Reasons For The Transatlantic Slave Trade

African slaves were shipped to the West Indies and America as part of the Triangular Trade. Many slaves died on the voyage due to the ghastly conditions that accompanied the Middle Passage and others committed suicide. Portugal held a near monopoly on the export of African slaves for a period of about 200 years from the early 14-1600s. The peak years of the slave trade were during the 16th and 17th century, but Africans were forced across the Atlantic for an astonishing timeframe of around 400 years.

Before Europeans joined the African slave trade, slavery was widespread throughout Africa, and slaves served to pay off debts, sold by their kin in exchange for goods during famine, or as war captives. The slaves were central to the trans-Saharan trade, and on occasion the slaves would be freed from servitude. Once the Europeans began to exploit the slave trade, they created a forced migration of African slaves into the

The Triangular trade was a trade system among Europe, Africa, and the Americas. Europe made manufactured goods such as textiles, gun powder, firearms, iron and copper bars, alcohol, cloth and brass kitchen ware. These were traded in Africa for slaves, gold, and silver, which were transported to the Americas, where they were exchanged for tobacco, fish, lumber, flour, sugar cane, cotton, and distilled rum. This merchandise was then brought to Europe, where the cycle began again. The Triangle Trade was very

The transatlantic slave trade began in the 15th century, after the Portuguese started exploring the coast of West Africa. This had a long term effect on Africa because even though it started out benefiting the upper class in Africa, the long term effect was devastating. When Europeans started to enter Africa, they enjoyed “the triple advantage of guns and other technology, widespread literacy, and the political organization necessary to sustain expensive programs of exploration and conquest”(Doc 4). Africa’s relations with Europe depended on common interests, which Europe did not share. Europe’s contact with Africa, involving economic exchanges and political relationships, was not mutually beneficial.

For more than three and a half centuries, the forcible bondage of at least twelve million men, women, and children from their African homelands to the Americas forever changed the face and character of the western hemisphere. The slave trade was brutal and horrific, and the enslavement of Africans was cruel, exploitative, and dehumanizing. The trade represented one of the longest and most sustained assaults on the life, integrity, and dignity of human beings in world history.

The Atlantic Slave Trade involved the forced intercontinental migration of West Africans across the Middle Passage during the 17th to 19th centuries. Between twelve and fifteen million slaves were exchanged between Africa, Europe and the Americas, together with raw materials and manufactured goods.

The Atlantic Slave Trade lasted between 1450 and 1750 and drastically impacted the lives of both European and African people. During this time, the Europeans, such as the British, Portuguese, Spanish, French, and Dutch, traveled to Africa in search of labor workers. In total, over twelve million slaves were taken, mainly because they workers to make money, but it also had to do with their race, religion – as they were not Christian – and to civilize them because the Europeans did not believe that they were humans. Due to these European beliefs, the Europeans saw themselves as the most powerful group and viewed slave trade as a business. The Africans, on the other hand, had a harder time transitioning into slavery. Many of them were taken from their homes and forced to accept a new life working as a slave. These events did not come without many sacrifices from the African people. One of the major reasons the slave trade was so expansive is due to the low life expectancy of the slaves after their capture. While the Europeans believed that they were helping the African culture, as well as themselves, the African society as a whole suffered the most.

Screams for relief, cries for comfort, and moans for death all revolved around the slave trade. The slave trade is an event that not only impacted Africa, but the whole world even still today. This essay will explain how cultures were ruined and families were torn apart. The slave trade has influenced history worldwide because it has impacted continents economically, socially, and politically.

The first African slaves were believed to have landed in Portuguese in 1442, the Portuguese merchants of this time were known to trade goods for slaves with Nigerians. The Portuguese were well known for trading slaves prior to the Europeans discovering America in 1492. According to an article titled The Transatlantic Slave Trade, “By 1490 approximately more than 3,000 slaves a year were being transported to Portugal and Spain from Africa”. Once Europeans colonized American land this began the three-way slave trade between Europe, Africa, and America. Majority of the slaves during this time came from slave traders in Nigeria, which was known to be majorly controlled by the Aro, Oyo, and Hausa groups. These slave trade groups were often under heavy pressure of the slave economy to constantly provide slaves for trading which resulted in war amongst the groups.

All through the African Slave Trade there have been numerous huge occasions that happened amid 1450-1850. Three of which I will be expounding on in this theme. The center section was the first key occasion in which Africans were sent to the New World. The slave treatment and resistance of African men and ladies who were viewed as not as much as human was the second key occasion. The Fugitive Slave Law which permitted recover of slaves was the third key occasion. An expected 12 million Africans were transported over the Atlantic toward the Western Hemisphere from 1450 to 1850. Of this number, around five percent were conveyed to British North America and, later, to the United States, the greater part of them landing somewhere around 1680 and 1810. A little number of Africans went first to the British West Indies and afterward to North America.

. Before the first Africans arrived in British North America in 1619, more than half a million African captives had already been transported and enslaved in Brazil. By the end of the nineteenth century, that number had risen to more than 4 million. Northern European powers soon followed Portugal and Spain into the transatlantic slave trade. The majority of African captives were carried by the Portuguese, Brazilians, the British, French, and Dutch. British slave traders alone transported 3.5 million Africans to the Americas.

Imagine going about your everyday life when all of a sudden, you are taken away from your family, friends, and the life you know and you are placed aboard a ship going to a foreign place. On top of all that, you will have to work hard for free and be treated with almost no respect. It’s crazy right? Well not for the millions of Africans during the 15th to 19th century. The Atlantic Slave Trade was a part of the triangular trade which involved trading between Europe, Africa, and the Americas. The triangular trade was a trade system between the three continents which involved exchange of goods and slaves. The Europeans traded manufactured goods while the Africans traded slaves and the Americans traded for agricultural products. In all of this, the question arises that who is to blame? The blame can’t be placed on only one group of people because each group has played a big role in the slave trade. By looking at what was the role of each continent in the slave trade, we can see how much they are to blame.

In the 1500s to 1900s, Africans were taken from Africa and brought across the Atlantic Ocean where they were traded and sold for labor in the New World, which included the Caribbean Islands, and North and South America. Around the 1600s, the Europeans captured and bought slaves, which began the Atlantic Slave trade and the forced migration of about 24 million people from Africa.

The horrors of the New World Atlantic Slave trade system cannot be expressed in figures along. The humanitarian and cultural losses are staggering. Throughout this period, more than a million and a half died

Slavery was thought to be a solution to the British Colonial Empire due to Europeans’ history in enslaving people for centuries. Additionally, the Bible also played an influential role since slavery was approved in it. This all led to slavery first transpiring in the New World when African immigrants were brought as captives to the colonies (Jamestown being the first) to work on tobacco plantations. In fact, Virginia was the first British colony that legally authorized the practice of slavery, in 1661. However, this was linked to the development of the Atlantic Slave Trade, or the Triangular Trade, when the most valuable trades involved enslaved people and products of slave labor. The lion's share of hijacked Africans weren't at that point slaves in Africa. They were free individuals who were seized to give the work that the European forces required to maintain colonies in the Americas. Transoceanic slave exchange included the transportation between 10 million and 12 million subjugated Africans over the Atlantic Ocean to the Americas from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century. It was the second of three phases of the triangular exchange. Many also Africans brought with them their languages, art, music, and other imperative components of their culture. At this point in time, there was a large growth in enslaved Africans. Slavery