Forms of Slave Trade
Senior 6 · History
Forms of Slave Trade
Lesson 3 of 5
25 min
No other forced migration in history is documented as fully as the trans-Atlantic slave trade. The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database, built by historians led by David Eltis and David Richardson from ships' logs, port records and insurance papers, holds the details of more than 36,000 voyages. From these, and from an allowance for voyages whose records are lost, its authors estimate that 12,521,337 people were embarked in Africa between 1501 and 1866, and 10,702,656 landed alive. Read the first chart before the text.
Three things stand out. The trade was small for its first century, then grew nearly sevenfold in the seventeenth century. More than half of all captives, about 6.5 million, were taken in the eighteenth century alone. And the trade did not stop when Britain abolished its own share in 1807: over 3.8 million people were still shipped after 1800, mostly to Brazil and Cuba.
Definition
Embarked and disembarked: the number of people forced onto ships in Africa, and the number landed alive in the Americas. The difference is the death toll at sea.
Middle Passage: the crossing of the Atlantic from Africa to the Americas, the middle leg of the triangular voyage.
Asiento: a contract or licence from the Spanish Crown granting a company or state the right to supply enslaved Africans to Spanish America.
Factor (trading agent): a merchant who lived at a coastal fort or trading post and bought captives and goods on behalf of a European company.
Worked example
Working with the figures: the death toll of the Middle Passage
Deaths at sea = embarked − disembarked = 12,521,337 − 10,702,656 = 1,818,681, about 1.8 million people.
As a share of those embarked: 1,818,681 ÷ 12,521,337 × 100 ≈ 14.5%. On average, roughly one captive in seven died during the crossing, and this figure does not include those who died on the march to the coast or while held in the coastal prisons.
Portuguese ships reached the West African coast in the 1440s, and captives from Africa were soon being sold in Portugal and Spain. The decisive step came with plantations. From the 1490s the Portuguese settled the island of São Tomé in the Gulf of Guinea and grew sugar there with enslaved African labour; after 1492 the same model crossed the ocean. The database records the first voyages direct from Africa to the Americas in the early sixteenth century, and by the seventeenth century the sugar plantations of Brazil and the Caribbean had turned a trickle into a flood.
| In the Americas and Europe (demand) | In Africa (supply) |
|---|---|
| Plantations. Sugar, and later tobacco, coffee and cotton, needed large, permanent labour forces. | Political fragmentation and war. Rival states such as Dahomey, Oyo and Asante, and warring groups in Kongo and Angola, sold war captives. |
| Collapse of the Indigenous population. European diseases and forced labour killed most of the Indigenous peoples of the Caribbean and many on the mainland. | Existing forms of servitude. Some African societies already held people in slavery or pawnship for war, debt or crime, and merchants could buy them. |
| Rising European consumption of sugar, tobacco and coffee, and the capital of chartered companies. | Demand for imported goods: textiles from India and Europe, iron bars, copper, cowrie shells, alcohol, and above all guns. |
| Ships and navigation able to cross the Atlantic reliably, and forts on the African coast such as Elmina (1482). | Merchant networks such as the Aro of the Bight of Biafra, who moved captives from the interior to the coast. |
| Racist ideas that presented Africans as fit for slavery, used to justify the system. | The gun–slave cycle: guns bought with captives made raiding easier, which produced more captives. |
Nearly half of all captives left from West Central Africa, the region of the Kongo kingdom and of Portuguese Angola, where the Portuguese had founded Luanda in 1576. Trade routes from this coast reached hundreds of kilometres into the interior of Central Africa.
| Stage | How it worked |
|---|---|
| Capture | War, raids and kidnapping; judicial enslavement for crime or witchcraft accusations; debt and pawnship. Most captives were taken far inland by Africans and passed from trader to trader. |
| The coast | Captives were held in forts (such as Elmina and Cape Coast) or in stockades, or sold directly to ships waiting off the coast. African rulers charged customs duties; brokers and interpreters arranged each sale. |
| Payment | Goods, not coins: cloth, guns, gunpowder, iron and copper bars, cowrie shells and alcohol. In the Bight of Biafra, European captains advanced goods on credit and held African pawns as security. |
| The Middle Passage | Weeks or months at sea in overcrowded holds; disease, hunger and violence killed about one in seven; there were revolts on board, most of them crushed. |
| Arrival | Sale by auction or private contract in American ports; the ships loaded sugar, tobacco or coffee for Europe, closing the triangle. |
Ouidah, on the Bight of Benin, was one of the busiest slave ports in Africa, and the English, French and Portuguese each kept a fort there. In 1727 King Agaja of Dahomey, an inland kingdom, conquered the coastal kingdom of Hueda and took Ouidah. From then on Dahomey controlled the trade through a royal official, the yovogan, who dealt with the Europeans, fixed customs duties and decided who could trade. Dahomey shows both sides of the African role: a strong state that dictated terms to European companies, and a state whose wars and raids made captives of its neighbours.
Important
Source analysis: an enslaved African's own account. Ottobah Cugoano was born among the Fante of the Gold Coast (today's Ghana), kidnapped as a boy, and enslaved on a plantation in Grenada before being taken to England, where he gained his freedom and became an abolitionist. This passage is from his book Thoughts and Sentiments on the Evil and Wicked Traffic of the Slavery and Commerce of the Human Species (London, 1787), page 12, written in English. The spelling has been modernised.
"But I must own, to the shame of my own countrymen, that I was first kidnapped and betrayed by some of my own complexion, who were the first cause of my exile and slavery; but if there were no buyers there would be no sellers. So far as I can remember, some of the Africans in my country keep slaves, which they take in war, or for debt […]. But I may safely say, that all the […] misery that any of the inhabitants of Africa meet with among themselves, is far inferior to those inhospitable regions of misery which they meet with in the West-Indies."
Cugoano does not hide the part played by Africans; he names it. But in the same sentence he places the root cause with the buyers, and he insists that slavery on Caribbean plantations was of a different order from slavery in Africa. These two ideas, African participation and European demand, are still at the centre of historians' debates today.
Tip
Participation is not equal responsibility. Examiners reward answers that recognise African rulers and merchants as active traders (Dahomey, the Aro, the Kongo nobility) and explain the structure they worked in: European capital, ships, plantations and guns set the scale and the terms. Use Cugoano's phrase as your hinge: "if there were no buyers there would be no sellers".
CrashCourse, "The Atlantic Slave Trade: Crash Course World History #24". Watch for how the video links the plantation economy to the demand for captives, and for the part played by African states. Compare its figures with the database estimates above.
Important
Discuss. West Central Africa supplied 45% of all captives but is often left out of the popular picture of the trade, which centres on the Gold Coast forts. Why might that be? What does it tell you about how public memory of the trade has been shaped?
Practice
Sources and credits
Written by Ganzaa: the analysis, the charts, the tables, the worked example, the definitions and the exercises.
