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The Atlantic slave trade or transatlantic slave trade involved the transportation by slave traders of enslaved African people, mainly to the Americas. The outfitted European slave ships of the slave trade regularly used the triangular trade route and its Middle Passage, and existed from the 16th to the 19th centuries.^[1]^[2]^[3] The vast majority of those who were transported in the transatlantic slave trade were from Central and West Africa who had been sold by West African slave traders to European slave traders,^[4]^[5]^[6] while others had been captured directly by the slave traders in coastal raids;^[7]^[8] European slave traders gathered and imprisoned the enslaved at forts on the African coast and then brought them to the Americas.^[9]^[10] Except for the Portuguese, European slave traders generally did not participate in the raids because life expectancy for Europeans in sub-Saharan Africa was less than one year during the period of the slave trade (which was prior to the widespread availability of quinine as a treatment for malaria).^[5] Portuguese coastal raiders found that slave raiding was too costly and often ineffective and opted for established commercial relations.^[11]

The colonial South Atlantic and Caribbean economies were particularly dependent on slave labour for the production of sugarcane and other commodities.^[12]^[13] This was viewed as crucial by those Western European states which were vying with one another to create overseas empires.^[14]^[15] The Portuguese, in the 16th century, were the first to transport slaves across the Atlantic. In 1526, they completed the first transatlantic slave voyage to Brazil, and other Europeans soon followed.^[16] Shipowners regarded the slaves as cargo to be transported to the Americas as quickly and cheaply as possible,^[14] there to be sold to work on coffee, tobacco, cocoa, sugar, and cotton plantations, gold and silver mines, rice fields, the construction industry, cutting timber for ships, as skilled labour, and as domestic servants.^[17] The first enslaved Africans sent to the English colonies were classified as indentured servants, with legal standing similar to that of contract-based workers coming from Britain and Ireland. However, by the middle of the 17th century, slavery had hardened as a racial caste, with African slaves and their future offspring being legally the property of their owners, as children born to slave mothers were also slaves (partus sequitur ventrem). As property, the people were considered merchandise or units of labour, and were sold at markets with other goods and services.^[18]

The major Atlantic slave trading nations, in order of trade volume, were Portugal, Britain, Spain, France, the Netherlands, the United States, and Denmark. Several had established outposts on the African coast, where they purchased slaves from local African leaders.^[19] These slaves were managed by a factor, who was established on or near the coast to expedite the shipping of slaves to the New World. Slaves were imprisoned in a factory while awaiting shipment. Current estimates are that about 12 million to 12.8 million Africans were shipped across the Atlantic over a span of 400 years.^[20]^[21]^: 194 The number purchased by the traders was considerably higher, as the passage had a high death rate, with between 1.2 and 2.4 million dying during the voyage, and millions more in seasoning camps in the Caribbean after arrival in the New World. Millions of people also died as a result of slave raids, wars, and during transport to the coast for sale to European slave traders.^[22]^[23]^[24]^[25] Near the beginning of the 19th century, various governments acted to ban the trade, although illegal smuggling still occurred. It was generally thought that the transatlantic slave trade ended in 1867, but evidence was later found of voyages until 1873.^[26] In the early 21st century, several governments issued apologies for the transatlantic slave trade.

Background

Atlantic travel

The Atlantic slave trade developed after trade contacts were established between the "Old World" (Afro-Eurasia) and the "New World" (the Americas). For centuries, tidal currents had made ocean travel particularly difficult and risky for the ships that were then available. Thus, there had been very little, if any, maritime contact between the peoples living in these continents.^[27] In the 15th century, however, new European developments in seafaring technologies, such as the invention of the caravel, resulted in ships being better equipped to deal with the tidal currents, and could begin traversing the Atlantic Ocean; the Portuguese set up a Navigator's School (although there is much debate about whether it existed and if it did, just what it was). Between 1600 and 1800, approximately 300,000 sailors engaged in the slave trade visited West Africa.^[28] In doing so, they came into contact with societies living along the west African coast and in the Americas which they had never previously encountered.^[29] Historian Pierre Chaunu termed the consequences of European navigation "disenclavement", with it marking an end of isolation for some societies and an increase in inter-societal contact for most others.^[30]^[31]

Historian John Thornton noted, "A number of technical and geographical factors combined to make Europeans the most likely people to explore the Atlantic and develop its commerce".^[32] He identified these as being the drive to find new and profitable commercial opportunities outside Europe. Additionally, there was the desire to create an alternative trade network to that controlled by the Muslim Ottoman Empire of the Middle East, which was viewed as a commercial, political and religious threat to European Christendom. In particular, European traders wanted to trade for gold, which could be found in western Africa, and to find a maritime route to "the Indies" (India), where they could trade for luxury goods such as spices without having to obtain these items from Middle Eastern Islamic traders.^[33]

During the first wave of European colonization, although many of the initial Atlantic naval explorations were led by the Iberian conquistadors, members of many European nationalities were involved, including sailors from Spain, Portugal, France, England, the Italian states, and the Netherlands. This diversity led Thornton to describe the initial "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 leadership later gave rise to the myth that "the Iberians were the sole leaders of the exploration".^[35]

European overseas expansion led to the contact between the Old and New Worlds producing the Columbian exchange, named after the Italian explorer Christopher Columbus.^[36] It started the global silver trade from the 16th to 18th centuries and led to direct European involvement in the Chinese porcelain trade. It involved the transfer of goods unique to one hemisphere to another. Europeans brought cattle, horses, and sheep to the New World, and from the New World Europeans received tobacco, potatoes, tomatoes, and maize. Other items and commodities becoming important in global trade were the tobacco, sugarcane, and cotton crops of the Americas, along with the gold and silver brought from the American continent not only to Europe but elsewhere in the Old World.^[37]^[38]^[39]^[40]

European slavery in Portugal and Spain

By the 15th century, slavery had existed in the Iberian Peninsula (Portugal and Spain) of Western Europe throughout recorded history. The Roman Empire had established its system of slavery in ancient times. Since the fall of the Western Roman Empire, various systems of slavery continued in the successor Islamic and Christian kingdoms of the peninsula through the early modern era of the Atlantic slave trade.^[41]^[42]

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 to be heretics or insufficiently correct in their religion, which allowed Catholic Christians to enslave Orthodox Christians, and Sunni Muslims to enslave Shia Muslims;^[43] similarly both Christians and Muslims approved of enslaving Pagans, who came to be a preferred and comparatively profitable target of the slave trade in the Middle Ages:^[43] Spain and Portugal were provided with non-Catholic slaves from Eastern Europe via the Balkan slave trade and the Black Sea slave trade.^[44] In the 15th century, when the Balkan slave trade was taken over by the Ottoman Empire^[45] and the Black Sea slave trade was supplanted by the Crimean slave trade and closed off from Europe, Spain and Portugal replaced this source of slaves by importing Pagan slaves first from the conquered Canary Islands and then from Africa; initially from Arab slave traders via the Trans-Saharan slave trade from Libya, and then directly from the African West coast through Portuguese outposts, which developed into the Atlantic slave trade^[46] and expanded significantly after the establishment of the colonies in the Americas in 1492.^[47]

In the 15th century Spain enacted a racially discriminatory law named Limpieza de sangre, which translates as "blood purity" or "cleanliness of blood", a proto-racial law. It prevented people with Jewish and Muslim ancestry from settling in the New World. Limpieza de sangre did not guarantee rights for Jews or Muslims who converted to Catholicism. Jews and Muslims who converted to Catholicism were respectively called conversos and moriscos. Some Jews and Muslims converted to Christianity hoping it would grant them rights under Spanish laws. After the "discovery" of new lands across the Atlantic, Spain did not want Jews and Muslims immigrating to the Americas because the Spanish Crown worried Muslims and non-Christians might introduce Islam and other religions to Native Americans.^[48] The law also led to the enslavement of Jews and Muslims, prevented Jews from entering the country and from joining the military, universities and other civil services.^[49]^[50]^[51]^[52]^[53] Although Jewish conversos and Muslims experienced religious and racial discrimination, some also participated in the slave trade of Africans. In Lisbon during the 16th and 17th centuries, Muslims financed by Jewish conversos traded Africans across the Sahara Desert and enslaved Africans before and during the Atlantic slave trade in Europe and Africa.^[54] In New Spain, Spaniards applied limpieza de sangre to Africans and Native Americans and created a racial caste system, believing them to be impure because they were not Christian.^[55]^[56]^[57]

Europeans enslaved Muslims and people practicing other religions as a justification to Christianize them. In 1452, Pope Nicholas V issued papal bull Dum Diversas which gave the King of Portugal the right to enslave non-Christians to perpetual slavery. The clause included Muslims in West Africa and legitimized the slave trade under the Catholic church. In 1454, Pope Nicholas issued Romanus Pontifex. "Written as a logical sequel to Dum Diversas, Romanus Pontifex allowed the European Catholic nations to expand their dominion over 'discovered' land. Possession of non-Christian lands would be justified along with the enslavement of native, non-Christian 'pagans' in Africa and the 'New World.'"^[58]^[59]^[60] Dum Diversas and Romanus Pontifex may have had an influence with the creation of doctrines supportive of empire building.^[61]

In 1493, the Doctrine of Discovery issued by Pope Alexander VI, was used as a justification by Spain to take lands from non-Christians West of the Azores. The Doctrine of Discovery stated that non-Christian lands should be taken and ruled by Christian nations, and Indigenous people (Africans and Native Americans) living on their lands should convert to Christianity.^[62]^[63] In 1493, Pope Alexander VI issued a papal bull called Inter Caetera which gave Spain and Portugal rights to claim and colonize all non-Christian lands in the Americas and enslave Native Americans and Africans.^[64] Inter Caetera also settled a dispute between Portugal and Spain over those lands. The declaration included a north–south divide 100 leagues West of the Cape Verde Islands and gave the Spanish Crown exclusive rights to travel and trade west of that line.^[65]^[66]

Noah curses Ham by Gustave Doré - The Curse of Ham was used as a justification to enslave Africans.^[67]

In Portugal and Spain people had been enslaved because of their religious identity, race had not been a developed factor for enslaving people; nonetheless, by the 15th century, Europeans used both race and religion as a justification to enslave sub-Saharan Africans. In the 15th century, Dominican friar Annius of Viterbo invoked the Curse of Ham, from the biblical story of enslavement, to explain the differences between Europeans and Africans in his writings. Annius, who frequently wrote of the "superiority of Christians over the Saracens", claimed that due to the curse imposed upon Black people, they would inevitably remain permanently subjugated by Arabs and other Muslims. He wrote that the fact that so many Africans had been enslaved even by the heretical Muslims was supposed proof of their inferiority. Through these and other writings, European writers established a hitherto unheard of connection between a cursed people, Africa and slavery, which laid the ideological groundwork for justifying the transatlantic slave trade.^[68]^[69] The term "race" was used by the English beginning in the 16th century and referred to family, lineage, and breed. The idea of race continued to develop further through the centuries and was used as a justification for the continuation of the slave trade and racial discrimination.^[70]^[71]^[72]^[73]

African slavery

A depiction of enslaved people transported across the Sahara desert

Slavery was prevalent in many parts of Africa^[74] for many centuries before the beginning of the Atlantic slave trade. Millions of enslaved people from some parts of Africa were exported to states in Africa, Europe, and Asia prior to the European colonization of the Americas.^[75]^[76] The Trans-Saharan slave trade across the Sahara had functioned since antiquity, and continued to do so up until the 20th-century; in 652, the Rashidun Caliphate in Egypt enforced an annual tribute of 400 slaves from the Christian Kingdom of Makuria by the Baqt treaty, which was to be in effect for centuries.^[77]

The Atlantic slave trade was not the only slave trade from Africa; as Elikia M'bokolo wrote in Le Monde diplomatique:

The African continent was bled of its human resources via all possible routes. Across the Sahara, through the Red Sea, from the Indian Ocean ports and across the Atlantic. At least ten centuries of slavery for the benefit of the Muslim countries (from the ninth to the nineteenth) ... Four million enslaved people exported via the Red Sea, another four million^[78] through the Swahili ports of the Indian Ocean, perhaps as many as nine million along the trans-Saharan caravan route, and eleven to twenty million (depending on the author) across the Atlantic Ocean.^[79]

However, estimates are imprecise, which can affect comparison between different slave trades. Two rough estimates by scholars of the numbers African slaves held over twelve centuries in the Muslim world are 11.5 million^[80] and 14 million,^[81]^[82] while other estimates indicate a number between 12 and 15 million African slaves prior to the 20th century.^[83]

According to John K. Thornton, Europeans usually bought enslaved people who had been captured in endemic warfare between African states.^[6] Some Africans had made a business out of capturing war captives or members of neighboring ethnic groups and selling them.^[84] A reminder of this practice is documented in the Slave Trade Debates of England in the early 19th century: "All the old writers ... concur in stating not only that wars are entered into for the sole purpose of making slaves, but that they are fomented by Europeans, with a view to that object."^[85] 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.^[86] The European demand for slaves provided a new and larger market for the already existing trade.^[87] While those held as slaves in their own region of Africa could hope to escape, those shipped away had little chance of returning to their homeland.^[88]

European colonization and slavery in West-Central Africa

The Atlantic slave trading of Africans began in 1441 with two Portuguese explorers, Nino Tristão and Antonio Goncalves. Tristão and Goncalves sailed to Mauritania in West Africa and kidnapped twelve Africans and returned to Portugal and presented the captive Africans as gifts to Prince Henry the Navigator. By 1460, seven hundred to eight hundred African people were taken annually and imported into Portugal. In Portugal, the Africans taken were used as domestic servants. From 1460 to 1500, the removal of Africans increased as Portugal and Spain built forts along the coast of West Africa. By 1500, Portugal and Spain had taken about 50,000 thousand West Africans. The Africans worked as domestic servants, artisans, and farmers. Other Africans were taken to work the sugar plantations on the Azores, Madeira, Canary, and Cape Verde islands. Europeans participated in African enslavement because of their need for labor, profit, and religious motives.^[91]^[92]

Upon discovering new lands through their naval explorations, European colonisers soon began to migrate to and settle in lands outside their native continent. Off the coast of Africa, European migrants, under the directions of the Kingdom of Castile, invaded and colonised the Canary Islands during the 15th century, where they converted much of the land to the production of wine and sugar. Along with this, they also captured native Canary Islanders, the Guanches, to use as slaves both on the Islands and across the Christian Mediterranean.^[93]

After the success of Portugal and Spain in the slave trade other European nations followed. In 1530 English merchant from Plymouth, William Hawkins, visited the Guinea Coast and left with a few slaves. In 1564, Hawkin's son John Hawkins, sailed to the Guinea Coast and his voyage was supported by Queen Elizabeth I. John later turned to piracy and stole 300 Africans from a Spanish slave ship after failures in Guinea trying to capture Africans as most of his men died after fights with the local Africans.^[92]

As historian John Thornton remarked, "the actual motivation for European expansion and for navigational breakthroughs was little more than to exploit the opportunity for immediate profits made by raiding and the seizure or purchase of trade commodities".^[97] Using the Canary Islands as a naval base, Europeans, at the time primarily Portuguese traders, began to move their activities down the western coast of Africa, performing raids in which slaves would be captured to be later sold in the Mediterranean.^[98] Although initially successful in this venture, "it was not long before African naval forces were alerted to the new dangers, and the Portuguese [raiding] ships began to meet strong and effective resistance", with the crews of several of them being killed by African sailors, whose boats were better equipped at traversing the west-central African coasts and river systems.^[99]

By 1494, the Portuguese king had entered agreements with the rulers of several West African states that would allow trade between their respective peoples, enabling the Portuguese to "tap into" the "well-developed commercial economy in Africa ... without engaging in hostilities".^[100] "Peaceful trade became the rule all along the African coast", although there were some rare exceptions when acts of aggression led to violence. For instance, Portuguese traders attempted to conquer the Bissagos Islands in 1535.^[101] In 1571, Portugal, supported by the Kingdom of Kongo, took control of the south-western region of Angola in order to secure its threatened economic interest in the area. Although Kongo later joined a coalition in 1591 to force the Portuguese out, Portugal had secured a foothold on the continent that it continued to occupy until the 20th century.^[102] Despite these incidents of occasional violence between African and European forces, many African states ensured that any trade went on in their own terms, for instance, imposing custom duties on foreign ships. In 1525, the Kongolese King Afonso I seized a French vessel and its crew for illegally trading on his coast. In addition, Afonso complained to the king of Portugal that Portuguese slave traders continued to kidnap his people, which was causing depopulation in his kingdom.^[103]^[101] Queen Nzinga (Nzinga Mbande) fought against the expansion of the Portuguese slave trade into Mbundu people's lands in Central Africa in the 1620s. The Portuguese encroached onto Mbundu lands to expand their mission of trading slaves and establishing a settlement. Nzinga allowed sanctuary to runaway slaves in her nation and organized a military called kilombo against the Portuguese. Nzinga formed alliances with other rival African nations and led an army against the Portuguese slave traders in a thirty-year war.^[104]^[105]^[106]

Historians have widely debated the nature of the relationship between these African kingdoms and the European traders. The Guyanese historian Walter Rodney (1972) has argued that it was an unequal relationship, with Africans being forced into a "colonial" trade with the more economically developed Europeans, exchanging raw materials and human resources (i.e. slaves) for manufactured goods. He argued that it was this economic trade agreement dating back to the 16th century that led to Africa being underdeveloped in his own time.^[107] These ideas were supported by other historians, including Ralph Austen (1987).^[108] This idea of an unequal relationship was contested by John Thornton (1998), who argued that "the Atlantic slave trade was not nearly as critical to the African economy as these scholars believed" and that "African manufacturing [at this period] was more than capable of handling competition from preindustrial Europe".^[109] However, Anne Bailey, commenting on Thornton's suggestion that Africans and Europeans were equal partners in the Atlantic slave trade, wrote:

[T]o see Africans as partners implies equal terms and equal influence on the global and intercontinental processes of the trade. Africans had great influence on the continent itself, but they had no direct influence on the engines behind the trade in the capital firms, the shipping and insurance companies of Europe and America, or the plantation systems in Americas. They did not wield any influence on the building manufacturing centres of the West.^[110]

African resistance movements against the Atlantic slave trade

Sometimes trading between Europeans and African leaders was not equal. For example, Europeans influenced Africans to provide more slaves by forming military alliances with warring African societies to instigate more fighting which would provide more war captives to the African rulers to trade as slaves for European consumer goods. Also, Europeans shifted the location of disembarkation points for trade along the African coast to follow military conflicts in West-Central Africa. In areas of Africa where slavery was not prevalent, European slave traders worked and negotiated with African rulers on their terms for trade, and African rulers refused to supply European demands. Africans and Europeans profited from the slave trade; however, African populations, the social, political, and military changes to African societies suffered greatly. For example, Mossi Kingdoms resisted the Atlantic slave trade and refused to participate in the selling of African people. However, as time progressed more European slave traders entered into West Africa and were having more influence in African nations and the Mossi became involved in slave trading in the 1800s.^[111]^[112]

Although there were African nations that participated and profited from the Atlantic slave trade, many African nations resisted such as the Djola and Balanta.^[113] Some African nations organized into military resistance movements and fought African slave raiders and European slave traders entering their villages. For example, the Akan, Etsi, Fetu, Eguafo, Agona, and Asebu people organized into the Fante coalition and fought African and European slave raiders and protected themselves from capture and enslavement.^[114] Chief Tomba was born in 1700 and his adopted father was a general from the Jalonke-speaking people who fought against the slave trade. Tomba became ruler of the Baga people in present-day Guinea Bissau in West Africa and made alliances with nearby African villages against African and European slave traders. His efforts were unsuccessful: Tomba was captured by African traders and sold into slavery.^[115]

Dahomey King Agaja Trudo from 1718 to 1740, opposed the Atlantic slave trade and refused to sell African people and attacked the European forts built along the slave coast in West Africa. Donna Beatriz Kimpa Vita in Kongo and Senegalese leader Abd al-Qadir, advocated resistance against the forced exportation of Africans.^[116] In the 1770s, leader Abdul Kader Khan opposed the Atlantic slave trade through Futa Toro, present-day Senegal. Abdul Kader Khan and Futa Toro nation resisted French slave traders and colonizers who wanted to enslave Africans and Muslims from Futa Toro.^[117] Other forms of resistance against the Atlantic slave trade by African nations was migrating to different areas in West Africa such as swamps and lake regions to escape slave raids. In West Africa, Efik slave dealers participated in slave dealing as a form of protection against enslavement.^[118] African resistance movements were carried out in every phase of the slave trade to resisting marches to the slave holding stations, resistance at the slave coast, and resistance on slave ships.^[119]

For example, aboard the slave ship Clare, the enslaved Africans revolted and drove the crew from the vessel and took control of the ship and liberated themselves and landed near Cape Coast Castle in present-day Ghana in 1729. On other slave ships enslaved Africans sunk ships, killed the crew, and set fire to ships with explosives. Slave traders and white crewmembers prepared and prevented possible rebellions by loading women, men, and children separately inside slave ships because enslaved children used loose pieces of wood, tools, and any objects they found and passed them to the men to free themselves and fight the crew. According to historical research from the records of slave ship captains, between 1698 and 1807, there were 353 acts of insurrection aboard slave ships. The majority of the rebellions by the Africans were defeated. Igbo slaves on ships committed suicide by jumping overboard as an act of resistance to enslavement. To prevent further suicides, white crewmen placed nets around slave ships to catch enslaved persons that jumped overboard. White captains and crewmen invested in firearms, swivel guns, and ordered ship crews to watch slaves to prevent or prepare for possible slave revolts.^[121] John Newton was a captain of slave ships and recorded in his personal journal how Africans mutinied on ships, and some were successful in overtaking the crew.^[122]^[123] For example, in 1730 the slave ship Little George departed from the Guinea Coast in route to Rhode Island with a cargo of ninety-six enslaved Africans. A few of the slaves slipped out of their iron chains and killed three of the watchmen on deck and imprisoned the captain and the rest of the crew. The captain and crew made a deal with the Africans and promised them their freedom. The Africans took control of the ship and sailed back to Africa's shore. The captain and his crew tried to re-enslave the Africans but were unsuccessful.^[124]

16th, 17th, and 18th centuries

The Atlantic slave trade is customarily divided into two eras, known as the first and second Atlantic systems. Slightly more than 3% of the enslaved people exported from Africa were traded between 1525 and 1600, and 16% in the 17th century.^{[citation needed]}

The first Atlantic system was the trade of enslaved Africans to, primarily, American colonies of the Portuguese and Spanish empires. Before the 1520s, slavers took Africans to Seville or the Canary Islands and then exported some of them from Spain to its colonies in Hispaniola and Puerto Rico, with 1 to 40 slaves per ship. These supplemented enslaved Native Americans. In 1518, the Spanish king gave permission for ships to go directly from Africa to the Caribbean colonies, and they started taking 200-300 per trip.^[125]

During the first Atlantic system, most of these slavers were Portuguese, giving them a near-monopoly. Decisive was the 1494 Treaty of Tordesillas which did not allow Spanish ships in African ports. Spain had to rely on Portuguese ships and sailors to bring slaves across the Atlantic. From 1525, slaves were transported directly from the Portuguese colony of Sao Tomé across the Atlantic to Hispaniola.^[126]^{: 446, 457, 460}

A burial ground in Campeche, Mexico, suggests enslaved Africans had been brought there not long after Hernán Cortés completed the subjugation of Aztec and Mayan Mexico in 1519. The graveyard had been in use from approximately 1550 to the late 17th century.^[127]

In 1562, John Hawkins captured Africans in what is now Sierra Leone and took 300 people to sell in the Caribbean. In 1564, he repeated the process, this time using Queen Elizabeth's own ship, Jesus of Lübeck, and numerous English voyages ensued.^[128]

Around 1560, the Portuguese began a regular slave trade to Brazil. From 1580 until 1640, Portugal was temporarily united with Spain in the Iberian Union. Most Portuguese contractors who obtained the asiento between 1580 and 1640 were conversos.^[129] For Portuguese merchants, many of whom were "New Christians" or their descendants, the union of crowns presented commercial opportunities in the slave trade to Spanish America.^[130]^[131]

Until the middle of the 17th century, Mexico was the largest single market for slaves in Spanish America.^[132] While the Portuguese were directly involved in trading enslaved peoples to Brazil, the Spanish Empire relied on the Asiento de Negros system, awarding (Catholic) Genoese merchant bankers the license to trade enslaved people from Africa to their colonies in Spanish America. Cartagena, Veracruz, Buenos Aires, and Hispaniola received the majority of slave arrivals, mainly from Angola.^[126]^{: 437, 446} This division of the slave trade between Spain and Portugal upset the British and the Dutch who invested in the British West Indies and Dutch Brazil producing sugar. After the Iberian Union fell apart, Spain prohibited Portugal from directly engaging in the slave trade as a carrier. According the Treaty of Münster the slave trade was opened for the traditional enemies of Spain, losing a large share of the trade to the Dutch, French, and English. For 150 years, Spanish transatlantic traffic was operating at trivial levels. In many years, not a single Spanish slave voyage set sail from Africa. Unlike all of their imperial competitors, the Spanish almost never delivered slaves to foreign territories. By contrast, the British, and the Dutch before them, sold slaves everywhere in the Americas.^[126]^{: 453–454}

The second Atlantic system was the trade of enslaved Africans by mostly English, French, and Dutch traders and investors.^[133] The main destinations of this phase were the Caribbean islands Curaçao, Jamaica and Martinique, as European nations built up economically slave-dependent colonies in the New World.^[134]^[126]^: 443 In 1672, the Royal Africa Company was founded. In 1674, the New West India Company became deeper involved in slave trade.^[135] From 1677, the Compagnie du Sénégal, used Gorée to house the slaves. The Spanish proposed to get the slaves from Cape Verde, located closer to the demarcation line between the Spanish and Portuguese empire, but this was against the WIC-charter".^[136] The Royal African Company usually refused to deliver slaves to Spanish colonies, though they did sell them to all comers from their factories in Kingston, Jamaica and Bridgetown, Barbados.^[126]^: 451 In 1682, Spain allowed governors from Havana, Porto Bello, Panama, and Cartagena, Colombia to procure slaves from Jamaica.^[137]

By the 1690s, the English were shipping the most slaves from West Africa.^[138] By the 18th century, Portuguese Angola had become again one of the principal sources of the Atlantic slave trade.^[139] After the end of the War of the Spanish Succession, as part of the provisions of the Treaty of Utrecht (1713), the Asiento was granted to the South Sea Company.^[140] Despite the South Sea Bubble, the British maintained this position during the 18th century, becoming the biggest shippers of slaves across the Atlantic.^[141]^[21] It is estimated that more than half of the entire slave trade took place during the 18th century, with the Portuguese, British, and French being the main carriers of nine out of ten slaves abducted in Africa.^[142] At the time, slave trading was regarded as crucial to Europe's maritime economy, as noted by one English slave trader: "What a glorious and advantageous trade this is ... It is the hinge on which all the trade of this globe moves."^[143]^[144]

Meanwhile, it became a business for privately owned enterprises, reducing international complications.^[132] After 1790, by contrast, captains typically checked out slave prices in at least two of the major markets of Kingston, Havana, and Charleston, South Carolina (where prices by then were similar) before deciding where to sell.^[126]^: 43? For the last sixteen years of the transatlantic slave trade, Spain was the only transatlantic slave-trading empire.^[126]^: 457

Following the British Slave Trade Act 1807 and U.S. bans on the African slave trade that same year, it declined, but the period thereafter still accounted for 28.5% of the total volume of the Atlantic slave trade.^[145] Between 1810 and 1860, over 3.5 million slaves were transported, with 850,000 in the 1820s.^[21]^: 193

Triangular trade

The first side of the triangle was the export of goods from Europe to Africa. A number of African kings and merchants took part in the trading of enslaved people from 1440 to about 1833. For each captive, the African rulers would receive a variety of goods from Europe. These included guns, ammunition, alcohol, indigo dyed Indian textiles, and other factory-made goods.^[146] The second leg of the triangle exported enslaved Africans across the Atlantic Ocean to the Americas and the Caribbean Islands. The third and final part of the triangle was the return of goods to Europe from the Americas. The goods were the products of slave plantations and included cotton, sugar, tobacco, molasses and rum.^[147] Sir John Hawkins, considered the pioneer of the English slave trade, was the first to run the triangular trade, making a profit at every stop.^[148]

Labour and slavery

The Atlantic slave trade was the result of, among other things, labour shortage, itself in turn created by the desire of European colonists to exploit New World land and resources for capital profits. Native peoples were at first utilized as slave labour by Europeans until a large number died from overwork and Old World diseases.^[149] Furthermore, in the mid-16th century, the Spanish New Laws, prohibited slavery of the Indigenous people. A labour shortage resulted. Alternative sources of labour, such as indentured servitude, failed to provide a sufficient workforce. Many crops could not be sold for profit, or even grown, in Europe. Exporting crops and goods from the New World to Europe often proved to be more profitable than producing them on the European mainland. A vast amount of labour was needed to create and sustain plantations that required intensive labour to grow, harvest, and process prized tropical crops. Western Africa (part of which became known as "the Slave Coast"), Angola and nearby Kingdoms and later Central Africa, became the source for enslaved people to meet the demand for labour.^[150]

The basic reason for the constant shortage of labour was that, with much cheap land available and many landowners searching for workers, free European immigrants were able to become landowners themselves relatively quickly, thus increasing the need for workers.^[151] Labour shortages were mainly met by the English, French and Portuguese with African slave labour.

Thomas Jefferson attributed the use of slave labour in part to the climate, and the consequent idle leisure afforded by slave labour: "For in a warm climate, no man will labour for himself who can make another labour for him. This is so true, that of the proprietors of slaves a very small proportion indeed are ever seen to labour."^[152] In a 2015 paper, economist Elena Esposito argued that the enslavement of Africans in colonial America was attributable to the fact that the American south was sufficiently warm and humid for malaria to thrive; the disease had debilitating effects on the European settlers. Conversely, many enslaved Africans were taken from regions of Africa which hosted particularly potent strains of the disease, so the Africans had already developed natural resistance to malaria. This, Esposito argued, resulted in higher malaria survival rates in the American south among enslaved Africans than among European labourers, making them a more profitable source of labour and encouraging their use.^[153]

Historian David Eltis argues that Africans were enslaved because of cultural beliefs in Europe that prohibited the enslavement of cultural insiders, even if there was a source of labour that could be enslaved (such as convicts, prisoners of war and vagrants). Eltis argues that traditional beliefs existed in Europe against enslaving Christians (few Europeans not being Christian at the time) and those slaves that existed in Europe tended to be non-Christians and their immediate descendants (since a slave converting to Christianity did not guarantee emancipation) and thus by the 15th century Europeans as a whole came to be regarded as insiders. Eltis argues that while all slave societies have demarked insiders and outsiders, Europeans took this process further by extending the status of insider to the entire European continent, rendering it unthinkable to enslave a European since this would require enslaving an insider. Conversely, Africans were viewed as outsiders and thus qualified for enslavement. While Europeans may have treated some types of labour, such as convict labour, with conditions similar to that of slaves, these labourers would not be regarded as chattel and their progeny could not inherit their subordinate status, thus not making them slaves in the eyes of Europeans. The status of chattel slavery was thus confined to non-Europeans, such as Africans.^[154]

For the British, slaves were no more than animals and could be treated as commodities, so situations like the Zong massacre occurred without any justice for the victims.^[155]

African participation in the slave trade

African partners, including rulers, traders and military aristocrats, played a direct role in the slave trade. They sold slaves acquired from wars or through kidnapping to Europeans or their agents.^[78] Those sold into slavery were usually from a different ethnic group than those who captured them, whether enemies or just neighbors.^[156] These captive slaves were considered "other", not part of the people of the ethnic group or "tribe"; African kings were only interested in protecting their own ethnic group, but sometimes criminals would be sold to get rid of them. Most other slaves were obtained from kidnappings, or through raids that occurred at gunpoint through joint ventures with the Europeans.^[78]^[157] The kingdom of Dahomey supplied war captives to European slave traders.^[158]

According to Pernille Ipsen, author of Daughters of the Trade: Atlantic Slavers and Interracial Marriage on the Gold Coast, Africans from the Gold Coast (present-day Ghana) also participated in the slave trade through intermarriage, or cassare (taken from Italian, Spanish, or Portuguese), meaning 'to set up house'. It is derived from the Portuguese word 'casar', meaning 'to marry'. Cassare formed political and economic bonds between European and African slave traders. Cassare was a pre-European-contact practice used to integrate the "other" from a differing African tribe. Early on in the Atlantic slave trade, it was common for the powerful elite West African families to marry off their women to the European traders in alliance, bolstering their syndicate. The marriages were even performed using African customs, which Europeans did not object to, seeing how important the connections were.^[159]

African awareness of the conditions of the slave trade

It is difficult to reconstruct and generalize how Africans residing in Africa understood the Atlantic slave trade, though there is evidence for some societies that African elites and slave traders had awareness of the conditions of the slaves who were transported to the Americas.^[160]^[161] According to Robin Law, the royal elites of the kingdom of Dahomey must have had an "informed understanding" of the fates of the Africans they sold into slavery.^[160] Dahomey sent diplomats to Brazil and Portugal who returned with information about their trips.^[160] In addition, a few royal elites of Dahomey had experienced slavery for themselves in the Americas before returning to their homeland.^[160] The only apparent moral issue that the kingdom had with slavery was the enslavement of fellow Dahomeyans, an offense punishable by death, rather than the institution of slavery itself.^[160]

On the Gold Coast, it was common for slave-trading African rulers to encourage their children to learn about Europeans by sending them to sail on European ships, live inside European forts, or travel to Europe or America for an education.^[162] Diplomats also traveled to European capital cities. The elites even rescued fellow elites who were tricked into slavery in the Americas by sending demands to the Dutch and the British governments, who complied due to fears of reduced trade and physical harm to hostages.^[162] An example is the case of William Ansah Sessarakoo, who was rescued from slavery in Barbados after being recognised by a visiting slave trader of the same Fante ethnic group, and later became a slave trader himself.^[163]

Fenda Lawrence was a slave trader from the Gambia who lived and traded in Georgia and South Carolina as a free person.^[164]

A common assumption by Africans who were unaware of the true purpose of the Atlantic slave trade was that the Europeans were cannibals who planned on cooking and eating their captives.^[165] This rumour was a common source of significant distress for enslaved Africans.^[165]

European participation in the slave trade

Europeans provided the market for slaves, rarely traveling beyond the coast or entering the African interior, due to fear of disease and native resistance.^[166] They typically resided in fortresses on the coasts, where they waited for Africans to provide them captured slaves from the interior in exchange for goods. Cases of European merchants kidnapping free Africans into slavery often resulted in fierce retaliation from Africans, who could momentarily stop trade and even capture or kill Europeans.^[167] Europeans who desired safe and uninterrupted trade aimed to prevent kidnapping incidents, and the British passed the "Acts of Parliament for Regulating the Slave Trade" in 1750 which outlawed the abduction of free Africans by "fraud, force, or violence".^[167] According to a source from the Lowcountry Digital Library at the College of Charleston, "When Portuguese, and later their European competitors, found that peaceful commercial relations alone did not generate enough enslaved Africans to fill the growing demands of the trans-Atlantic slave trade, they formed military alliances with certain African groups against their enemies. This encouraged more extensive warfare to produce captives for trading."^[168]

In 1778, Thomas Kitchin estimated that Europeans were bringing an estimated 52,000 slaves to the Caribbean yearly, with the French bringing the most Africans to the French West Indies (13,000 out of the yearly estimate).^[169] The Atlantic slave trade peaked in the last two decades of the 18th century,^[170] during and following the Kongo Civil War.^[171] Wars among tiny states along the Niger River's Igbo-inhabited region and the accompanying banditry also spiked in this period.^[84] Another reason for surplus supply of enslaved people was major warfare conducted by expanding states, such as the kingdom of Dahomey,^[172] the Oyo Empire, and the Ashanti Empire.^[173]

Slavery in Africa and the New World contrasted

Forms of slavery varied both in Africa and in the New World. In general, slavery in Africa was not heritable—that is, the children of slaves were free—while in the Americas, children of slave mothers were considered born into slavery. This was connected to another distinction: slavery in West Africa was not reserved for racial or religious minorities, as it was in European colonies, although the case was otherwise in places such as Somalia, where Bantus were taken as slaves for the ethnic Somalis.^[174]^[175]

The treatment of slaves in Africa was more variable than in the Americas. At one extreme, the kings of Dahomey routinely slaughtered slaves in hundreds or thousands in sacrificial rituals, and slaves as human sacrifices were also known in Cameroon.^[176] On the other hand, slaves in other places were often treated as part of the family, "adopted children", with significant rights including the right to marry without their masters' permission.^[177] Scottish explorer Mungo Park wrote:

The slaves in Africa, I suppose, are nearly in the proportion of three to one to the freemen. They claim no reward for their services except food and clothing, and are treated with kindness or severity, according to the good or bad disposition of their masters ... The slaves which are thus brought from the interior may be divided into two distinct classes—first, such as were slaves from their birth, having been born of enslaved mothers; secondly, such as were born free, but who afterwards, by whatever means, became slaves. Those of the first description are by far the most numerous ...^[178]

In the Americas, slaves were denied the right to marry freely and masters did not generally accept them as equal members of the family. New World slaves were considered the property of their owners, and slaves convicted of revolt or murder were executed.^[179]

Slave market regions and participation

Europeans would buy and ship slaves to the Western Hemisphere from markets across West Africa. The number of enslaved people sold to the New World varied throughout the slave trade. As for the distribution of slaves from regions of activity, certain areas produced far more enslaved people than others. Between 1650 and 1900, 10.2 million enslaved Africans arrived in the Americas from the following regions in the following proportions:^[180]

Senegambia (Senegal and the Gambia): 4.8%
Upper Guinea (Guinea-Bissau, Guinea and Sierra Leone): 4.1%
Windward Coast (Liberia and Ivory Coast): 1.8%
Gold Coast (Ghana and east of Ivory Coast): 10.4%
Bight of Benin (Togo, Benin and Nigeria west of the Niger Delta): 20.2%
Bight of Biafra (Nigeria east of the Niger Delta, Cameroon, Equatorial Guinea and Gabon): 14.6%
West Central Africa (Republic of the Congo, Democratic Republic of the Congo and Angola): 39.4%
Southeastern Africa (Mozambique and Madagascar): 4.7%

Although the slave trade was largely global, there was considerable intracontinental slave trade in which 8 million people were enslaved within the African continent.^[181] Of those who did move out of Africa, 8 million were forced out of Eastern Africa to be sent to Asia.^[181]

African kingdoms of the era

There were over 173 city-states and kingdoms in the African regions affected by the slave trade between 1502 and 1853, when Brazil became the last Atlantic import nation to outlaw the slave trade. Of those 173, no fewer than 68 could be deemed nation-states with political and military infrastructures that enabled them to dominate their neighbours. Nearly every present-day nation had a pre-colonial predecessor, sometimes an African empire with which European traders had to barter.

Ethnic groups

The different ethnic groups brought to the Americas closely correspond to the regions of heaviest activity in the slave trade. Over 45 distinct ethnic groups were taken to the Americas during the trade. Of the 45, the ten most prominent, according to slave documentation of the era and modern genealogical studies are listed below.^[182]^[183]^[184]

The BaKongo of the Democratic Republic of Congo, the Republic of the Congo and Angola
The Mandé of Upper Guinea
The Gbe speakers of Togo, Ghana, and Benin (Fon, Ewe, Adja, Mina)
The Akan of Ghana and Ivory Coast
The Wolof of Senegal and the Gambia
The Igbo of southeastern Nigeria
The Ambundu of Angola
The Yoruba of southwestern Nigeria and Benin
The Tikar and Bamileke of Cameroon
The Makua of Mozambique

Human toll

The transatlantic slave trade resulted in a vast and as yet unknown loss of life for African captives both in and outside the Americas. Estimates have ranged from as low as 2 million^[185] to as high 60 million.^[186] "More than a million people are thought to have died" during their transport to the New World according to a BBC report.^[187] More died soon after their arrival. The number of lives lost in the procurement of slaves remains a mystery but may equal or exceed the number who survived to be enslaved.^[23]

The trade led to the destruction of individuals and cultures. Historian Ana Lucia Araujo has noted that the process of enslavement did not end with arrival on Western Hemisphere shores; the different paths taken by the individuals and groups who were victims of the Atlantic slave trade were influenced by different factors—including the disembarking region, the ability to be sold on the market, the kind of work performed, gender, age, religion, and language.^[188]^[189]

Patrick Manning estimates that about 12 million slaves entered the Atlantic trade between the 16th and 19th centuries, but about 1.5 million died on board ship. About 10.5 million slaves arrived in the Americas. Besides the slaves who died on the Middle Passage, more Africans likely died during the slave raids and wars in Africa and forced marches to ports. Manning estimates that 4 million died inside Africa after capture, and many more died young. Manning's estimate covers the 12 million who were originally destined for the Atlantic, as well as the 6 million destined for Arabian slave markets and the 8 million destined for African markets.^[22] Of the slaves shipped to the Americas, the largest share went to Brazil and the Caribbean.^[190]

Canadian scholar Adam Jones characterized the deaths of millions of Africans during the Atlantic slave trade as genocide. He called it "one of the worst holocausts in human history", and claims arguments to the contrary such as "it was in slave owners' interest to keep slaves alive, not exterminate them" to be "mostly sophistry" stating: "the killing and destruction were intentional, whatever the incentives to preserve survivors of the Atlantic passage for labour exploitation. To revisit the issue of intent already touched on: If an institution is deliberately maintained and expanded by discernible agents, though all are aware of the hecatombs of casualties it is inflicting on a definable human group, then why should this not qualify as genocide?"^[191]

Saidiya Hartman has argued that the deaths of enslaved people was incidental to the acquisition of profit and to the rise of capitalism: "Death wasn't a goal of its own but just a by-product of commerce, which has the lasting effect of making negligible all the millions of lives lost. Incidental death occurs when life has no normative value, when no humans are involved, when the population is, in effect, seen as already dead."^[192] Hartman highlights how the Atlantic slave trade created millions of corpses but, unlike the concentration camp or the gulag, extermination was not the final objective; it was a corollary to the making of commodities.

Destinations and flags of carriers

Most of the Atlantic slave trade was carried out by seven nations and most of the slaves were carried to their own colonies in the new world. But there was also significant other trading which is shown in the table below.^[193] The records are not complete, and some data is uncertain. The last rows show that there were also smaller numbers of slaves carried to Europe and to other parts of Africa, and at least 1.8 million did not survive the journey and were buried at sea with little ceremony.

Flag of vessels carrying the slaves
Destination	Portuguese	British	French	Spanish	Dutch	American	Danish	Total
Portuguese Brazil	4,821,127	3,804	9,402	1,033	27,702	1,174	130	5,848,266
British Caribbean	7,919	2,208,296	22,920	5,795	6,996	64,836	1,489	3,259,441
French Caribbean	2,562	90,984	1,003,905	725	12,736	6,242	3,062	1,381,404
Spanish Americas	195,482	103,009	92,944	808,851	24,197	54,901	13,527	1,061,524
Dutch Americas	500	32,446	5,189	0	392,022	9,574	4,998	554,336
North America	382	264,910	8,877	1,851	1,212	110,532	983	388,747
Danish West Indies	0	25,594	7,782	277	5,161	2,799	67,385	108,998
Europe	2,636	3,438	664	0	2,004	119	0	8,861
Africa	69,206	841	13,282	66,391	3,210	2,476	162	155,568
did not arrive	748,452	526,121	216,439	176,601	79,096	52,673	19,304	1,818,686
Total	5,848,266	3,259,443	1,381,404	1,061,524	554,336	305,326	111,040	12,521,339

The timeline chart when the different nations transported most of their slaves.

The regions of Africa from which these slaves were taken is given in the following table, from the same source.

Source of slaves, by region
Region	Embarked	Disembarked	did not arrive	% did not arrive
Angola Coast, Loango Coast, and Saint Helena	5,694,570	4,955,430	739,140	12.98%
Bight of Benin	1,999,060	1,724,834	274,226	13.72%
Bight of Biafra	1,594,564	1,317,776	276,788	17.36%
Gold Coast	1,209,322	1,030,917	178,405	14.75%
Senegambia and off-shore Atlantic	755,515	611,017	144,498	19.13%
Southeast Africa and Indian Ocean islands	542,668	436,529	106,139	19.56%
Sierra Leone	388,771	338,783	49,988	12.87%
Windward Coast	336,869	287,366	49,503	14.70%
Total	12,521,339	10,702,652	1,818,687	14.52%

African conflicts

According to Kimani Nehusi, the presence of European slavers affected the way in which the legal code in African societies responded to offenders. Crimes traditionally punishable by some other form of punishment became punishable by enslavement and sale to slave traders.^[194]^[195] According to David Stannard's American Holocaust, 50% of African deaths occurred in Africa as a result of wars between native kingdoms, which produced the majority of slaves.^[23] This includes not only those who died in battles but also those who died as a result of forced marches from inland areas to slave ports on the various coasts.^[196] The practice of enslaving enemy combatants and their villages was widespread throughout Western and West Central Africa, although wars were rarely started to procure slaves. The slave trade was largely a by-product of tribal and state warfare as a way of removing potential dissidents after victory or financing future wars.^[197] In addition, European nations instigated war between African nations and increased the number of war captives by making alliances with warring nations and shifted trade locations in coastal areas to follow patterns of African military conflicts to acquire more slaves.^[198] Some African groups proved particularly adept and brutal at the practice of enslaving, such as Bono State, Oyo, Benin, Igala, Kaabu, Ashanti, Dahomey, the Aro Confederacy and the Imbangala war bands.^[199]^[200]

In letters written by the Manikongo, Nzinga Mbemba Afonso, to the King João III of Portugal, he writes that Portuguese merchandise flowing in is what is fueling the trade in Africans. He requests the King of Portugal to stop sending merchandise but should only send missionaries. In one of his letters he writes:

Each day the traders are kidnapping our people—children of this country, sons of our nobles and vassals, even people of our own family. This corruption and depravity are so widespread that our land is entirely depopulated. We need in this kingdom only priests and schoolteachers, and no merchandise, unless it is wine and flour for Mass. It is our wish that this Kingdom not be a place for the trade or transport of slaves ... Many of our subjects eagerly lust after Portuguese merchandise that your subjects have brought into our domains. To satisfy this inordinate appetite, they seize many of our black free subjects ... They sell them. After having taken these prisoners [to the coast] secretly or at night ... As soon as the captives are in the hands of white men they are branded with a red-hot iron.^[201]

Before the arrival of the Portuguese, slavery had already existed in the Kingdom of Kongo. Afonso I of Kongo believed that the slave trade should be subject to Kongo law. When he suspected the Portuguese of receiving illegally enslaved persons to sell, he wrote to King João III in 1526 imploring him to put a stop to the practice.^[202]

The kings of Dahomey sold war captives into transatlantic slavery; they would otherwise have been killed in a ceremony known as the Annual Customs. As one of West Africa's principal slave states, Dahomey became extremely unpopular with neighbouring peoples.^[203]^[204]^[205] Like the Bambara Empire to the east, the Khasso kingdoms depended heavily on the slave trade for their economy. A family's status was indicated by the number of slaves it owned, leading to wars for the sole purpose of taking more captives. This trade led the Khasso into increasing contact with the European settlements of Africa's west coast, particularly the French.^[206] Benin grew increasingly rich during the 16th and 17th centuries on the slave trade with Europe; slaves from enemy states of the interior were sold and carried to the Americas in Dutch and Portuguese ships. The Bight of Benin's shore soon came to be known as the "Slave Coast".^[207]

King Gezo of Dahomey said in the 1840s:

The slave trade is the ruling principle of my people. It is the source and the glory of their wealth ... the mother lulls the child to sleep with notes of triumph over an enemy reduced to slavery ...^[208]^[209]

In 1807, the UK Parliament passed the Bill that abolished the trading of slaves. The King of Bonny (now in Nigeria) was horrified at the conclusion of the practice:

We think this trade must go on. That is the verdict of our oracle and the priests. They say that your country, however great, can never stop a trade ordained by God himself.^[209]

Port factories

After being marched to the coast for sale, enslaved people were held in large forts called factories. The amount of time in factories varied, but Milton Meltzer states in Slavery: A World History that around 4.5% of deaths attributed to the transatlantic slave trade occurred during this phase.^[210] In other words, over 820,000 people are believed to have died in African ports such as Benguela, Elmina, and Bonny, reducing the number of those shipped to 17.5 million.^[210]

Atlantic shipment

After being captured and held in the factories, slaves entered the infamous Middle Passage. Meltzer's research puts this phase of the slave trade's overall mortality at 12.5%.^[210] Their deaths were the result of brutal treatment and poor care from the time of their capture and throughout their voyage.^[211] Around 2.2 million Africans died during these voyages, where they were packed into tight, unsanitary spaces on ships for months at a time.^[212] Measures were taken to stem the onboard mortality rate, such as enforced "dancing" (as exercise) above deck and the practice of force-feeding enslaved persons who tried to starve themselves.^[196] The conditions on board also resulted in the spread of fatal diseases. Other fatalities were suicides, slaves who escaped by jumping overboard.^[196] The slave traders would try to fit anywhere from 350 to 600 slaves on one ship. Before the African slave trade was completely banned by participating nations in 1853, 15.3 million enslaved people had arrived in the Americas.

Raymond L. Cohn, an economics professor whose research has focused on economic history and international migration,^[213] has researched the mortality rates among Africans during the voyages of the Atlantic slave trade. He found that mortality rates decreased over the history of the slave trade, primarily because the length of time necessary for the voyage was declining. "In the eighteenth century many slave voyages took at least 2½ months. In the nineteenth century, 2 months appears to have been the maximum length of the voyage, and many voyages were far shorter. Fewer slaves died in the Middle Passage over time mainly because the passage was shorter."^[214]

Despite the vast profits of slavery, the ordinary sailors on slave ships were badly paid and subject to harsh discipline. Mortality of around 20%, a number similar and sometimes greater than those of the slaves,^[215] was expected in a ship's crew during the course of a voyage; this was due to disease, flogging, overwork, or slave uprisings.^[216] Disease (malaria or yellow fever) was the most common cause of death among sailors. A high crew mortality rate on the return voyage was in the captain's interests as it reduced the number of sailors who had to be paid on reaching the home port.^[217]

The slave trade was hated by many sailors, and those who joined the crews of slave ships often did so through coercion or because they could find no other employment.^[218]

Seasoning camps

Meltzer also states that 33% of Africans would have died in the first year at the seasoning camps found throughout the Caribbean.^[210] Jamaica held one of the most notorious of these camps. Dysentery was the leading cause of death.^[219] Captives who could not be sold were inevitably destroyed.^[189] Around 5 million Africans died in these camps, reducing the number of survivors to about 10 million.^[210] The purpose of seasoning camps were to obliterate the Africans' identities and culture and prepare them for enslavement. In seasoning camps, enslaved Africans learned a new language and adopted new customs. This process of seasoning slaves took about two or three years.^[220]

Conditions of slavery on plantations before and after abolition of the transatlantic slave trade

Caribbean

Over the colony's hundred-year course, about a million slaves succumbed to the conditions of slavery in Haiti.^[221] A slave imported into Haiti was expected to die, on average, within 3 years of arrival, and slaves born on the island had a life expectancy of only 15 years.^[222]

In the Caribbean, Dutch Guiana, and Brazil, the death rate of enslaved people was high, and the birth rates were low, slaveholders imported more Africans to sustain the slave population. The rate of natural decline in the slave population ran as high as 5 percent a year. While the death rate of enslaved populations in the United States was the same on Jamaican plantations. In the Danish West Indies, and for most of the Caribbean, mortality rate was high because of the taxing labor of sugar cultivation. Sugar was a major cash crop and as the Caribbean plantations exported sugar to Europe and North America, they needed an enslaved work force to make its production economically viable, so slaves were imported from Africa. Enslaved Africans lived in inhumane conditions and the mortality rate of enslaved children under the age of five was forty percent. Many enslaved persons died from smallpox and intestinal worms contracted from contaminated food and water.^[223]

The Atlantic slave trade exportation of slaves to Cuba was illegal by 1820; however, Cuba continued to import enslaved Africans from Africa until slavery was abolished in 1886. After the abolition of the slave trade to the United States and British colonies in 1807, Florida imported enslaved Africans from Cuba, many landing in Amelia Island. A clandestine slave ferry operated between Havana, Cuba and Pensacola, Florida. Florida remained under Spanish control until 1821 which made it difficult for the United States to cease the smuggling of enslaved Africans from Cuba. In 1821, Florida was ceded to the United States and the smuggling of enslaved Africans continued, and from 1821 to 1841 Cuba became a main supplier of enslaved Africans for the United States. Between 1859 and 1862, slave traders made 40 illegal voyages between Cuba and the United States.^[224]^[225]

The costs of the shipment of human cargo from Africa and operating costs of the slave trade from Africa into Cuba rose in the mid-19th century. Historian Laird Bergad writes of the Cuban slave trade and slave prices: "...slave prices on the African coast seem to have remained remarkably stable from the 1840s through the mid-1860s, although shipping and operating costs for slave traders seem to have risen considerably. In addition, increased bribes to Spanish colonial officials effectively raised operating costs for slavers. These factors did not restrict the number of Africans embarking for Cuba, nor can they be used alone to explain Cuban slave price rises in the late 1850s and early 1860s. Three interacting factors produced the overwhelming demand for slaves responsible for pushing prices to the high levels[...] The first was the uncertainty surrounding the future of the slave trade itself. The long and persistent British campaign to force an end to the Cuban trade had traditionally been circumvented by collusion between Spanish colonial officials and Cuban slave traders. An additional obstacle to British efforts was the unwillingness of the United States to permit the search of U.S.-flag vessels suspected of involvement in the slave trade". By the mid-1860s, prices of Africans in their elderly years decreased while prices of younger Africans increased because they were considered to be of prime working age. According to research, in 1860 in Matanzas, about 39.6 percent of slaves sold were young prime aged Africans of either sex; in 1870 the percentage was 74.3 percent. In addition, as the cost of sugar increased so did the price of slaves.^[226]

South America

The life expectancy for Brazil's slave plantation's for African descended slaves was around 23 years.^[227]^{[page needed]} The trans-Atlantic slave trade into Brazil was outlawed in 1831. To replace the demand for slaves, slaveholders in Brazil turned to slave reproduction. Enslaved women were forced to give birth to eight or more enslaved children. Some slaveholders promised enslaved women their freedom if they gave birth to eight children. In 1873 in the village of Santa Ana, province of Ceará an enslaved woman named Macária was promised her freedom after she gave birth to eight children. An enslaved woman Delfina killed her baby because she did not want her enslaver Manoel Bento da Costa to own her baby and enslave her child. Brazil practiced partus sequitur ventrem to increase the slave population through enslaved female reproduction, because in the 19th century, Brazil needed a large enslaved labor force to work on the sugar plantations in Bahia and the agricultural and mining industries of Minas Gerais, São Paulo, and Rio de Janeiro. After the abolition of the Atlantic slave trade to Brazil, the inter-provincial trade increased which slaveholders forced and depended on enslaved women to give birth to as many children as possible to supply the demand for slaves. Abolitionists in Brazil wanted to abolish slavery by removing partus sequitur ventrem because it was used to perpetuate slavery. For example, historian Martha Santos writes of the slave trade, female reproduction, and abolition in Brazil: "A proposal centered on the 'emancipation of the womb', authored by the influential jurist and politician Agostinho Marques Perdigão Malheiro, was officially endorsed by Pedro II as the most practical means to end slavery in a controlled and peaceful manner. This conservative proposal, a modified version of which became the 'free womb' law passed by Parliament in 1871, did provide for the freedom of children subsequently born of enslaved women, while it forced those children to serve their mothers’ masters until age twenty-one, and deferred complete emancipation to a later date".^[228]

United States

The birth rate was more than 80 percent higher in the United States because of a natural growth in the slave population and slave breeding farms.^[229]^[230]^[231] Birth rates were low for the first generation of slaves imported from Africa, but, in the US, may have increased in the 19th century to some 55 per thousand, approaching the biological maximum for human populations.^[232]^[233]

After the prohibition of the trans-atlantic slave trade in 1807, slaveholders in the Deep South of the United States needed more slaves to work in the cotton and sugar fields. To fill the demand for more slaves, slave breeding was practiced in Richmond, Virginia. Richmond sold thousands of enslaved people to slaveholders in the Deep South to work the cotton, rice, and sugar plantations. Virginia was known as a "breeder state." A slaveholder in Virginia bragged his slaves produced 6,000 enslaved children for sale. About 300,000 to 350,000 enslaved people were sold from Richmond's slave breeding farms.^[234] Slave breeding farms and forced reproduction on enslaved young girls and women caused reproductive health issues. Enslaved women found ways to resist forced reproduction by causing miscarriages and abortions by taking plants and medicines.^[235]^[236] Slaveholders tried to control enslaved women's reproduction by encouraging them to have relationships with enslaved men. "Some slaveholders took matters into their own hands, however, and paired enslaved men and women together with the intent that they would procreate."^[237]^[238] Enslaved teenage girls gave birth at the ages of fifteen or sixteen years old. Enslaved women gave birth in their early twenties. To meet the demands of slaveholders' needs to birth more slaves, enslaved girls and women had seven or nine children. Enslaved girls and women were forced to give birth to as many slaves as possible. The mortality rate of enslaved mothers and children was high because of poor nutrition, sanitation, lack of medical care, and overwork.^[239]^[240] In the United States a slave's life expectancy was 21 to 22 years, and a black child through the age of 1 to 14 had twice the risk of dying of a white child of the same age.^[241]

Slave breeding replaced the demand for enslaved laborers after the decline of the Atlantic slave trade to the United States which caused an increase in the domestic slave trade. The sailing of slaves in the domestic slave trade is known as "sold down the river," indicating slaves being sold from Louisville, Kentucky which was a slave trading city and supplier of slaves. Louisville, Kentucky, Virginia, and other states in the Upper South supplied slaves to the Deep South carried on boats going down the Mississippi River to Southern slave markets.^[242]^[243]^[244]^[245]^[246] New Orleans, Louisiana became a major slave market in the United States domestic slave trade after the prohibition of the Atlantic slave trade in 1807. Between 1819 and 1860, 71,000 enslaved people were transported to New Orlean's slave market on slave ships that departed from ports in the United States along the Atlantic and Gulf of Mexico to New Orleans to supply the demand for slaves in the Deep South.^[247]^[248]

Texas participated in the illegal slave trade and imported enslaved persons from Cuba to Galveston Island which was the main illegal slave port in Texas. Texas was part of Mexico from 1821 until 1836, and Cuba continued to supply African slaves to many Latin American countries. After 1821, the smuggling of slaves into Texas increased because of slaveholders' demand for additional enslaved labor. Galveston Island is located in the Gulf of Mexico and is 800 miles away from the slave ports in Cuba and between 60 and 70 miles away from the Louisiana border. Smugglers utilized these geographic locations to their advantage and illegally imported enslaved Africans from Cuba and made a profit by selling Africans to slaveholders in Texas and Louisiana. For example, French pirate and privateer Jean Lafitte, established a colony on Galveston Island in 1817 and participated in privateering for four years and made a profit by smuggling in slaves and sold over 200 Africans to slaveholders in the United States. Lafitte used intermediaries such as the Bowie brothers, John, Resin, and James who contracted with slave traders and planters from the United States who had an interest in buying slaves. From 1818 to 1820, Lafitte and the Bowie brothers made $65,000 smuggling Africans into the Southern states and selling them to planters in Louisiana and Mississippi.^[249]

Historian Ernest Obadele-Starks estimated that after 1807 the number of enslaved Africans smuggled into the United States annually averaged as low as 3,500. New Orleans, Louisiana and Florida were centers for the illegal importation of slaves in the United States because of their close proximity to Cuba and the other Caribbean islands that provided Southern states enslaved labor.^[250]

Diseases

Many diseases, each capable of killing a large minority or even a majority of a new human population, arrived in the Americas after 1492. They include smallpox, malaria, bubonic plague, typhus, influenza, measles, diphtheria, yellow fever, and whooping cough.^[251] During the Atlantic slave trade following the discovery of the New World, diseases such as these are recorded as causing mass mortality.^[252]

Evolutionary history may also have played a role in resisting the diseases of the slave trade. Compared to Africans and Europeans, New World populations did not have a history of exposure to diseases such as malaria, and therefore, no genetic resistance had been produced as a result of adaptation through natural selection.^[253]

Levels and extent of immunity varies from disease to disease. For smallpox and measles for example, those who survive are equipped with the immunity to combat the disease for the rest of their life in that they cannot contract the disease again. There are also diseases, such as malaria, which do not confer effective lasting immunity.^[253]

Smallpox

Epidemics of smallpox were known for causing a significant decrease in the Indigenous population of the New World.^[254] The effects on survivors included pockmarks on the skin which left deep scars, commonly causing significant disfigurement. Some Europeans, who believed the plague of syphilis in Europe to have come from the Americas, saw smallpox as the European revenge against the Natives.^[252] Africans and Europeans, unlike the native population, often had lifelong immunity, because they had often been exposed to minor forms of the illness such as cowpox or variola minor disease in childhood. By the late 16th century, there existed some forms of inoculation and variolation in Africa and the Middle East. One practice features Arab traders in Africa "buying-off" the disease in which a cloth that had been previously exposed to the sickness was to be tied to another child's arm to increase immunity. Another practice involved taking pus from a smallpox scab and putting it in the cut of a healthy individual in an attempt to have a mild case of the disease in the future rather than the effects becoming fatal.^[254]

European competition

The trade of enslaved Africans in the Atlantic has its origins in the explorations of Portuguese mariners down the coast of West Africa in the 15th century. Before that, contact with African slave markets was made to ransom Portuguese who had been captured by the intense North African Barbary pirate attacks on Portuguese ships and coastal villages, frequently leaving them depopulated.^[255] The first Europeans to use enslaved Africans in the New World were the Spaniards, who sought auxiliaries for their conquest expeditions and labourers on islands such as Cuba and Hispaniola. The alarming decline in the native population had spurred the first royal laws protecting them (Laws of Burgos, 1512–13). The first enslaved Africans arrived in Hispaniola in 1501.^[256] After Portugal had succeeded in establishing sugar plantations (engenhos) in northern Brazil c. 1545, Portuguese merchants on the West African coast began to supply enslaved Africans to the sugar planters. While at first these planters had relied almost exclusively on the native Tupani for slave labour, after 1570 they began importing Africans, as a series of epidemics had decimated the already destabilized Tupani communities. By 1630, Africans had replaced the Tupani as the largest contingent of labour on Brazilian sugar plantations. This ended the European medieval household tradition of slavery, resulted in Brazil's receiving the most enslaved Africans, and revealed sugar cultivation and processing as the reason that roughly 84% of these Africans were shipped to the New World.

On November 7, 1693, Charles II issued a royal decree, providing sanctuary in Spanish Florida for fugitive slaves from the British colony of South Carolina.^[257]

As Britain rose in naval power and settled continental North America and some islands of the West Indies, they became the leading slave traders.^[258] At one stage the trade was the monopoly of the Royal African Company, operating out of London. But, following the loss of the company's monopoly in 1689,^[259] Bristol and Liverpool merchants became increasingly involved in the trade.^[260] By the late 18th century, one out of every four ships that left Liverpool harbour was a slave trading ship.^[261] Much of the wealth on which the city of Manchester, and surrounding towns, was built in the late 18th century, and for much of the 19th century, was based on the processing of slave-picked cotton and manufacture of cloth.^[262] Other British cities also profited from the slave trade. Birmingham, the largest gun-producing town in Britain at the time, supplied guns to be traded for slaves.^[263] 75% of all sugar produced in the plantations was sent to London, and much of it was consumed in the highly lucrative coffee houses there.^[261]