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

European powers set up colonies in the Americas. This changed the lives of people worldwide. One example of this was the drastic 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 dates back to some of the earliest societies. The Athenians and Romans had slavery, as did early states in China and India. Slavery also existed in some parts of Africa before to the arrival of Europeans. In these cultures, though, slaves were treated more like a social class of people than like non-human property. It was often possible for the enslaved to gain their freedom and become part of new communities.

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.

These early forms of slavery certainly caused great pain and suffering. The transatlantic slave trade was entirely different, though. It was larger in scale, crueller, and more violent than anything that came before it.

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

The transatlantic slave trade was the result of European colonialism in the Americas. When colonies Brazil and the Caribbean started using plantation system for sugar production, there was an explosion in demand for labor. Spaniards and Portuguese did not want to work on the sugar plantations, though. 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 for work in the Americas. They were unfamiliar with the land, so it was harder for them to escape. They were also mostly resistant to European diseases. Historians still debate how large a role race played at the time. Later on, racist ideas about Africans were used to justify slavery. Other justifications included religion and concepts of “civilization”.

Enslaved people started being traded across the Atlantic around 1526. Before it was over, about 12.5 million Africans were taken from the coast of Africa to the Americas. About 2.5 million of those died during the voyage.

Europe’s demand for more slaves was endless. To find more victims, slave traders from the coasts journeyed into the interior of Africa. They used their military advantage to take advantage of communities there. It is true that many of those doing the enslaving were themselves Africans. However, European demand and wealth is what drove the entire system.

As slave traders sent more enslaved people to European colonies, many communities in Africa simply collapsed. The chaos was then used by Europeans to justify more enslavement. Another effect was increased warfare between African nations. The slave trade encouraged African leaders to attack their neighbors. Fighting in wars let them take prisoners. Prisoners could be sold as slaves.

For example, when the Oyo Empire of West Africa defeated their rivals in southern Yoruba states, they sold their captives into slavery. They were paid with a European goods, such as guns, cotton, glass, and food. These goods were made from materials grown by slaves in the Americas. It was a good deal for European powers, who profited from warfare in Africa without having do any of the fighting.

Over time, the transatlantic slave trade became increasingly driven by sugar plantations. By the 1800s, more than eight out of every ten enslaved people were sent to either Brazil or the Caribbean. African laborers toiled from sunrise to sunset under horrible conditions. Life expectancy for an enslaved person 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 ships brought raw materials from the Americas to Europe. This generated more production and wealth, which Europeans then used to trade for more slaves. Thus, the triangular trade was born.

Europeans fiercely protected their trading rights in Africa. They also wanted to make sure they were exporting (selling) more than they were importing (buying). The slave trade brought in more money (gold and silver) than ever before. This wealth would also help to bring about the Industrial Revolution, which first began in Europe.

Middle Passage

The leg of the triangular trade linking Africa to the Americas was called the Middle Passage. This was a journey across miles of ocean. It usually began in ports along the western coasts of Africa. That is where 12.5 million enslaved Africans were shipped to plantations.

They came from many different ethnic communities from Africa’s interior. Some of them were transported over 1,000 miles as captives of slave traders with European-made firearms. They were marched toward the coasts to be put in castle-like prisons, which can still be seen today. They were held there until European ships sailed into nearby waters. These castles, known as “Points of No Return,” were the last places in Africa 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.