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In 1541, Roger Barlow, an English merchant who had traded with Spain's Atlantic settlements from Seville in the 1520s, presented Henry VIII with a cosmography containing his personal account of the Rio de la Plata, inserted into an English translation of the 1519 edition of the Suma de Geographia by Martin Fernandez de Enciso. Despite the fact that both men had been involved in the buying and selling of West African slaves, Barlow translated Enciso's short description of the slave markets in Guinea without comment. This chapter explores how the trading network of English, Spanish and Genoese merchants Barlow belonged to had traded in slaves and associated products, such as pearls and sugar, since the 1480s. In doing so, they were instrumental in linking the ‘Guinea of Cape Verde’ to the wider Atlantic world.

In 1660–1807, the British were the pre-eminent slave traders of the western hemisphere. The growth of British slaving activity between 1660 and 1807 was accompanied by major changes in its organization. The most obvious changes occurred in the way in which voyages were financed and managed and in patterns of investment in the trade among British and British colonial ports. There were also changes in the internal structure of the firms that came to dominate British slaving and in the relationship of individual ports to the trade. The profits that the British earned from the Atlantic slave trade have been the subject of much debate. The impact of the slave trade on Britain’s economy was not simply confined to its effects on capital investment. Its effects were, arguably, much wider.

The trans-Atlantic trade that brought slaves from the African continent to the New World has generated such interest and controversy that it has tended to obscure another significant African slave trade, that which saw individuals sent across the Sahara to be sold in North Africa and Western Asia. This trans-Saharan trade was both longer-lived and, in terms of numbers eventually enslaved, demographically similar to the better-known trans-Atlantic trade. This chapter summarizes current understandings of the trans-Saharan slave trade for the period ad 750–1500 approximately, and assesses the prospects for its archaeological recognition. A second topic will be to suggest the merits of a comparative approach considering the impact of slave trading on social and political frameworks: the argument here is that a consideration of wider themes can bring us closer to understanding roots and causes, invalidating the convenient assumption that the Atlantic slave trade was a historical curiosity which can be safely consigned to the annals of the past.

By examining the Atlantic slave trade in the period prior to 1650, this chapter argues that despite its synchrony with the rise of sugar production, the slave trade evolved independently of the expansion of the sugar economy. It describes the purchase of African slaves from European ships, including the high mortality of slaves in Atlantic slave trade voyages. Since data from this early period is admittedly difficult to obtain, the relative significance of the slave trade to the early sugar industry is considerably more problematic than has been previously thought.

This chapter explores the impacts of the Atlantic slave trade between Africa and the European settlements of the New World on two settings along the West African coast. The Atlantic slave trade engaged societies ranging from complexly organised ‘states’ to loosely organised societies based on diverse local leadership. The chapter discusses archaeological investigations of one complex setting, that of the seventeenth- to nineteenth-century Hueda and Dahomey societies of the Bight of Benin, and contrasts those findings with preliminary results from the nineteenth-century sites along the Rio Pongo, Guinea, where the slave trade was conducted by a range of societies of less complex organisation. These investigations demonstrate that the specific responses of local African people to the Atlantic slave trade were highly variable.

This chapter examines the role of Jews and New Christians in the Atlantic slave trade. It discusses the three phases of the African slave trade, each succeeding phase numerically larger than its predecessor. In the century and a half of the first phase (1500–1640), nearly 800,000 Africans embarked on the “Middle Passage.” During the course of the second phase (1640–1700), 817,000 left Africa. In the final phase, between 1700 and British abolition in 1807, 6,686,000 were exported. This means that four out of every five Africans transported to the New World between 1500 and 1807 were boarded in the final phase. This chapter also considers how the slave trade opened up transoceanic niches of entrée and refuge that gave New Christians an initial advantage in human capital over other merchants. It also suggests that Jewish merchants were marginal collective actors in most places and during most periods of the Atlantic system: its political and legal foundations; its capital formation; its maritime organization; and its distribution of coerced migrants from Europe and Africa.

This chapter employs the journeys of Amistad's orphans as a vehicle to distinguish myth from reality as part of investigating the complexity of child mobility in the nineteenth-century Atlantic world. It presents two arguments. First, the adult journeying narratives overshadow the complexity of children's mobility in relation to the illicit Atlantic nineteenth-century slave trade. Second, the histories of child mobility occupy discrete spaces, such as serving in a ship's crew or unaccompanied migration. The journeying of Amistad's orphans, as situated by the mobility of other Atlantic Africans and statistical data from slave-trading vessels, illustrates how children traveled and moved in ways that were often concealed by adult movements.

Although Africa is a huge continent with many different peoples, only some of them were involved in the Atlantic slave trade. During the first two centuries of the Atlantic slave trade, few enslaved Africans were collected east of Greater Senegambia/Upper Guinea all the way to the Slave Coast. This chapter seeks evidence of the clustering of African ethnicities in the Americas from Atlantic slave trade voyages as well as in their final destinations. It enumerates the factors clustering Africans from the same regions and ethnicities in the Americas, such as timing, traditional trading networks, and preferences for Africans by slave owners. The chapter also examines the clustering of African ethnicities in Louisiana during the course of the transshipment trade from the Caribbean.

This chapter attempts to make Africans, who played a crucial role in the formation of new cultures throughout the Americas, more visible. It discusses several studies of African diaspora in the Americas. Such studies can provide a better understanding of when particular African ethnicities started to become victims of the Atlantic slave trade, and of their final destinations in the Americas. The chapter also highlights the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database, the best recent synthesis of the work of the quantification school of Atlantic slave trade studies.

This chapter focuses on the German slave traders who played, at most, a minor part in the history of the transatlantic slave trade. The ending of the Brandenburg slave trade came quite abruptly after 1700, not only because of financial constraints but also because the English and French chose to stop buying slaves from the Germans. German involvement in the Atlantic slave trade was always dependent on broader political and economic conjunctures, as the German states were unable to provide sufficient resources to promote trading companies on their own. Although the Germans did not play a major role in the slave trade, the history of their involvement, especially that of Brandenburg-Prussia, provides an interesting example of how smaller states tried to share this trade in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

Slave trade and slavery have existed throughout the world for millennia. As the Atlantic slave trade began, slavery became associated with blacks, and antiblack racism became very powerful in Europe and the Americas. This chapter discusses the development of the Atlantic slave trade and its devastating impact on Africa. In particular, it looks at how the European powers imposed on Africa the financial cost, destruction, social disorganization, demoralization, and population loss caused by warfare and kidnapping Africans for enslavement.

The earliest Atlantic slave trade began in the Greater Senegambia. This region was an important source of African slaves, who were shipped to the Americas for the rest of the eighteenth century. This chapter argues that people from the Greater Senegambia have made rich demographic and cultural contributions to many regions in the Americas, especially in the Caribbean and the Gulf of Mexico. It also discusses the slave trade voyages recorded between Greater Senegambia and the Americas in The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database. Records show that the United States was the most important place where Senegambians clustered after Europe legally entered the Atlantic slave trade.

This chapter explain how the business of slavery encouraged the emergence of slavery. Prior to the pursuit of commerce in the Atlantic economy, Rhode Islanders sought to restrict and even ban slaveholding; however, once they began to participate in the West Indian and Atlantic slave trades, they wrote slavery into law. By the 1730s, merchants, slave traders, farmers, distillers, and manufacturers had created a niche for themselves in the Atlantic economy, and a series of racist laws served the needs of a local economy deeply entrenched in the West Indian and Atlantic slave trades. Moreover, the more dominant Rhode Islanders became in the slave trade, the more they relied on slave labor. Slave law in the colony also buttressed the business of slavery by explicitly protecting the property rights of slaveholders. Furthermore, these laws elevated all whites to the enslaver class, as it required them to supervise all slaves; at the same time, those laws relegated people of color to the status of dependents or potential dependents. The business of slavery in Rhode Island shaped not only the economy but also social standing and race relations.

The history of the Atlantic slave trade is a history of human encounters. Relationships between blacks and whites under slavery may have been defined by “race” and “power,” but it was also defined by perception. In the final decades of the British slave trade, captive Africans not only made it onto British ships but also arrived in Jamaica in numbers unmatched in previous years. The expansion of the Jamaican plantation economy, for which the Haitian Revolution was a catalyst, required that more captive men, women, and children were to be caught, captured, and even killed if the increased demand for enslaved labor in Jamaica was to be met. Unfortunately, during this period, trading mechanisms on the African coast were already well established and easily facilitated the increased numbers of captives shipped to Jamaica.

This chapter focuses on the African roots of the Yucatan and provides fresh insights into the origins, arrival, and integration of Afro Caribs during the colonial period and into the evolving roles of Afro-Yucatecans in the socioeconomic network of New Spain. It presents documentary evidence indicating that Mexico's “third root” (Africans and their descendants) can be traced to the early colonial period. They probably came to Mexico during that time and, more specifically, the Yucatan came together with the Spanish conquistadors. The trans-Atlantic slave trade, which began in the Antilles, predates the demographic collapse of the indigenous native populations of the Caribbean.

This book traces the lives of six African children in an attempt to demonstrate that the lived experiences of slave children are indeed recoverable, arguing that the role of African child slaves in the illegal slave trade has been underestimated and their experiences misunderstood. A reassessment of the children's participation in the nineteenth-century Atlantic slave-trading networks reveals that the establishment of abolitionism marked the beginning of the child enslavement era. These six lives illustrate the broader experience of African child enslavement and mobility during the early to mid-nineteenth century, as well as the centrality of child mobility to the huge illegal trafficking enterprise supporting the nineteenth-century trans-Atlantic trade. The book shows how these six lives constitute an imagined Atlantic “slave ship family” born of fictional bond, molded by shared traumas, and united by a common goal of survival.

The monumental Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade database has its limitations. It tells us, however, that of the 12 million (or more) slaves embarked from Africa for America, around 2 million (or more) came from the Slave Coast. Between 1696 and 1730 – that is, before the rise of Dahomey – one-third of all slaves came from the Slave Coast, which was then the leading African supplier. But under Dahomey, and much to the dismay of the new rulers, that coast lost its predominant position. A relative decline set in, as the heavy-handed methods of the new masters of the coast turned out to be counterproductive.

The Atlantic slave trade from the Bight of Biafra rose rapidly during the eighteenth century and continued well into the nineteenth century, bringing a significant number of slaves to Cuba. This chapter explores when and what proportions of African ethnicities were shipped out of the Bight of Biafra. Since some ethnicities were shipped from more than one coast, descriptions of Africans in documents generated in the Americas can tell the proportions of ethnicities recorded among enslaved Africans in particular times and places in the Americas. There is strong evidence in these documents that the vast majority of Africans shipped from the Bight of Biafra were from the Igbo nation.

This chapter is about the church’s teachings on slavery, Dutch attitudes toward Africans and Native Americans, Dutch beliefs about evangelical duties, and the obstacles the missionaries faced. They had the greatest successes in Brazil, but they also experimented in Africa, New Netherland, Guyana, and the Caribbean. The church itself caused significant problems: Clergy at home rejected much-needed publications, fearing any “novelty” or deviation from the standard literature. They recalled talented, orthodox colonial clergy who did not consult with them on every decision. And most damaging for the New Netherland mission, the church in Holland did not allow clergy to organize the kinds of councils that were critical for missionary work.