Slave trade

The shipment of Africans against their will from their communities to outposts scattered across the Atlantic world where those who held them in bondage hoped to use the slaves’ labor to produce wealth.

In essence, the slave trade was the mechanism whereby SLAVERY spread outward from Africa during the early modern period. But forced migration of slaves across the Atlantic did not represent the origins of the slave trade. As various scholars have demonstrated, an earlier slave trade had led to the relocation of thousands of Africans to the East long before CHRISTOPHER CoLUMBUS ever sailed to the West. Slavery, which existed when scribes wrote both the Old and New Testaments, appeared in the Koran as well; in that sacred text slaveholders learned that they should be willing to offer freedom to the slaves they kept in bondage if the slaves could afford to purchase their liberation. But many Muslims (see Islam), like other peoples in the world, nonetheless participated in the slave trade. One historian has estimated that slave traders arranged for the transportation of 4,820,000 slaves across the Sahara between 650 and 1600. During the 10th and 11th centuries, when this trade hit its peak, perhaps 8,700 slaves left their homelands through this trade each year, although by the 15th century the annual rate had dipped to approximately 4,300 (before rising again, during the 16th century, to 5,500 per year). These numbers are estimates based on a variety of sources. But whatever the precise figure, there is no doubt that the eastern slave trade took hundreds of thousands of Africans from their communities to new lives. Once enslaved, men might become soldiers, grooms, scholars, clerks, and secretaries; female slaves found themselves as concubines, musicians, cooks, or domestic workers. Although many of the enslaved might have landed in North Africa or southern Europe, others traveled much farther; substantial numbers made it as far as India and China.

Although there had been an internal slave trade within Africa long before Europeans arrived to establish colonies, in addition to the eastern slave trade, the commerce in slaves increased dramatically after the mid-15th century, when Portuguese slavers began to transport Africans to Europe and to offshore European colonies. The Portuguese were able to succeed quickly in the business because they took advantage of the existing African slave trade whereby individuals captured in war were taken against their will to people who were willing to purchase them.

From the time that it began, the slave trade had a devastating effect on individuals, families, and communities. Witnessing the unloading of 235 slaves in the Portuguese port near Lagos in August, 1444, Gomes Eannes de Zurara, an associate of Prince Henry the Navigator, learned that it became necessary “to part fathers from sons, husbands from wives, brothers from brothers. No respect was shown to either friends or relations, but each fell where his lot took him.” Wherever slavers hauled their human wares, such desperate scenes invariably followed. He could have added that the capture of large numbers of members of any community had a devastating effect on that settlement’s ability to survive, especially if slavers disturbed the sex balance of a town and thereby endangered its ability to stage a demographic recovery from the slave raids.

The Portuguese were the first Europeans to take a sustained interest in the slave trade, and to get their business started they knew they had to provide a range of commercial alternatives to the Africans who controlled the supply of slaves. Thus, when the Portuguese arrived in African ports in the 15th century to purchase human labor, they brought trade goods such as cloth from Flanders and France, German brass goods, Venetian glass, spiced wine from the Canary Islands, conch shells found in the Canaries, and even goods produced in Africa itself, such as woolen shawls made in Tunis. To get these goods, those in command of slave ships had only to stock up on products in Lisbon or some other southern European entrepot. The horrors of the slave trade, not only the destruction of African communities but also the terrible privations suffered by slaves during the middle passage, rested initially on the ability of the Portuguese to offer the wares of countless European artisans to Africans who found them suitable compensation for less fortunate Africans, most of them taken in wars, who were already enslaved. According to one surviving valuation, one horse was worth 25 to 30 slaves in Senegambia in the 1440s. But the Portuguese were not the only Europeans to embrace the opportunities afforded by the sale of human beings. The enterprising English merchant-seaman Sir John Hawkins became a pioneer of the slave trade for his nation when he made three separate journeys from Africa to the Western Hemisphere in the 1560s, each time hoping to profit from the sale of slaves.

Perhaps the most notable feature of the slave trade was its dramatic expansion over the course of the 16th century. In 1500 slavers exported approximately 5,000 slaves each year from Africa. By 1550 the number had increased to 8,000 annually, and by 1600 the average yearly exports reached 9,500. Of course, the trade took different tolls on different regions. During the 16th century the greatest number of slaves came from Angola, which contributed approximately one-half of all exported slaves in 1500 and whose share increased to more than 65 percent of the total by the mid-17th century. Yet while the share of Angolans rose, those from Benin decreased after local authorities there moved to ban the trade in the mid-16th century.

The most recent estimates of the slave trade for the period from 1519 to 1600 provide a clear picture of the range of slaves’ origins. During those 80 years the largest number of slaves, approximately 221,200, came from West central Africa, with additional slaves from other areas—Senegambia, the Gold Coast, the Bight of Benin, and the Bight of Biafra, each of which contributed approximately 10,700 humans. With another 2,000 from Sierra Leone, the totals for the period add up to 266,000. Virtually all of these slaves were destined for New Spain and Brazil, suggesting that the Spanish and Portuguese alike recognized the utility of slaves for the colonial economies of the New World. By the latter decades of the 17th century, slaves left Africa on ships owned by the English, Dutch, Danes, and French along with those still hauled by the Portuguese.

Modern studies of the slave trade reveal how the entire institution of slavery evolved during the course of the 16th century. By 1580, slavers had transported 58,000 Africans to the Americas. The number seems high, but demand was relatively low since many slaves were destined for Spanish haciendas, whose owners tended to be less driven by the search for profits than later plantations designed explicitly for export. The shift can be seen in the numbers. Between 1580 and 1640, more than one-half million Africans arrived in the Americas, and the further expansion of the plantation system led to an enormous increase in the scale of the trade after 1700.

Despite the ability of slavers to transport humans to new destinations, individual slaves and entire groups often resisted their captors. Recent estimates suggest that as many as 10 percent of all slave ships experienced rebellions, and various kinds of documentary evidence suggest that slaves often decided to take their chances against their captors rather than suffer the continued horrors of being treated like property. The slave trade, then, succeeded in the minds of Europeans, but it could not quell an individual slave’s desire to break free.

Further reading: David Eltis, The Rise of African Slavery in the Americas (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000); David Eltis, Stephen D. Behrendt, David Richardson, and Herbert S. Klein, The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade: A Database on CD-ROM (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999); Joseph E. Inikori and

Stanley L. Engerman, eds., The Atlantic Slave Trade: Effects on Economies, Societies, and Peoples in Africa, the Americas, and Europe (Durham, N. C.: Duke University Press, 1992); “New Perspectives on the Transatlantic Slave Trade,” special issue of William and Mary Quarterly, 3d ser., LVIII (2001), 1-251; William D. Phillips, Jr., “The Old World Background of Slavery in the Americas,” in Barbara L. Solow, ed., Slavery and the Rise of the Atlantic System (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 43-61; Ronald Segal, Islam’s Black Slaves: The Other Black Diaspora (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2001); Hugh Thomas, The Slave Trade: The History of the Atlantic Slave Trade, 1440—1870 (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1997).