The Transatlantic Slave Trade and Slavery in the Americas

The peak of a crime

Between the early 1500s and the 1860s, about 12.5 million African people were forced onto ships bound for the Americas. About 10.7 million survived the crossing, which means roughly 1.8 million died at sea. More than half of all these people were transported in the 1700s, the period of this unit. The same century that celebrated reason and rights was the century in which the slave trade reached its height.

These numbers come from the Slave Voyages database, built by historians from ships' records, port registers and tax documents for tens of thousands of voyages. Numbers are a starting point. Behind each one is a person with a name, a family, a language and a home.

Why did the trade grow?

• Sugar. Sugar plantations in Brazil and the Caribbean (Barbados, Jamaica, Saint-Domingue) were enormously profitable and needed huge numbers of labourers for brutal work. European demand for sugar, then tobacco, coffee, rice and cotton, kept rising.
• Demographic disaster in the Americas. Indigenous populations had been devastated by epidemics, war and forced labour since 1492 (see The World, 1450–1650).
• Profits and states. Merchants in Lisbon, Liverpool, Bristol, Nantes, Amsterdam, Newport and Rio de Janeiro grew rich. Governments licensed companies, such as the Royal African Company, and fought for the asiento, the contract to supply enslaved Africans to Spanish America, which Britain won in the Treaty of Utrecht (1713).
• High death rates. On Caribbean sugar plantations, deaths often outnumbered births, so planters kept buying newly enslaved Africans instead of improving conditions.

The African side

Europeans rarely captured people themselves; most captives were bought from African rulers and merchants at coastal forts and ports, in exchange for textiles (many from India), guns, metal goods, alcohol and cowrie shells. Powerful states such as Dahomey, Asante and the Oyo Empire took part in the trade and grew stronger from it, and warfare to take captives increased. Other leaders tried to limit it.

The effects on Africa were deep:

• Population loss, especially of young men and women, in some regions.
• More warfare and insecurity, as raiding for captives spread.
• Economic distortion: exports of people instead of goods, while imports of manufactures competed with local crafts.

African participation does not make the trade less of a crime, and it does not mean "Africans sold Africans" in a simple sense. Captives were usually taken from other peoples and states, and the trade existed because of European and American demand and profit. Slavery also existed within Africa and in the trans-Saharan and Indian Ocean trades, but the Atlantic trade was unique in scale and in turning people into racialized, inherited property.

The Middle Passage

Captives were often marched long distances to the coast and held in forts or pens. On board, men were usually chained below decks in crowded, airless spaces; women and children were held separately. Voyages lasted weeks or months. Disease, especially dysentery, killed many. Captives resisted by refusing food, and by shipboard revolts, which occurred on a significant number of voyages. Many survivors formed lifelong bonds with shipmates.

Making slavery racial and inherited

In the Americas, laws turned slavery into a permanent, inherited status tied to African descent:

• A 1662 law in Virginia declared that a child's status followed the mother's, so children of enslaved women were born enslaved.
• Barbados's slave code (1661) and France's Code Noir (1685) set out masters' powers over enslaved people.
• Racist ideas, including pseudo-scientific rankings of humanity, were developed to justify the system.

Slavery also existed in New France. Historians have identified about 4000 enslaved people in its history, roughly two-thirds of them Indigenous (often called panis) and one-third African. You may have studied Marie-Joseph Angélique, an enslaved Black woman executed in Montreal in 1734, in Grade 7.

Resistance and survival

Enslaved people resisted in every way they could:

• Everyday resistance: slowing work, breaking tools, keeping languages, music, names and religions alive. New faiths, such as Vodou in Saint-Domingue and Candomblé in Brazil, combined African and other traditions.
• Flight and maroon communities: Palmares in northeast Brazil held out for most of the 1600s until it was destroyed in 1694–1695; its leader Zumbi is honoured in Brazil today. In Jamaica, maroons led by figures such as Queen Nanny and Cudjoe fought the British to treaties (1739) that recognized their freedom and land. In Suriname, maroon nations won treaties in the 1760s, and their descendants live there today.
• Revolt: the Stono Rebellion in South Carolina (1739) and Tacky's Revolt in Jamaica (1760) were among the largest. They were crushed with terrible violence.
• Words: freed and enslaved people petitioned courts and legislatures, and published writing. Phillis Wheatley, enslaved in Boston, published a book of poems in 1773. Ottobah Cugoano (1787) and Olaudah Equiano (1789) published powerful attacks on the trade in London.

The beginnings of abolitionism

• In 1688 Quakers in Germantown, Pennsylvania, wrote one of the first protests against slavery in the colonies.
• In the Somerset case (1772), an English judge, Lord Mansfield, ruled that James Somerset, an enslaved man brought to England, could not be forcibly taken out of the country. The ruling was narrow but was widely understood as a blow against slavery in England.
• Vermont's 1777 constitution banned adult slavery; Pennsylvania passed a gradual abolition law in 1780.
• In 1787 the Society for Effecting the Abolition of the Slave Trade was founded in London. Its image of a kneeling, chained African man asking "Am I not a man and a brother?" was reproduced on medallions and dishes.

The slave trade and slavery would be abolished only in the next century, after the Haitian Revolution and long campaigns by enslaved people and abolitionists (The World, 1789–1900).