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Atlantic slave trade

A trade in Africa which started in ancient times. Slaves were sent across the Sahara and were traded in the Mediterranean by Phoenicians; Graeco-Roman traders in the Red Sea and beyond traded slaves from E Africa to Egypt and the Middle East. These trades continued in mediaeval times, but the scale of the trade built up with the arrival of the Portuguese in Africa and the development of the labour-intensive plantation system in the W African islands of São Tomé and Principe, Brazil, the Caribbean, the southern American colonies, and later the Indian Ocean islands and South and East Africa. The Portuguese dominated the trade in the 16th Century , the Dutch in the early 17th Century , while the late 17th Century was a period of intense competition with the French, British, Danes, and Swedes joining the early practitioners. The trade reached its peak in the second half of the 18th Century , and from this period the E African slave trade became more significant, particularly during the period of Omani power up to the 1860s. The British abolished the slave trade in 1807, and the institution of slavery in 1833. They then instituted Royal Naval anti-slaver squadrons on the coasts of W and E Africa. There have been various estimates of the number of slaves removed from Africa, the most reliable figure being c.12·5 million between 1650 and 1850. Many other people must have lost their lives in the wars stimulated by the trade, and the total drain meant that at the very least the African population remained static for over two centuries.

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REFERENCES

  • Anstey, Roger, The Atlantic Slave Trade and British Abolition, 1760-1810, London: Macmillan, and Atlantic Highlands, New Jersey: Humanities Press, 1975.
  • Craton, Michael, Sinews of Empire: A Short History of British Slavery, New York: Anchor Press, and London: Temple Smith, 1974.
  • Curtin, Philip, The Atlantic Slave Trade: A Census, Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1969.
  • Davis, David Brion, The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution, 1770-1823, Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 1975; Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1999.
  • Drescher, Seymour, Capitalism and Antislavery: British Mobilization in Comparative Perspective, London: Macmillan, 1986; New York: Oxford University Press, 1987.
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From Credo

  • Dunn, Richard S., Sugar and Slaves: The Rise of the Planter Class in the English West Indies, 1624-1713, Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1972; London: Jonathan Cape, 1973.
  • Goveia, Elsa V., Slave Society in the British Leeward Islands at the End of the Eighteenth Century, New Haven, Connecticut: Yale University Press, 1965.
  • Howell, Raymond, The Royal Navy and the Slave Trade, London: Croom Helm, 1987.
  • Inkori, Joseph E. and Stanley L. Engerman (editors), The Atlantic Slave Trade: Effects on Economies, Societies, and Peoples in Africa, the Americas, and Europe, Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press, 1992.
  • Lloyd, Christopher, The Navy and the Slave Trade: The Suppression of the African Slave Trade in the Nineteenth Century, London and New York: Longmans Green, 1949.
  • Patterson, Orlando, The Sociology of Slavery: An Analysis of the Origins, Development, and Structure of Negro Slave Society in Jamaica, London: MacGibbon and Kee, 1967; Rutherford, New Jersey: Farleigh Dickinson University Press, 1969.
  • Thomas, Hugh, The Slave Trade: The Story of the Atlantic Slave Trade, 1440-1870, New York: Simon and Schuster, and London: Picador, 1997.
  • Williams, Eric, Capitalism and Slavery, Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1944; with new introduction by Brogan, D W., London: André Deutsch, 1964.