Atlantic slave trade

Reproduction of a handbill advertising a slave auction in Charleston, South Carolina in 1769.

The Atlantic slave trade or transatlantic slave trade involved the transportation by slave traders of enslaved African people, mainly to the Americas during the early modern period. The outfitted European slave ships of the slave trade regularly used the triangular trade route and its Middle Passage, and existed from the late 15th to the early 19th centuries.

Quotes

• Men, at that time, both in England and in America, looked upon the slave trade as the life of slavery. The abolition of the slave trade was supposed to be the certain death of slavery. Cut off the stream, and the pond will dry up, was the common notion at the time. Wilberforce and Clarkson, clear-sighted as they were, took this view; and the American statesmen, in providing for the abolition of the slave trade, thought they were providing for the abolition of the slavery. This view is quite consistent with the history of the times.
  • Frederick Douglass, "The Constitution of the United States: Is It Pro-Slavery or Anti-slavery?" (1860)

• For by aiming at the abolition of the slave-trade, they were laying the axe at the very root.
  • Thomas Clarkson, "The History of the Rise, Progress, and Accomplishment of the Abolition of the African Slave-trade by the British Parliament", (1836) p. 217

• Mr. Wesley, whose letter was read next, informed the committee of the great satisfaction which he also had experienced when he heard of their formation. He conceived that their design, while it would destroy the slave trade, would also strike at the root of the shocking abomination of slavery.
  • John Wesley and John Emory, "The Works of the Reverend John Wesley", (1831), p. 238

• The first step to be taken to put a stop to slavery in this country, is to leave off importing slaves. For this purpose let our assemblies unite in petitioning the king and parliament to dissolve the African company.
  • Benjamin Rush, "An address to the inhabitants of the British settlements in America, upon slave-keeping", (1773), p. 21

• God Almighty has set before me two great objects, the suppression of the slave trade and the reformation of manners.
  • William Wilberforce, quoted in "The Life of William Wilberforce: 1759-1752", by Robert Isaac Wilberforce and Samuel Wilberforce (1838) p. 149

• The early and more moderate American antislavery societies were called "abolition" societies, and the later and more militant groups were "antislavery" societies. British reformers, too, were by no means consistent in distinguishing the slave trade from slavery. In England, "the abolition" always referred to the end of the slave trade; but many "abolitionists" favored emancipation, and "emancipationists" were also known as "abolitionists." The term "anti-slavist," used by Jeremy Bentham, never gained wide currency. For both British and American reformers, "abolitionism" and "antislavery" were often interchangeable terms.
  • David Brion Davis, The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution, 1770-1823, (1999), p. 21

• Nothing is proved by the expectation of some Northerners that the clause would eventually put an end to slavery, for there was widespread confusion of "slavery" with the "slave trade." Both American and British abolitionists assumed that an end to slave imports would lead automatically to the amelioration and gradual abolition of slavery.
  • David Brion Davis, The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution, 1770-1823, (1999) page 129.

• Personally I believe the bicentenary offers us a chance not just to say how profoundly shameful the slave trade was – how we condemn its existence utterly and praise those who fought for its abolition, but also to express our deep sorrow that it ever happened, that it ever could have happened and to rejoice at the different and better times we live in today.
  • Tony Blair, in a statement to New Nation (27 November 2006)

• The transatlantic slave trade is one of the biggest crimes in the history of humankind. And we continue to live in its shadow. We can only move forward by confronting the racist legacy of slavery together.
  • António Guterres, Twitter, (25 March 2020)

• The history of slavery is a history of suffering and barbarity that shows humanity at its worst.
  But it is also a history of awe-inspiring courage that shows human beings at their best – starting with enslaved people who rose up against impossible odds and extending to the abolitionists who spoke out against this atrocious crime.
  And yet, the legacy of the transatlantic slave trade haunts us to this day.
  We can draw a straight line from the centuries of colonial exploitation to the social and economic inequalities of today.
  And we can recognize the racist tropes popularized to rationalize the inhumanity of the slave trade in the white supremacist hate that is resurgent today.
  • António Guterres, “Secretary-General's message on the International Day of Remembrance of the Victims of Slavery and the Transatlantic Slave Trade”, United Nations, (25 March 2023)

• One can say that Europe allocated to Africa the role of supplier of human captives to be used as slaves in various parts of the world. When Europeans reached the Americas, they recognized its enormous potential in gold and silver and tropical produce. But that potential could not be made a reality without adequate labor supplies. The indigenous Indian population could not withstand new European diseases such as smallpox, nor could they bear the organized toil of slave plantations and slave mines, having barely emerged from the hunting stage. That is why in islands like Cuba and Hispaniola, the local Indian population was virtually wiped out by the white invaders. At the same time, Europe itself had a very small population and could not afford to release the labor required to tap the wealth of the Americas. Therefore, they turned to the nearest continent, Africa, which incidentally had a population accustomed to settled agriculture and disciplined labor in many spheres. Those were the objective conditions lying behind the start of the European slave trade, and those are the reasons why the capitalist class in Europe used their control of international trade to insure that Africa specialized in exporting captives.
  • Walter Rodney, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa. Howard University Press. 1972. pp. 87-88. ISBN 978-0-9501546-4-0. 

• African rulers found European goods sufficiently desirable to hand over captives which they had taken in warfare. Soon, war began to be fought between one community and another for the sole purpose of getting prisoners for sale to Europeans, and even inside a given community a ruler might be tempted to exploit his own subjects and capture them for sale. A chain reaction was started by European demand for slaves (and only slaves) and by their offer of consumer goods—this process being connected with divisions within African society.
  • Walter Rodney, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa. Howard University Press. 1972. p. 89. ISBN 978-0-9501546-4-0. 

• The trade in human beings from Africa was a response to externa factors. At first, the labor was needed in Portugal, Spain, and in Atlantic islands such as São Tomé, Cape Verde, and the Canaries; then came the period when the Greater Antilles and the Spanish-American mainland needed replacements for the Indians who were victims of genocide; and then the demands of Caribbean and mainland plantation societies had to be met. The records show direct connections between levels of exports from Africa and European demand for slave labor in some part of the American plantation economy. When the Dutch took Pernambuco in Brazil in 1634, the director of the Dutch West Indian Company immediately informed their agents on the Gold Coast that they were to take the necessary steps to pursue the trade in slaves on the adjacent coast east of the Volta—thus creating for that area the infamous name of the “Slave Coast.” When the British West Indian islands took to growing sugar cane, Gambia was one of the first places to respond. Examples of this kind of external control can be cited right up to the end of the trade, and this embraces Eastern Africa also, since European markets in the Indian Ocean islands became important in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and since demand in places like Brazil caused Mozambicans to be shipped around the Cape of Good Hope.
  • Walter Rodney, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa. Howard University Press. 1972. p. 92. ISBN 978-0-9501546-4-0. 

• John Hawkins made three trips to West Africa in the 1560s, and stole Africans whom he sold to the Spanish in America. On returning to England after the first trip, his profit was so handsome that Queen Elizabeth I became interested in directly participating in his next venture; and she provided for that purpose a ship named the Jesus. Hawkins left with the Jesus to steal some more Africans, and he returned to England with such dividends that Queen Elizabeth made him a knight. Hawkins chose as his coat of arms the representation of an African in chains.
  • Walter Rodney, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa. Howard University Press. 1972. p. 93. ISBN 978-0-9501546-4-0. 

• In speaking of the European slave trade, mention must be made of the U.S.A., not only because its dominant population was European but also because Europe transferred its capitalist institutions more completely to North America than to any other part of the globe, and established a powerful form of capitalism—after eliminating the indigenous inhabitants and exploiting the labor of millions of Africans.
  • Walter Rodney, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa. Howard University Press. 1972. p. 97. ISBN 978-0-9501546-4-0. 

• European planters and miners enslaved Africans for economic reasons, so that their labor power could be exploited. Indeed, it would have been impossible to open up the New World and to use it as a constant generator of wealth, had it not been for African labor. There were no other alternatives: the American (Indian) population was virtually wiped out and Europe’s population was too small for settlement overseas at that time. Then, having become utterly dependent on African labor, Europeans at home and abroad found it necessary to rationalize that exploitation in racist terms as well. Oppression follows logically from exploitation, so as to guarantee the latter. Oppression of African people on purely racial grounds accompanied, strengthened, and became indistinguishable from oppression for economic reasons.
  • Walter Rodney, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa. Howard University Press. 1972. pp. 99-100. ISBN 978-0-9501546-4-0. 

• On the whole, the process by which captives were obtained on African soil was not trade at all. It was through warfare, trickery, banditry, and kidnaping. When one tries to measure the effect of European slave trading on the African continent, it is essential to realize that one is measuring the effect of social violence rather than trade in any normal sense of the word. Many things remain uncertain about the slave trade and its consequences for Africa, but the general picture of destructiveness is clear, and that destructiveness can be shown to be the logical consequence of the manner of recruitment of captives in Africa.
  • Walter Rodney, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa. Howard University Press. 1972. p. 104. ISBN 978-0-9501546-4-0. 

• By 1885, when European kings, princes and presidents sat in Berlin to slice up the African continent with their geometrical instruments, the African people had already been devastated by the ravages of the West Atlantic slave trade. In West and Central Africa, the indigenous civilisations lay in ruins, from the sophisticated Saharan trade routes with Timbuktu at their centre, to the empires of Angola. On the Eastern seaboard, the European invasion, led by the Portuguese, defeated and destroyed the city states of Swahili civilisation. All in all, some 40,000,000 souls are estimated to have perished in the triangular slave trade, which lasted for roughly four centuries, 1450–1850. The development of the European and North American industrial revolution and the global lead this gave to Europe and America was in no small measure built on the back of Africans. The colonial episode was thus the tail end of long and destructive contact between Europe and Africa. The slave trade tore apart the very social fabric of African societies, destroying their internal processes of change. It imposed on the continent a European worldview in which the peoples of Africa were at the lowest rung of the so-called civilised order. No other continent, including those that suffered formal European colonisation, had their social, cultural and moral order destroyed on this scale.
  • Issa G. Shivji, Silences in NGO Discourse: The Role and Future of NGOs in Africa. Fahamu/Pambazuka. 30 June 2007. pp. 2-3. ISBN 978-0-9545637-5-2. 

See also

• Abolitionism
• Reparations for slavery
• Slavery in the United States

External links

• Voyages: The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database Archived 2019-07-05 at the Wayback Machine
• Quick guide: The slave trade – BBC News
• Slave Trade and Abolition of slavery – Teaching resources at Black History 4 Schools
• British documents on slave holding and the slave trade, 1788–1793