What was the Atlantic slave trade?

The Atlantic slave trade was one of the largest forced migrations in human history and one of its greatest crimes. Over roughly four centuries, an estimated 12.5 million Africans were forcibly shipped across the Atlantic to labor in the Americas. Perhaps 1.5–2 million more died during the horrific Middle Passage — the ocean crossing in which enslaved people were packed into ships under conditions of extreme brutality.

The trade operated as part of the triangular trade system. European ships carried manufactured goods — textiles, metal tools, weapons, alcohol — to West Africa, where they were exchanged for enslaved people captured through warfare, raiding, or judicial proceedings by African kingdoms and merchants. The enslaved were then transported across the Atlantic (the Middle Passage) to colonies in the Caribbean, Brazil, and North America, where they were sold to work on plantations producing sugar, tobacco, cotton, and coffee. These raw materials were shipped back to Europe, completing the triangle.

The economic impact was staggering. Sugar and slave-produced commodities generated enormous wealth that fueled European industrialization. Major European cities — Liverpool, Bristol, Nantes, Amsterdam — were built on slave trade profits. Meanwhile, the drain of millions of people devastated West and Central African societies, disrupted political systems, and fueled endemic warfare as kingdoms competed to supply captives to European traders.

The abolition movement, driven by enslaved people's resistance (notably the Haitian Revolution), Enlightenment ideals, religious conviction, and economic shifts, gradually ended the legal trade in the 19th century. Britain abolished the trade in 1807 and slavery in 1833; the United States followed with the 13th Amendment in 1865; Brazil was the last major slaveholding nation to abolish in 1888. But the legacies — racial inequality, economic disparity, cultural trauma — endure to this day.