The Transatlantic Slave
From the 1520s to the 1860s an estimated 11 to 12 million African men, women, and children were forcibly embarked on European vessels for a life of slavery in the Western Hemisphere. Many more Africans were captured or purchased in the interior of the continent but a large number died before reaching the coast. About 9 to 10 million Africans survived the Atlantic crossing to be purchased by planters and traders in the New World, where they worked principally as slave laborers in plantation economies requiring a large workforce. African peoples were transported from numerous coastal outlets from the Senegal River in West Africa and hundreds of trading sites along the coast as far south as Benguela (Angola), and from ports in Mozambique in southeast Africa. In the New World slaves were sold in markets as far north as New England and as far south as present-day Argentina.The Early History of European Trade with Africa The marketing of people in the interior of Africa predates European contact with West Africa. A Trans-Saharan slave trade developed from the tenth to fourteenth century which featured the buying and selling of African captives in Islamic markets such as the area around present-day Sudan
Most African captives arrived in British North America and the United States from the Congo River area, Senegambia, the Bight of Biafra, the Gold Coast, and the Sierra Leone region. By the 1830s, Cuba emerged as the principal Caribbean plantation colony. The crew's power was enforced through such torture devices as thumbscrews and iron collars. Slaves were led through a small door on the barricade to the hatches and decks below. Moreover, as about two-thirds of the captive Africans were men between the ages of 18 and 30, the slave trade likely removed essential workers and soldiers. Without the forced labor of peoples of African descent, European consumers would have paid much higher prices for a wide range of subtropical produce. Thus within the Atlantic system regional, specialized economies, linked through maritime trade, developed. The United States slave trade - centered in Rhode Island - ended in 1807, the first year Congress could address the question of abolition, as agreed to by the compromise between Northern and Southern states writing the Constitution in 1787. Europeans called this region the Gold Coast. In the four years prior to abolition, 5000 to 7000 slaves landed annually in Charleston. As an Atlantic maritime enterprise, however, the transatlantic slave trade is well documented: European governments taxed vessels clearing and entering customs, and many newspapers and colonial gazettes survive, as do general shipping documents such as muster rolls and ship registers. Slave-distribution networks developed in the interior to ensure a regular flow of African captives to coastal outlets, which in turn became slave-export centers with facilities to provision and confine Africans for several months. By the later seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, tobacco, sugar, indigo (used to make blue dye), and rice plantations switched from European indentured labor to African slave labor.
Common topics in this essay:
Passage Officers,
Bonny Calabar,
Indian- European-produced,
Middle Passage,
Caribbean Recent,
Occasionally Africans,
Windward Coast,
Americas African,
North America,
Nigeria African,
slave trade,
slave vessels,
transatlantic slave,
transatlantic slave trade,
african captives,
nineteenth century,
gold coast,
eighteenth century,
west africa,
slaves sold,
slave voyages,
slave vessels sailed,
slave trade centered,
african slave labor,
british north america,
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Acceptance Essays
