The Atlantic Slave Trade

Slavery existed in Africa before Europeans arrived. It existed in Europe, Asia, the Middle East, and the Americas. Stating this fact is necessary. Misusing it is common. Nothing in the prior history of human bondage prepared the world for what began in the fifteenth century.

In West and Central African societies, enslaved people were typically war captives or debtors. Their status was often temporary. Their children were frequently born free. They could marry, own property, rise in social standing. In the Songhai Empire, enslaved administrators held positions of genuine power. In Akan societies, an enslaved person's grandchildren might be fully integrated into the lineage. This was not freedom. It was not kind. But it operated within a social fabric that recognized the enslaved as persons embedded in human relationships.

What Europeans built across the Atlantic was something categorically different.