Forms of Slave Trade
Senior 6 · History
Forms of Slave Trade
Lesson 1 of 5
25 min
For more than a thousand years, people were taken from sub-Saharan Africa and sold into slavery along three great systems of routes. Look at the map before reading on, and ask three questions of it: where did captives come from, where were they taken, and who controlled each stage of the journey?
The map is a sketch: each arrow stands for a bundle of routes that changed over the centuries. Rwanda is marked for orientation only. What the map cannot show is time. The trans-Saharan trade began first and lasted longest; the trans-Atlantic trade was the largest and the most concentrated in time; the Indian Ocean trade grew fastest in the nineteenth century, when it fed the long-distance caravan trade of East Africa, which you study in lesson 5.
Definition
Slavery: a condition in which one person is treated as the property of another, can be bought and sold, and is forced to work without consent or pay.
Slave trade: the capture, transport, buying and selling of people as slaves. It is a system: raiders or sellers, transporters, markets and buyers.
Chattel slavery: slavery in which the enslaved person is legal property for life, and the status passes to their children. It was the form practised on the plantations of the Americas.
Caravan: a large group of traders, animals and porters travelling together for safety across a desert or long overland route.
| Feature | Trans-Saharan | Red Sea and Indian Ocean | Trans-Atlantic |
|---|---|---|---|
| Main period | From the seventh century to the early twentieth | From the seventh century to the early twentieth; peak in the nineteenth | From the early sixteenth century to 1866 |
| Where captives were taken | North Africa, Egypt, the Ottoman lands and the Middle East | Arabia, the Persian Gulf, India, and plantation islands such as Zanzibar and Mauritius | Brazil, the Caribbean, Spanish America and North America |
| Main uses of the enslaved | Domestic service, soldiers, concubines, and some farm and mine work | Domestic service, pearl diving, soldiers, and clove and sugar plantations | Plantation labour (sugar, coffee, cotton, tobacco) and mining |
| Who was taken most | More women and children than men | Women and children, and men for plantations | About two men for every woman |
| Scale (estimates) | About 9 million | About 8 million | About 12.5 million embarked, 10.7 million landed |
The estimates for the two older trades come from the French historian Olivier Pétré-Grenouilleau (2004), who counted from the seventh century to about 1920. The trans-Atlantic figures come from the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database, which is built from the records of more than 36,000 individual voyages. That difference matters, as the warning below explains.
Warning
Not all numbers are equally solid. The trans-Atlantic figure rests on ships' records, customs registers and insurance papers, so historians can check it voyage by voyage. No such records exist for most caravans across the Sahara or most dhows on the Indian Ocean, so those totals are reconstructions from scattered travellers' reports and tax records, and different historians' estimates differ by millions. In an exam, always say whose estimate you are using, and never compare a precise Atlantic figure with a rough Saharan one as if they were equally exact.
You met the trans-Saharan gold trade in Senior 1. Here the focus is the trade in people that travelled on the same routes. Several factors made it possible and profitable.
The trade worked as a chain, and each link had its own methods.
| Stage | Method |
|---|---|
| Capture | Raids and wars by Sahelian states and warlords; kidnapping; enslavement as punishment for crime or debt; tribute paid in people by weaker communities to stronger ones. |
| First sale | Captives were sold in Sahel market towns such as Kano, Timbuktu and Kukawa, the capital of Bornu, often in exchange for horses, cloth, salt or copper. |
| The crossing | Captives walked beside the camels for two months or more, moving from well to oasis. Guides chose the route; thirst, exhaustion and cold desert nights killed many on the way. |
| Resale | Survivors were resold in the northern markets (Murzuk, Tripoli, Cairo, Fez) and often shipped on to the Ottoman lands and Arabia. |
Important
Source analysis: a traveller in the Sahara, 1353. The Moroccan traveller Ibn Battuta crossed the Sahara on his way home from Mali. These extracts come from the English translation by H. A. R. Gibb, Ibn Battuta: Travels in Asia and Africa, 1325–1354 (1929). He is writing about Takedda, a copper-producing town in the Sahara, in today's Niger.
"They dig the ore out of the ground, bring it to the town, and cast it in their houses. This work is done by their male and female slaves. […] They serve also as their medium of exchange; with the thin bars they buy meat and firewood, with the thick, slaves, male and female, millet, butter, and wheat."
"The people of Barnu [Bornu] are Muslims, and have a king called Idris […]. From this country come excellent slave-girls, eunuchs, and fabrics dyed with saffron."
"I left Tagadda on Thursday 11th Sha'ban of the year [seven hundred and] fifty-four [11th September 1353] with a large caravan which included six hundred women slaves."
Notice the tone. Ibn Battuta lists enslaved people in the same sentence as millet, butter and dyed cloth, and he describes the caravan without comment. His matter-of-fact voice is itself evidence: in the fourteenth-century Sahel and Maghreb, the trade was an ordinary part of commerce. Exercises 5 and 6 below ask you to analyse the extracts.
Tip
Remember the push and the pull. Every slave trade has demand factors (why buyers wanted people: soldiers, servants, plantation labour) and supply factors (why people were available for sale: wars, raids, strong states, debt). A "factors for the emergence" answer that covers both sides, with a named example for each, always outscores a list of one side only.
Important
Discuss. Ibn Battuta travelled with a caravan of six hundred enslaved women and did not question it. Should a historian judge people of the past by the values of their own time, by today's values, or by both? What is gained and lost with each approach?
Practice
Sources and credits
Written by Ganzaa: the analysis, the tables, the map, the definitions and the exercises. This lesson adapts CC BY-SA material and is shared under CC BY-SA 4.0.
