Pre-Columbian Slave Trade (Pre-Sixteenth Century CE)

The development of European colonies in the Americas reshaped society and affected millions of people all over the world. One of the most glaring examples of this was the drastic effect of the enslavement of humans from Africa. Many scholars today call this an African holocaust and a crime against humanity. It is typically known under the name “the transatlantic slave trade”.

Slavery and slave trading in world history dates back to some of the earliest societies. The Athenians had slavery, as did the Romans, the Assyrians, and early states in China and India. Slavery also existed in some parts of Africa prior to the involvement of Europeans. In some African societies, slave trading was linked to warfare, debt, religious duties, and criminal punishment. In these cultures, though, slaves were not considered property, as they later would be under the transatlantic system. In these earlier forms of slavery in Africa, slaves were more like a social class of people than sub-human property. It was often possible to escape slavery and gain opportunities. Sometimes, this happened over multiple generations, as children of the enslaved were considered to be free. On other occasions, it was actually possible for an enslaved person to gain their freedom and be considered a free member of the society that enslaved him or her.

In the Middle Ages, the slave trade brought many enslaved people from Africa to the Muslim world. There were twice as many female slaves as men, though the opposite would later be true in the Americas. Many enslaved people had to work as servants or sex slaves. On occasion, some rose to prominence in Muslim societies.

While these early forms of slavery go back thousands of years, many historians argue that the transatlantic slave trade was a dramatically different kind of system. In its scale, purpose, and the extent of its violence, it unlike anything that came before it.

Origins and overview of the transatlantic slave trade (sixteenth to nineteenth century CE)

The transatlantic slave trade grew out of a new world order introduced by European colonialism in the Americas. When they arrived in the New World, European powers set up colonies to support their own economic growth. Soon, colonies in Brazil and the Caribbean shifted established a plantation system for sugar production, which led to an explosion in demand for labor. Spaniards and Portuguese did not want to work on the sugar plantations, and European diseases had wiped out indigenous populations. As a result, Europeans looked to Africa for a new source of workers.
 
Africans were thought to be a good fit because they were unfamiliar with the land, and so less likely to be able to escape, and they were also mostly resistant to European diseases. Scholars still debate how large a role race played at the time. Later on, the notion of racial inferiority was used by Europeans to justify the enslavement of millions of Africans. Other justifications included religion and concepts of “civilization.” To the English, for example, non-Christian people were candidates for enslavement because they could not be “civilized” members of society.

Slaves started being traded within the Americas shortly after the arrival of the Spanish and Portuguese, and trading across the Atlantic began around 1526. Before it was over, approximately 12.5 million Africans were taken from the coast of Africa to the Americas, though about 2.5 million of those died during the voyage. It was the largest and most violent system of slavery in history.

Europe’s demand for more slaves was endless. To meet this demand, slave traders from the coasts journeyed inland and used their military advantage to prey upon communities. It is true that many of those doing the enslaving were themselves Africans. However, European demand and economic muscle is what drove the entire system.

As slave traders provided more enslaved people to European colonies in the Americas, many communities in Africa simply collapsed. Social collapse was then used by many as a justification for more enslavement.

Another effect was increased warfare between African nations. The slave trade provided an added reason for African leaders to attack their neighbors. For example, when the Oyo Empire of West Africa defeated their rivals in southern Yoruba states, they profited from the victory by selling their captives into slavery. In return, they were paid with a variety of manufactured products including guns, cotton textiles, glass, and food products made from the very sugar grown by slaves in the Americas. It was a good deal for European powers, who profited from warfare in Africa without having to do any of the fighting.

Over time, the transatlantic slave trade became increasingly fueled by sugar production. By the 1800s, more than eight out of every ten enslaved Africans who were taken to the Americas were taken to either Brazil or the islands of the Caribbean, which were dominated by sugar plantations. African laborers toiled from sunrise to sunset under back-breaking conditions. The labor was so harsh that the average life expectancy for a slave in Brazil was only twenty-three years. The high death rate only increased demand for slave trading, with new a new slave brought over for ever one that died.

While ships carried slaves from Africa to the Americas, other vessels brought raw materials and cash crops to markets in Europe. This generated more production and wealth, which Europeans then used to trade for more slaves. Thus, the triangular trade was born.

Middle Passage

The leg of the triangular trade linking Africa to the Americas was called the Middle Passage. This journey across miles of ocean usually began in ports along the western coasts of Africa. That is where African and European slave traders did their business and 12.5 million enslaved Africans were shipped to plantations.

As discussed earlier, those men and women came from many different ethnic communities from Africa’s interior. Some of them were transported over 1,000 miles from their homes as captives of slave traders with European-made firearms. They were abducted, traded, and marched toward the coasts to be put in castle-like prisons, which can still be seen along the coast of Ghana and other West African nations. They were held there until European ships sailed into nearby waters. These castles, known as “Points of No Return,” were the last places on the continent that almost all of those who entered would see. From those castle-shaped prisons, they were put on ships bound for the other side of the world.

Conditions on these ships were so harsh that 15 percent of them would die during the two-to-three-month journey. Forced between decks at night, chained together and stacked like luggage, each captive had less space than a body in a coffin. Feces, urine, and vomit built up. When someone died, the traders would not notice until morning, forcing the living to share space with the dead until someone opened the latch. Because disease could wipe out a ship’s whole population, living people showing any symptoms of illness were usually tossed overboard in the same manner as the corpses. There is little about these journeys that isn’t horrifying to recall.

In good weather, the captives were brought to the top deck for exercise, but their chains stayed on. They were fed nothing but mushy beans until the ship closed in on its destination. At that point they were fed some meat and more calories to try to undo signs of malnourishment. Sellers did not do this out of kindness, but rather in order to get a better price. Eventually the slaves were brought to shore and sold in what can only be described as livestock markets. Upon arrival at the home of their new owner, this impossibly harsh journey was over, and new horrors awaited them.