The Trade Of The Atlantic Slave Trade

The aftermath of the Atlantic Slave Trade included the commercialization of African economies and the solidification of European colonization and colonialism. Describe this commercialization and its subsequent effects.

“The Slave Ship: A Human History” written by Marcus Rediker describes the horrifying experiences of Africans, and captains, and ship crewmen on their journey through the Middle Passage, the water way in the Atlantic Ocean between Africa and the Americas. The use of slaves to cultivate crops in the Caribbean and America offered a great economy for the European countries by providing “free” labor and provided immense wealth for the Europeans. Rediker describes the slave migration by saying, “There exists no account of the mechanism for history’s greatest forced migration, which was in many ways the key to an entire phase of globalization” (10). African enslavement to the Americas is the most prominent reason for a complete shift in the

The changes in African life during the slave trade era form an important element in the economic and technological development of Africa. Although the Atlantic slave trade had a negative effect on both the economy and technology, it is important to understand that slavery was not a new concept to Africa. In fact, internal slavery existed in Africa for many years. Slaves included war captives, the kidnapped, adulterers, and other criminals and outcasts. However, the number of persons held in slavery in Africa, was very small, since no economic or social system had developed for exploiting them (Manning 97). The new system-Atlantic slave trade-became quite different from the early African slavery. The

Although African slaves in the Caribbean and the Americas were torn apart from their families and displaced for centuries, they kept up their African culture through dance, food and art. The effects on Africa’s west coast also lingered, as the Portuguese left their Christian mark on the Kongo elite as European and African cultures fused, all in the name of profit (Goucher, 7). While the developed role of the African merchant princes sidestepped “inherited patterns of African political systems”, these new merchants thrived as they gained wealth, guns and goods from trading with the Europeans, in return supplying Europeans with slaves as they helped the Triangle Trade survive, thus ripping apart tribal life and “destabilizing” African culture with violence. African livelihood was impacted causing economic inequality, as African “interior trade routes” were redirected as trading increased along the coast. Additionally, the profit driven sale of millions of Africans into slavery to grow the Atlantic economy, was responsible for Africa’s population loss that affected not only their own agricultural production, but their technological advancements as well, furthering the imbalance still seen today. The slave trade also gave rise to racism, as the slaves’ dark skin

The black slave trade, the trading in human beings which linked Europe, Africa, and the America’s from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries, sustained a colossal colonial machine based on the slavery system. (Schmidt) Around ten to twelve million African’s were forcefully taken to the New World to fulfill a labor shortage. These millions of African captives sold as slaves provided the labor required for the exploration of mines and plantations of sugar cane, tobacco, coffee, and cotton. (Schmidt)

In 1969 Philip Curtin described the historiography of the Atlantic slave trade as a “Numbers Game.” Curtin found that historians conceptualized the commodification of human beings through quantification. A year earlier in 1968, Frederick George Kay claimed in The Shameful Trade that fifty million Africans were exported into slavery in foreign lands. Twenty years later, Paul Lovejoy offered a summary of the field. He argued “that known scale of the slave trade was on the order of 11,863,000” Africans were exported into bondage. Then ten years later, in 1999, the work of David Eltis, Stephen D. Behrendt, and Herbert S. Klein was published as The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade: A Database on CD-ROM. This work built upon the work of other historians who have largely dealt with the issue of the Atlantic Slave Trade by counting and quantifying human suffering. This database slowly grew and now includes documentation “on more than 35,000 slave voyages that forcibly embarked over 12 million Africans for transport to the Americas between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries.” This database has made it easier to quantify the Atlantic slave trade. Historians now could use the power of a computer to understand the sheer number of transportations. With the publication of this database it seemed likely that historians would continue the “numbers game” and get to the heart of the Atlantic slave trade. However, recent work on the Atlantic slave trade has gone in a different direction.

The slave trade within the Atlantic World took place amongst the Atlantic Ocean beginning in the fifteenth century. The majority of the individuals whom became part of the slave trade were moved about on the triangular trade route to the New World. The Portuguese empire in 1418 was the first to conform into the idea of the New World slave trade. In 1440 Columbus’s discovery of the Americas created a new Atlantic zone of human contact and communication that embraced four continents and one ocean” (Reilly,563). In 1562 the first slave voyage from Africa to the Americas was conquered, which started a trend for other countries to follow. The Atlantic slave

Through the transportation use of the asientistas, the slave trade was constantly changing and integrated with the whole Atlantic economy. From 1595 to 1773, a total of 648,688 slaves, or an annual average of 3,381 slaves every year for the 178 years of trade. However, as with many economic understandings and studies changes are more important than the totals. Therefore, the changing sources of supply and destinations are of more importance. With Spanish records, the Guinea of Cape Verde and the region just south of Congo mouth were the main sources of slaves arriving to Spanish-America.

Edward Long justified slavery in 1774 by arguing that black Africans’ “narrow intellect” and “bestial smell” implied that they might almost be of a different species.

There has always been a great debate on why the British Parliament chose to abolish the slave trade, after all, this was the richest part of Britain's trade in the 18th century. Most importantly, Britain benefited immensely from the Transatlantic Slave Trade as it was extensive and flooded into the country bringing wealth which established newly funded industries. However, there were multiple humanitarian and economic factors that were responsible for the abolition of the transatlantic slave trade and the effect it had on the economic and political stability of Britain and West Africa in the nineteenth century.

The trans-Atlantic slave trade is a complex institution with multiple sides to be considered and analyzed. On the one hand, one could say that Europeans were the sole creators of this trade, for it was their motive to bring slave labor to the Americas that served as the driving force behind the mass movement of slaves out of Africa and across the Atlantic. They brought desired material resources to African nations, and in exchange they gained human cargo to be used at their will. While this is the understanding that many hold about the slave trade, it is not the only side to be measured. Africans themselves also played a substantial part in contributing to and facilitating the progression of the slave trade by selling their own people for desired necessities such as weapons and other manufactured goods. As a result, both Africans and Europeans held interesting roles in the advancement of the Atlantic slave trade, which begs the greater question of whether the Europeans were really the only party at fault in enabling the progression of slavery in the Americas.

In this paper, we examine one of the channels through which the slave trade may affect

The Atlantic slave trade existed from the 16th to the early 19th century and stimulated trade between Europe, Africa, and the Americas. Over 12 million Africans were captured and sold into chattel slavery off the coast of West Africa, and more than 2 million of them died crossing the Atlantic. These outcomes of the slave trade are rarely disputed among historians; the effect of the Atlantic slave trade in Africa, however, is often a topic of debate. Some academics, such as Walter Rodney, insist that Africans were forced to take part in the slave trade, resulting in demographic disruption and underdevelopment in all sectors of Africa. Historian John Thornton acknowledges the negative consequences of the Trans-Atlantic slave trade, yet contends that it was merely an expansion of the existing internal slave trade which African rulers engaged in willingly. A final case made by Hugh Thomas completely contradicts Rodney’s thesis, asserting that the slave trade was not solely responsible for decreasing Africa’s population, and furthermore, that it was primarily beneficial to Africa’s economy and politics. The true outcome of the slave trade in Africa lies not entirely in any one of these arguments, but rests rather in a combination of all three. Although the Atlantic slave trade was detrimental to the economic and social development of Africa, the trade benefited a small portion of Africans, who willingly aligned themselves with

13 million lives were taken away from Africans in only 300 years. If they were not killed from overworking, they died along the way here. The Atlantic World’s state today would not be achieved without the African Slave trade. Europeans greatly benefitted from the trade, but at the cost of entire generations of Africans, and even Native Americans from the 1550s to 1850s.

At the time of the Triangular trade, Britain had enhanced its interests in the Americas, and the number of African slaves was beginning to grow. This growing interest led to the Trans-Atlantic business, in the 16th century (Radburn, 2015). The south Atlantic together with the Caribbean regions were in great need of labor to be able to produce commodity crops and making clothes and other goods which they would be sold back to Europe. The demand for slaves in these regions saw the Portuguese complete the first Trans-Atlantic slave voyage to Brazil by the year 1526. Other European countries soon followed. They joined the Portuguese in establishing slave posts and ports where captured slaves were kept waiting to be shipped overseas. Portugal required laborers to work on their sugar plantations in their new colony in Brazil. Subsequently, there was a need for additional labor in these new territories. Paid laborers were very expensive to pay for, thus this makes African slaves as the only solution to develop these new colonies with their free labor. The first shipment containing African slaves to the Americas sailed across the Atlantic Ocean was in early 1500, dominated by the Europeans, (mainly the Portuguese), the Arabs and African merchants.