Atlantic slave trade

• 1. Introduction

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  The Atlantic slave trade carried an estimated 12 million to 12.8 million Africans across the ocean over a span of 400 years. Ships from both Europe and the New World made the crossings, and some followed a loop called the triangular trade, which included the Middle Passage. Most of the captives came from Central Africa and West Africa. So who sold these people, and who bought them? Why did rival empires come to depend so heavily on their labour? And what ideas were used to justify a trade that turned human beings into cargo?

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• 2. Iberian Roots

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  Rome's system of slavery left deep roots in Portugal and Spain, and it never fully disappeared. After the western empire fell, the Islamic and Christian kingdoms of the Iberian Peninsula kept slavery going into the early modern era.

  In the Middle Ages, faith rather than skin colour decided who could be enslaved. Christians did not enslave Christians, and Muslims did not enslave Muslims. Yet both allowed the enslavement of people they judged to be heretics or insufficiently devout. That let Catholics hold Orthodox Christians, and Sunni Muslims hold Shia Muslims. Pagans were the preferred and comparatively profitable targets. Spain and Portugal received non-Catholic captives from Eastern Europe through the Balkan and Black Sea slave trades.

  In the 15th century, the Ottoman Empire took over the Balkan trade, and the Crimean slave trade replaced the Black Sea route and closed it off from Europe. Spain and Portugal looked elsewhere, first to the conquered Canary Islands and then to mainland Africa. The mainland supply began with Arab traders crossing the Sahara from Libya. It then shifted to Portuguese outposts on the West African coast, and it grew after colonies were established in the Americas in 1492.

  In 1452, Pope Nicholas V issued the bull Dum Diversas, which let the King of Portugal enslave non-Christians in perpetuity. Its reach included Muslims in West Africa, and it gave the Church's blessing to the slave trade. In 1454, the same pope issued Romanus Pontifex as a sequel. It allowed Catholic nations to extend their dominion over lands they had discovered, and to enslave the non-Christian peoples of Africa and the New World.

  In 1493, Pope Alexander VI issued Inter Caetera, which gave Spain and Portugal the right to claim and colonize non-Christian lands in the Americas and to enslave Native Americans and Africans. It also settled a quarrel between the two crowns. A line running north to south, 100 leagues west of the Cape Verde Islands, gave Spain exclusive rights to travel and trade to its west. A Doctrine of Discovery from the same pope that year became Spain's justification for taking lands west of the Azores.

  Spain's 15th-century law of limpieza de sangre, meaning "cleanliness of blood", barred people of Jewish and Muslim ancestry from settling in the New World. It guaranteed no rights even to converts, who were called conversos and moriscos. In New Spain, Spaniards applied the same idea to Africans and Native Americans. They built a racial caste system on the belief that these peoples were impure because they were not Christian.

  By the 15th century, Europeans were citing both race and religion to justify buying sub-Saharan Africans. As captives from Senegal grew in number on the Iberian Peninsula, Europeans developed vocabulary that tied slavery to skin colour. Seville had the largest African population. The Treaty of Alcacuvas in 1479 gave traders the right to supply Spaniards with Africans. The Dominican friar Annius of Viterbo invoked the biblical curse of Ham to explain differences between Europeans and Africans. He treated the many Africans already enslaved by Muslims as supposed proof of their inferiority. Such writings joined a cursed people, Africa and slavery into one idea that had not existed before.

  The English began using the word race in the 16th century, to mean family, lineage and breed. Over time the idea grew into a defence for continuing the slave trade and for discrimination.

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• 3. Portugal Opens the Coast

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  In 1441, two Portuguese explorers, Nuno Tristão and António Gonçalves, sailed to Mauritania and kidnapped twelve Africans. They carried the captives home and presented them as gifts to Prince Henry the Navigator. Portuguese traders seized more Africans on that coast through 1444 and built a fort for the slave trade at the Bay of Arguin.

  By 1460, between 700 and 800 Africans a year were being taken to Portugal to serve as servants. From 1460 to 1500 the numbers rose as Portugal built forts along the West African coast. By 1500, Portugal had taken 50,000 West Africans. Some worked in Portugal as domestic servants, artisans and farmers. Others went to sugar plantations on the Azores, Madeira, the Canary Islands and Cape Verde.

  The Kingdom of Castile had meanwhile invaded the Canary Islands during the 15th century and turned much of the land over to wine and sugar. Its settlers also enslaved the native Guanches, using them on the islands and across the Christian Mediterranean. The islands then served as a naval base for raids down Africa's west coast, with captives sold in the Mediterranean. The historian John Thornton judged that the motive behind European expansion was "little more than to exploit the opportunity for immediate profits".

  The raiding did not stay easy for long. African naval forces were alerted, and Portuguese raiding ships met "strong and effective resistance". Several crews were killed by African sailors, whose boats suited the coastal waters and river systems far better. By 1494, the Portuguese king had reached agreements with the rulers of several West African states. These let Portugal draw on a well-developed commercial economy without fighting, and peaceful trade became the norm along the coast.

  Violence still flared up. Portuguese traders tried to conquer the Bissagos Islands in 1535. In 1571, Portugal, supported by the Kingdom of Kongo, took control of the southwest region of Angola to protect its economic interests. Kongo joined a coalition in 1591 to push the Portuguese out, but Portugal kept a foothold there until the 20th century. Elsewhere, many African states set the terms of trade themselves, for instance by charging customs duties on foreign ships.

  Portuguese slaving bases on the African coast were built around barracoons, in which newly purchased captives waited for the next ship. The Dutch built some forts for the same purpose, and the British captured several of them. Most North European traders used their own ships as the base instead. Those ships stayed on the African coast much longer than Portuguese vessels, so the first captives bought had to endure a far longer confinement on board.

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• 4. Africa's Many Roles

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  The explorer Mungo Park wrote that "The slaves in Africa, I suppose, are nearly in the proportion of three to one to the freemen." Slavery had been a significant part of the African economy for many centuries before the Atlantic trade, though its role varied from one society to another. Millions of enslaved Africans had already been moved within Africa or exported to Europe and Asia.

  In 652, the Rashidun Caliphate in Egypt required the Christian Kingdom of Makuria to hand over 400 slaves every year under the Baqt treaty. That arrangement stayed in force for centuries. It was one strand of the Trans-Saharan slave trade, which operated from antiquity into the 20th century. Captives were marched in shackles to the coasts of Sudan, Ethiopia and Somalia and shipped by dhow across the Indian Ocean to the Gulf of Aden. Others crossed the Red Sea to Arabia, and sick captives were thrown overboard. Still others walked the Sahara to the Nile, and many died of exposure or swollen feet. Estimates for Africans held as slaves in the Muslim world over twelve centuries run from 12-14 million, with other figures at 12-15 million before the 20th century.

  In West Africa, enslavement was not reserved for racial or religious minorities, and the children of slaves were born free. In the Americas, children of enslaved mothers were themselves born enslaved, and the system was tied to race and religion. Somalia was a different case, where ethnic Somalis took Bantus as slaves. Treatment in Africa also varied more widely. At one extreme, the kings of Dahomey routinely killed enslaved people by the thousand in sacrificial rituals, and sacrifice of slaves was also known in Cameroon. In other places, slaves counted as adopted children, with significant rights, including marrying without their masters' permission. In the Americas, slaves could not marry freely, and owners rarely accepted them as equal members of the family. Those convicted of revolt or murder were executed.

  King Agaja of Dahomey, who ruled from 1718 to 1740, took control of key trade routes by conquering Allada in 1724 and Whydah in 1727. Trade in the area dipped after these conquests, yet Agaja built significant infrastructure for it and took an active part. Dahomey's war captives, who would otherwise have been killed in a ceremony called the Annual Customs, went to European buyers instead. Across the region, rulers, traders and military aristocrats sold people taken in wars or kidnappings. Those sold usually belonged to a different ethnic group from their captors and counted as outsiders. Occasionally, criminals were sold too. Europeans did some raiding themselves, but it was rare and usually discouraged. Arab buyers supplying their own markets worked in much the same way.

  On the Gold Coast, in present-day Ghana, intermarriage called cassare bound African and European traders together. The word comes from the Portuguese casar, meaning to marry. Early in the trade, elite West African families commonly married their women to European traders to strengthen their alliances. The ceremonies followed African customs, and Europeans did not object because the connections mattered so much.

  The historian Robin Law argues that the elites of Dahomey must have had an informed understanding of the fates of those they sold. Dahomey sent diplomats to Brazil and Portugal who returned with information about the voyages, and some royal elites had themselves experienced slavery in the Americas. The kingdom's only apparent moral objection was to enslaving fellow Dahomeyans, an offence punishable by death. On the Gold Coast, rulers sent their children to sail on European ships, live in European forts, or study in Europe or America. William Ansah Sessarakoo, of the Fante, was rescued from slavery in Barbados after a visiting slave trader of the same ethnic group recognised him. He later became a slave trader himself. Fenda Lawrence, a slave trader from the Gambia, lived and traded in Georgia and South Carolina as a free person. Captives who did not know the purpose of the trade often feared that Europeans were cannibals, and that rumour caused them great distress.

  In 1525, King Afonso I of Kongo seized a French vessel and its crew for trading illegally on his coast. He complained to the king of Portugal that Portuguese slave traders kept kidnapping his people, which was depopulating the land. In a letter to King João III in 1526, he implored Portugal to stop the practice, insisting that the trade should fall under Kongo law. In his letters he wrote that "Each day the traders are kidnapping our people." He asked Portugal to send only missionaries and teachers, since he believed Portuguese goods were fuelling the trade.

  Most Europeans lived in coastal fortresses and waited for African suppliers to bring captives from the interior, avoiding the interior for fear of disease and resistance. When merchants kidnapped free Africans, retaliation could halt trade and cost European lives. In 1750, Britain passed the Acts of Parliament for Regulating the Slave Trade, which outlawed abducting free Africans by fraud, force or violence. Yet Europeans also fed the cycle of war. They formed military alliances with fighting African societies to produce more war captives, and they moved disembarkation points along the coast to follow the conflicts. According to Kimani Nehusi, crimes once punished in other ways became punishable by enslavement and sale. King Gezo of Dahomey declared in the 1840s that "The slave trade is the ruling principle of my people." The King of Bonny, horrified when Britain abolished the trade in 1807, said "We think this trade must go on."

  Not every society took part. The Mossi Kingdoms refused to sell people, though they joined the trade in the 1800s as European influence grew. The Djola and Balanta also resisted. The Akan, Etsi, Fetu, Eguafo, Agona and Asebu peoples formed the Fante coalition to fight raiders and protect themselves. Chief Tomba, born in 1700, ruled the Baga people in present-day Guinea Bissau, and his father was a Jalonke general who fought the trade. Tomba allied with nearby villages against African and European slave traders. African traders captured him and sold him into slavery. Donna Beatriz Kimpa Vita in Kongo argued for resistance, and in the 1770s Abdul Kader Khan led Futa Toro, in present-day Senegal, against French slave traders. Other communities fled to swamps and lake regions to escape raids, while the Efik joined in slave dealing as a form of protection against enslavement.

  Nzinga ruled the Ambundu kingdom of Ndongo from 1624 to 1663 and Matamba from 1631 to 1663, in present-day Angola. She first accommodated the Portuguese, converting to Christianity and recasting Ndongo as an intermediary in the trade rather than a source of captives. Portugal kept encroaching, and it declared war on Ndongo in 1626. Nzinga sheltered runaway slaves from Portuguese territory and organised an army called kilombo. Within two years it was defeated and she went into exile. She later conquered Matamba and allied with the Dutch West India Company and former rival states. With their help she reclaimed large parts of Ndongo between 1641 and 1647. A peace treaty was signed in 1656.

  Historians still argue about how equal the relationship was. In 1972, the Guyanese historian Walter Rodney argued that Africa was forced into a colonial trade, exchanging raw materials and slaves for manufactured goods, and that this left it underdeveloped. Ralph Austen supported the idea. John Thornton countered that the trade was not nearly as critical to the African economy as these scholars believed. Anne Bailey objected that calling Africans partners implies equal terms. They had great influence on their own continent, she wrote, but none over the European and American firms, shipping and insurance companies, and plantation systems that drove the trade.

  From 1502 to 1853, the African regions affected by the trade held more than 173 city-states and kingdoms. No fewer than 68 of them were nation-states with the political and military strength to dominate their neighbours. Over 45 distinct ethnic groups were taken to the Americas, among them the BaKongo, Mandé, Akan, Wolof, Igbo, Yoruba and Makua.

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• 5. The Labour Question

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  In the mid-16th century, Spain's New Laws prohibited the enslavement of Indigenous people in its American lands. Before that, Europeans had used native peoples as slave labour until large numbers died from overwork and Old World diseases. A labour shortage followed, and alternatives such as indentured servitude could not supply enough workers.

  Sugarcane, coffee, tobacco, cocoa and cotton shaped the demand. Many of these crops could not be grown or sold at a profit in Europe, and exporting New World goods often paid better than producing them at home. Plantations needed vast amounts of labour to grow, harvest and process the prized tropical crops. Cheap land made the shortage worse, because free European immigrants could quickly become landowners themselves. Western European states competing for overseas empires viewed slave labour on sugar plantations as crucial. Shipowners saw captives as cargo to be carried as quickly and cheaply as possible. They were sold to work on plantations, in gold and silver mines, in rice fields and in construction. Others cut timber for ships, worked as skilled labour, or served as domestic servants.

  The first enslaved Africans sent to the English colonies were classed as indentured servants, with legal standing like contract workers from Britain and Ireland. By the middle of the 17th century, slavery had hardened into a racial caste. Africans and their future offspring became legally the property of their owners. Treated as merchandise or units of labour, people were sold at markets alongside other goods and services.

  Thomas Jefferson blamed the climate in part: "For in a warm climate, no man will labour for himself who can make another labour for him." The economist Elena Esposito points instead to malaria. The American south was warm and humid enough for the disease to thrive, and it weakened European settlers. Many enslaved Africans came from regions with potent strains and had developed resistance. More of them survived, which made them a more profitable source of labour.

  David Eltis offers a cultural explanation. Europe held traditional beliefs against enslaving Christians, who made up nearly everyone there, and the slaves that existed tended to be non-Christians and their immediate descendants. Eltis argues that Europeans extended the status of insider to the whole continent, so enslaving a European was unthinkable. Africans were viewed as outsiders. Convicts, prisoners of war and vagrants might face slave-like conditions, but they were not chattel and their children did not inherit their status.

  For the British, slaves were no more than animals and commodities. Under that view, the Zong massacre went without justice for its victims.

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• 6. Rival Empires

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  From 1525, ships carried captives directly from the Portuguese colony of Sao Tomé across the Atlantic to Hispaniola. In the first Atlantic system, most slavers were Portuguese, who held a near-monopoly. The Treaty of Tordesillas kept Spanish ships out of African ports, so Spain relied on Portuguese ships and sailors. The system moved many Atlantic Creoles, Africans who had adapted to various languages, cultures and economies. They were multilingual and worked as merchants, sailors and interpreters, and they were among the first captured and enslaved.

  A burial ground in Campeche, Mexico, in use from 1550 to the late 17th century, suggests enslaved Africans arrived soon after Hernán Cortés completed his conquest in 1519. By the 1530s, large numbers lived in Cusco, the recently conquered Inca capital. Diego de Almagro left the city in 1535 with about 100 Black Africans bound for Chile.

  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 voyage in Queen Elizabeth's own ship, Jesus of Lübeck, and numerous English voyages followed.

  Around 1560, the Portuguese began a slave trade to Brazil. From 1580 until 1640, Portugal was united with Spain in the Iberian Union. Most Portuguese contractors who obtained the asiento in those years were conversos, and the union opened commercial opportunities for Portuguese "New Christian" merchants in Spanish America. Otherwise, Spain relied on the Asiento de Negros system, which awarded Genoese merchant bankers the licence to supply its colonies. Until the middle of the 17th century, Mexico was the largest single market in Spanish America. Cartagena, Veracruz, Buenos Aires and Hispaniola received most arrivals, mainly from Angola.

  This split between Spain and Portugal upset the British and Dutch, who had invested in sugar in the British West Indies and Dutch Brazil. After the Iberian Union fell apart, Spain barred Portugal from carrying slaves directly. Under the Peace of Münster, the trade opened to Spain's traditional enemies, and the Dutch, French and English took a large share. For 150 years, Spanish transatlantic traffic ran at trivial levels, and in many years not a single Spanish slave voyage left Africa. Unlike their rivals, the Spanish almost never delivered slaves to foreign territories. The British, and the Dutch before them, sold slaves everywhere in the Americas.

  In 1672, the Royal Africa Company was founded, and in 1674 the New West India Company became more deeply involved. From 1677, the Compagnie du Sénégal used Gorée to house captives. The second Atlantic system was run mostly by English, French and Dutch traders and investors. Its main destinations included Curaçao, Jamaica and Martinique. The Royal African Company usually refused to deliver slaves to Spanish colonies, though it sold to all comers from its factories in Kingston, Jamaica and Bridgetown, Barbados. By the 1690s, the English were shipping the most slaves from West Africa.

  After the War of the Spanish Succession, the Treaty of Utrecht in 1713 granted the Asiento to the South Sea Company. Despite the South Sea Bubble, the British held the lead through the 18th century and became the biggest shippers across the Atlantic. Most of the trade took place in that century, and the Portuguese, British and French carried nine out of ten captives. Portuguese Angola again became one of the principal sources. Slave trading became a business for privately owned enterprises, which reduced international complications. An English slave trader wrote: "What a glorious and advantageous trade this is... It is the hinge on which all the trade of this globe moves." After 1790, captains compared slave prices in the major markets of Kingston, Havana and Charleston, South Carolina before deciding where to sell.

  The triangular trade had three sides. The first carried goods from Europe to Africa, where African kings and merchants took part from 1440 to about 1833. For each captive, rulers received guns, ammunition, alcohol, indigo-dyed Indian textiles and other factory-made goods. The second leg carried enslaved Africans to the Americas and the Caribbean. The third returned the products of slave plantations to Europe: cotton, sugar, tobacco, molasses and rum. John Hawkins, considered the pioneer of the English slave trade, was the first to run the circuit, making a profit at every stop.

  In 1778, Thomas Kitchin estimated that Europeans were bringing about 52,000 slaves a year to the Caribbean. The trade peaked in the last two decades of the 18th century, during and after the Kongo Civil War. Wars among small states in the Igbo-inhabited region of the Niger River, and the banditry that came with them, spiked in the same years. Expanding powers such as the kingdom of Dahomey, the Oyo Empire and the Ashanti Empire also waged major wars. After the British ban and American bans, the trade declined, yet the years that followed still accounted for 29% of the whole. Between 1810 and 1860, over 3.5 million slaves were transported, 850,000 of them in the 1820s. For the last sixteen years of the trade, Spain was the only transatlantic slave-trading empire.

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• 7. The Middle Passage

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  After the march to the coast, captives were held in large forts called factories. Milton Meltzer, in Slavery: A World History, says around 4.5% of the trade's deaths occurred in this phase. That means over 820,000 people are believed to have died in African ports such as Benguela, Elmina and Bonny.

  Slave traders tried to fit anywhere from 350 to 600 captives on one ship. Meltzer's research puts the Middle Passage at 12.5% of the trade's overall mortality, with around 2.2 million Africans dying on the voyages. Captives were packed into tight, unsanitary spaces for months at a time, and the conditions spread fatal diseases. Traders took some measures against onboard deaths, such as enforced "dancing" above deck as exercise and force-feeding of captives who tried to starve themselves. Some died by suicide after jumping overboard. Igbo captives were among those who took their own lives this way as an act of resistance, and crews hung nets around ships to catch them.

  Raymond L. Cohn, an economics professor, found that mortality fell over the history of the trade mainly because voyages got shorter. In the 18th century, many voyages took at least 2½ months, while in the 19th century 2 months appears to have been the maximum. In his words, "Fewer slaves died in the Middle Passage over time mainly because the passage was shorter."

  Ordinary sailors on slave ships were badly paid and subject to harsh discipline. A crew mortality of around 20% was expected over a voyage, similar to and sometimes greater than that of the captives. Malaria and yellow fever were the most common killers. A high death rate among the crew on the return voyage suited the captain, since fewer sailors had to be paid at the home port. Many sailors joined slave ships through coercion or because they could find no other work.

  In 1729, aboard the slave ship Clare, enslaved Africans drove the crew from the vessel, took control and landed near Cape Coast Castle, in present-day Ghana. Records from slave ship captains show 353 acts of insurrection between 1698 and 1807, and most rebellions were defeated. Africans sank ships, killed crews and set fire to vessels with explosives. Crews loaded women, men and children separately, because children had passed loose pieces of wood and tools to the men so they could free themselves. Captains invested in firearms and swivel guns and ordered crews to watch the captives closely. John Newton, himself a slave ship captain, recorded in his journal how Africans mutinied, and some took over the ship.

  In 1730, the slave ship Little George left the Guinea Coast for Rhode Island with 96 enslaved Africans. A few of them slipped out of their iron chains, killed three watchmen on deck and imprisoned the captain and crew. The Africans were promised freedom in a deal with their captors. They reclaimed the ship and sailed it back to Africa's shore, and the captain and crew failed in their attempt to re-enslave them. According to research by Jane Landers, rebellions were more frequent when large numbers of African women were aboard.

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• 8. The Reckoning

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  Estimates of the lives lost in the Atlantic slave trade range from as low as 2 million to as high as 60 million. Patrick Manning estimates that about 1.5 million died on board ship and about 10.5 million arrived in the Americas. He adds that around 4 million died inside Africa after capture, and many more died young. The deaths in procuring captives remain a mystery, but may equal or exceed the number who survived to be enslaved.

  Voyage records tabulated in the source show that seven nations carried nearly all the captives: Portugal, Britain, Spain, France, the Netherlands, the United States and Denmark, in that order of volume. Portuguese vessels alone carried nearly 5.85 million. Brazil received roughly 4.9 million people, far more than any other destination. About 1.8 million, or 14.5% of those who embarked, did not arrive. The largest region of origin was the Angola Coast, Loango Coast and Saint Helena, which sent about 5.7 million.

  The historian Ana Lucia Araujo notes that enslavement did not end on arrival in the Western Hemisphere. The paths of victims were shaped by where they disembarked, whether they could be sold, the work they did, and their gender, age, religion and language.

  Meltzer states that 33% of Africans would have died in their first year in the seasoning camps found throughout the Caribbean. Jamaica held one of the most notorious. Dysentery was the leading cause of death, and around 5 million Africans are thought to have died in these camps. Their purpose was to obliterate the captives' identities and culture. Over two or three years, enslaved Africans learned a new language and adopted new customs.

  Over the hundred-year course of the colony of Haiti, about a million enslaved people succumbed to the conditions there. A captive brought into Haiti was expected to die within three years of arrival on average, and those born on the island had a life expectancy of only 15 years. In the Caribbean, Dutch Guiana and Brazil, deaths were high and births low, so slaveholders imported more Africans to sustain the population. Natural decline ran as high as 5% a year. In the Danish West Indies and most of the Caribbean, the taxing labour of sugar cultivation drove mortality. Among enslaved children under five, forty percent died, and many of the deaths came from smallpox and intestinal worms contracted from contaminated food and water.

  The Canadian scholar Adam Jones characterises the deaths of millions of Africans as genocide, calling it "one of the worst holocausts in human history". He dismisses the argument that owners wanted slaves alive as "mostly sophistry". Saidiya Hartman reads the record differently. She argues that the deaths were incidental to profit, writing that "Death wasn't a goal of its own but just a by-product of commerce." In her view, extermination was a corollary to the making of commodities rather than the final objective.

  Exports of enslaved Africans to Cuba were illegal by 1820, yet Cuba kept importing them until slavery ended there in 1886. After the trade to the United States and British colonies was abolished, Florida took captives from Cuba, many landing on Amelia Island. A clandestine slave ferry ran between Havana and Pensacola. Florida stayed under Spanish control until 1821, which made it hard for the United States to stop the smuggling. After Florida passed to the United States, the smuggling continued, and from 1821 to 1841 Cuba was 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.

  It was long thought that the transatlantic slave trade ended in 1867, but evidence was later found of voyages until 1873. In the early 21st century, several governments issued apologies for it.

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