which African slaves and their future offspring were legally the property of their owners, and children born to slave mothers were also deemed to be slaves according the legal doctrine of partus sequitur ventrem. As property, the people were considered merchandise or units of labour, and sold at markets with other goods and services, their prices determined by their health and expected productivity.
The major Atlantic slave trading nations, in order of trade volume, were Portugal, Britain, Spain, France, the Netherlands, the United States, and Denmark. The largest slave trading ports were in South America, with New World-based ships probably carrying more enslaved people from Africa than those travelling in ships with a home port in Europe. The current estimate is that about 12.75 million Africans were loaded onto slave ships for transportation to the Americas. Of these, up to 2 million died during the voyage. About 8 million Africans were enslaved and remained on the African continent. Near the beginning of the 19th century, various governments acted to ban the trade, although illegal smuggling still occurred.
Slavery was prevalent in many parts of Africa for many centuries before the Atlantic slave trade. Claire C Robertson writes that while chattel systems aimed to sustain a permanent underclass available for cheap labor, African slavery "historically did not conform to a typical chattel slavery model but was highly varied, especially for women." Historians of African slavery have now generally absorbed the Miers and Kopytoff concept of slavery as a continuum of statuses rather than as a monolith, and have discarded chattel slavery as the paradigm of all slavery. Slavery remained a significant part of the African economy after slave exports declined and then collapsed in the second half of the 19th century. Consequently, slaves were used more widely in the African economy.
Millions of enslaved Africans were transported to other parts of Africa, or exported to Europe and Asia prior to the Atlantic slave trade and the European colonization of the Americas. The Trans-Saharan slave trade across the Sahara had functioned since antiquity, and continued until the 20th-century. Slaves from eastern Sudan, Somalia, and Ethiopia were marched in shackles to the coast and packed into dhows and trafficked across the Red Sea or the Gulf of Aden to markets in Arabia, the Persian Gulf, and the Indian Ocean.
Yves Beigbeder says 5.15 million slaves were sold in Muslim countries from the 16th to the 19th centuries, and cites Roger Botte's estimate that until the 20th century from 12 to 15 million Africans were sold in the Arab slave trade. Raymond Mauny estimates a total of 14 million Black slaves were traded in Muslim countries through the 20th century, including 300,000 for part of the 20th century.
According to John K. Thornton, Europeans usually bought enslaved people who had been captured in endemic warfare between African states. People living around the Niger River would be transported from these markets to the coast and sold in European trading ports, in exchange for muskets and manufactured goods such as cloth or alcohol. The European demand for slaves provided a new and larger market for the already existing trade. While those held as slaves in their region of Africa could hope to escape, those shipped away had little chance of returning to their homeland.
Slavery had existed in Portugal and Spain throughout recorded history. The Roman Empire had established its system of slavery in ancient times. Benjamin Isaac posits a proto-racism that existed among Greco-Roman people, referring to Aristotle's statement in his Politics that "slaves are subhuman or lesser men while masters are superior", to justify the inferior status of slaves. Since the fall of the Western Roman Empire, systems of slavery continued in the successor Islamic and Christian kingdoms of the Iberian Peninsula through the early modern era of the Atlantic slave trade. Arlindo Caldeira writes that in 1444, six caravels belonging to a consortium of seamen and merchants docked in Lagos with a cargo of 235 enslaved men, women, and children who had been captured in the Bay of Arguin in what is today Mauritania. These were mostly Muslim Berbers, but also, for the first time, included black-skinned people, likely from sub-Saharan Africa, who had been brought to North Africa over the Trans-Saharan caravan routes. Caldeira says "historians recognized this episode as the beginning of the Atlantic slave trade", although ships in Prince Henry the Navigator's fleet had been bringing enslaved persons from West Africa since 1441. The Portuguese established their first trading post as early as 1448 at Arguin, and in 1455 built a fortress to defend the Portuguese merchants settled there.
In the Middle Ages, religion and not race was a determining factor for who was considered to be a legitimate target of slavery. While Christians did not enslave Christians and Muslims did not enslave Muslims, both allowed the enslavement of people they regarded as heretics or insufficient in their religion. This allowed Catholic Christians to enslave Orthodox Christians, and Sunni Muslims to enslave Shia Muslims. Christians and Muslims approved of enslaving pagans, who came to be a preferred and comparatively profitable target of the slave trade, though on a much smaller scale than the trade in sub-Saharan Black African slaves. White slavery was notable throughout the 14th and 15th centuries, and white slaves were one of the largest slave populations. The slaves sold in Spain during medieval times came from the Black Sea area and the Balkans via the Balkan slave trade and the Black Sea slave trade.
In the 15th century, the Balkan slave trade was taken over by the Ottoman Empire, and the Black Sea slave trade, supplanted by the Crimean slave trade, was closed off from Europe. Spain and Portugal replaced this source of slaves by importing slaves from the conquered Canary Islands and then from mainland Africa. The mainland trade was initially from Arab slave traders, via the Trans-Saharan slave trade from Libya, and then from the African West coast through Portuguese outposts, which developed into the Atlantic slave trade and expanded after the establishment of plantations in the Americas.
The philosopher Julia Jorati writes that Jewish, Muslim, and Christian scholars began invoking the curse of Ham to justify the enslavement of Africans at least as early as the 10h century, long before the existence of the transatlantic slave trade. She cites the 15th-century Portuguese chronicler Gomes Eanes de Zurara, who, in his Chronicle of the Discovery and Conquest of Guinea (Crónica dos feitos da Guiné) composed in the early 1450s, claims that Black people are enslaved "in accordance with ancient custom, which I believe to have been because of the curse which, after the Deluge, Noah laid upon his son Cain [sic], cursing him in this way:—that his race should be subject to all the other races of the world." According to Colin A. Palmer, it appears that by the 15th century the majority of slaves in Spain were of African descent, most of them living in Andalusia, especially Seville. While the early Portuguese and Spanish authorities justified slavery as a means to Christianise Africans, the nature of New World slavery was racialised by European traders and settlers who had few scruples about the enslavement of "heathens" or their conversion.
In 1452, Pope Nicholas V issued the papal bull Dum Diversas which gave the King of Portugal the right to enslave non-Christians in perpetual slavery. Thomas says, "This clause was obviously intended to include the natives of West Africa." In 1454, Pope Nicholas issued Romanus Pontifex, which laid the foundation for doctrines supportive of empire building. Palmer says, "In 1479 the Spaniards signed the Treaty of Alcáçovas with the Portuguese, granting traders in that country the right to supply Spaniards with enslaved Africans."
According to Thomas, conversos, former Jews who had been forcibly converted to Christianity, financed much of the slave trade in Lisbon during the 16th and 17th centuries. He writes that one can speculate how far Muslim mullah-merchants controlled the medieval trade in Black Africans across the Sahara before Portuguese ships were seen in West Africa. In New Spain, Spaniards applied the concept of limpieza de sangre (blood purity) to Africans and Native Americans. Believing their ancestries to be impure even though they might be "New Christians", the Spaniards created a racial caste system, with Black blood more often considered a blemish on a person's lineage.
Ellen Yvonne Simms cites Morner's proposition of three main types of social stratification in colonial New Spain: a caste system, in which membership was set by birth, the estate system, a hierarchy in which rank was determined by customs and laws, and a class system based mainly on economic disparity which allowed upward social mobility. According to Simms, their racist ideology allowed the Spaniards to build a society in colonial New Spain based on racial distinctions, with a white Spanish elite minority controlling all its social, economic, and political aspects, and dominating a large indigenous population alongside the numerous enslaved Blacks who remained at the bottom of the social hierarchy.
The Atlantic slave trade developed after trade contacts were established between the "Old World" (Afro-Eurasia) and "New World" (the Americas). The ocean currents and prevailing winds of the Atlantic represented a barrier to return travell for seafarers who did not understand their pattern, whilst those with sufficient knowledge could use them as a tool to assist them. In the 15th century, European developments in seafaring technologies produced multi-masted sailing vessels with centre-line rudders, replacing the medieval cog and the Mediterranean round ship. This led to vessels more suited to Atlantic seafaring. Between 1600 and 1800, approximately 300,000 sailors engaged in the slave trade visited West Africa. In doing so, they came into contact with societies along the West African coast and in the Americas which they had never previously encountered. Pierre Chaunu termed the consequences of European navigation désenclavement, with it marking an end of isolation for some societies and an increase in inter-societal contact in maritime regions.
The historian John Thornton notes, "technical and geographical factors combined to make Europeans the most likely people to explore the Atlantic and develop its commerce". He identifies these as being the drive to find profitable commercial opportunities outside Europe. There was the desire to create an alternative trade network to that controlled by the Muslim Ottoman Empire, which was viewed as a commercial, political and religious threat to European Christendom. European traders wanted to trade for gold, which could be found in West Africa, and find a maritime route to "the Indies" (India), where they could trade luxury goods such as spices, without having to obtain them from Islamic traders.
European overseas expansion led to contact between the Old and New Worlds, producing the Columbian exchange named after Christopher Columbus. It started the global silver trade from the 16th to 18th centuries, and involved the transfer of goods unique to one hemisphere to the other. Europeans brought cattle, horses, pigs, sheep, and chickens to the New World, and from the New World Europeans received turkeys, tobacco, potatoes, tomatoes, and maize. Other commodities becoming important in trade were the sugarcane, coffee, and cotton crops of the Americas, along with their gold and silver.
During the first wave of European colonization, although many Atlantic naval explorations were led by the Iberian conquistadors, members of many European nationalities were involved, including from Spain, Portugal, France, England, the Italian states, and the Netherlands. This diversity led Thornton to describe the "exploration of the Atlantic" as "a truly international exercise, even if many of the dramatic discoveries were made under the sponsorship of the Iberian monarchs". That gave rise to the myth that "the Iberians were the sole leaders of the exploration".
Text from the Wikipedia article “Atlantic slave trade”, available under CC BY-SA 4.0.