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The transatlantic slave trade involved the capture and transportation of millions of Africans across the Atlantic for a period of approximately four hundred years. European and New World merchants, traders, and ship captains were behind much of the organization of this huge forced migration. They also captured and loaded Africans onto slave ships themselves via raids, warfare, or trade. However, the traffic would not have evolved as it did had they failed to rely on a series of mechanisms of enslavement indigenous to Africa. Some of these mechanisms included judicial proceedings, debts, pawning, trickery, kidnapping, and, of course, warfare. Each of them had an impact on Africa and her children, both those who stayed behind and those scattered across the Atlantic. Nevertheless, these mechanisms helped sustain the traffic as a long-lasting and complex historical event.
British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) News
Africa and the Transatlantic Slave TradeThe Journal of Caribbean history
Why an Atlantic Slave Trade2008 •
IntroductionThe Atlantic trade in enslaved Africans remains a sensitive subject for several reasons, including issues of race, morality, ethics, identity, underdevelopment and reparations. Europeans defended the trade mainly for its role in providing renewable plantation labour and stimulating economic growth, best manifested in the phenomenal expansion of the mercantile marine. By the eighteenth century, the trade had become the "most advantageous and most abundant source of wealth" to participating European nations;1 its defenders also purported that the trade was indispensable as a nursery for seamen in imperial navies. These considerations do not explain the origins of the trade, but they do help to account for its longevity and resilience against the forces of abolition.The Atlantic trade in enslaved Africans was not always a Middle-Passage affair. What became the transatlantic trade was a later expression of a slowly evolving commercial and colonizing enterprise with...
2015 •
"Recent Trends in the Study of the Atlantic Slave Trade," Indian Historical Review (New Delhi), vol.XV, no. 1-2 (July 1988 & January 1989), pp.1-15
Recent Trends in the Study of the Atlantic Slave Trade2015 •
The Atlantic slave trade imprisoned the development of the African countries on the basis of supporting the West. I argue that the Atlantic slave trade, enforced by European traders, was responsible for the exploitation of African countries by means of causing social cataclysms, political illegitimacies and instabilities and economic despair. In the following reading, I will demonstrate how the Atlantic slave trade has caused the Africans social and economic despair by means of looking at demographic figures, gendered relations and other political and economic factors.
The most notorious triangular trade in recorded human history was the 18th century trade between West Africa, the West Indies, and Europe. The slave ships were specially structured as to minimize the possibility of damage to the mechanization of human bodies. The captured men and women were stacked between the decks with little air and less ventilation. In darkness with no sanitation facilities, almost naked and perfectly chained about the ankle they lay there in those narrow holds for at least fifteen to sixteen hours a day. They were allowed a space hardly larger than a grave, five feet six inches long, sixteen inches broad and two or three feet high, not high enough to set up in. “ They had not so much room as man in his coffin, either in length or breath. It was impossible for them to turn or shift with any degree of ease.” (Bennett, Before Mayflower: A History of the Negro in America. 1966) The unfortunate slaves suffered misery and suffocation in these narrow deep holds of these ships. They often stank very nauseatingly. The historical accounts reveal that if one was down fifteen or twenty miles away one could smell the ships even before they were sighted. The sheer stink and suffocation made the enslaved ones go berserk. Introduction Triangular trade is a historical term The most notorious triangular trade in recorded human history was the 18th century trade between West Africa, the West Indies, and Europe. The slave ships were specially structured as to minimize the possibility of damage to the mechanization of human bodies. The captured men and women were stacked between the decks with little air and less ventilation. In darkness with no sanitation facilities, almost naked and perfectly chained about the ankle they lay there in those narrow holds for at least fifteen to sixteen hours a day. They were allowed a space hardly larger than a grave, five feet six inches long, sixteen inches broad and two or three feet high, not high enough to set up in. “ They had not so much room as man in his coffin, either in length or breath. It was impossible for them to turn or shift with any degree of ease.” (Bennett, Before Mayflower: A History of the Negro in America. 1966) The unfortunate slaves suffered misery and suffocation in these narrow deep holds of these ships. They often stank very nauseatingly. The historical accounts reveal that if one was down fifteen or twenty miles away one could smell the ships even before they were sighted. The sheer stink and suffocation made the enslaved ones go berserk. Introduction Triangular trade is a historical term
“The Atlantic Slave Trade to 1650,” in Stuart B. Schwartz, ed., Tropical Babylons: Sugar and the Making of the Atlantic World, 1450-1680. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004, pp. 201-236.
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2006 •
IZA Journal of Migration
The legacies of slavery in and out of Africa2016 •
Journal of World-Systems Research
Routes of Atlantic Slave Voyages: Revised Framework and New Insightsin I. Ness (ed.), The Encyclopedia of Global Human Migration
East Africa: slave migrations2013 •
“The Structure of the Atlantic Slave Trade in the 19th century: An Assessment,” Revue Française d’Histoire d’Outre-mer, no. 336-337 (2éme semestre 2002), pp. 63-77.
The Atlantic Slave Trade in the 19th CenturySSRN Electronic Journal
The Role of the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade in Contemporary Anti-Trafficking Discourse2010 •
"African Women in the Atlantic Slave Trade," in Claire Robinson and Martin A. Klein, eds., Women and Slavery in Africa (Madison: Univ.of Wisconsin Press, 1983), pp. 29-38.
African Women in the Atlantic Slave TradeAfrican Diaspora Archaeology Newsletter
Extending the Frontiers: Essays on the New Transatlantic Slave Trade Database2008 •
2007 •
Lancaster University
HIST241: The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade, 1500-18652018 •
Journal of Interdisciplinary History
Extending the Frontiers of Transatlantic Slavery, Partially2009 •