The Atlantic Slave Trade

The Atlantic slave trade (c. 1500–1870) was the largest forced migration in human history and one of its greatest crimes. Over roughly four centuries, an estimated 12.5 million Africans were forcibly transported across the Atlantic to the Americas, with perhaps 1.8 million dying during the horrific Middle Passage alone. The trade transformed four continents: depopulating regions of Africa, building the economies of the Americas, enriching Europe, and creating the African diaspora.

The trade operated through the triangular trade system. European manufactured goods (textiles, firearms, metal wares) were shipped to West Africa and exchanged for enslaved people. The enslaved were transported across the Atlantic — the Middle Passage — in conditions of almost unimaginable horror: chained in the dark below decks, with mortality rates sometimes exceeding 20%. In the Americas, enslaved people were sold and put to work on sugar, tobacco, cotton, and rice plantations. Plantation products were then shipped to Europe, completing the triangle.

The Atlantic slave trade was not merely an economic system — it was a racial ideology. The dehumanization of Africans required the construction of racist belief systems that justified treating human beings as property. These ideologies long outlived the trade itself and continue to shape racial attitudes, economic inequality, and social structures across the Americas. The trade's abolition — achieved through a combination of enslaved people's resistance, abolitionist activism, and changing economic interests — was a moral milestone, but its legacies remain deeply embedded in the modern world.