The Atlantic Slave Trade

“No African Trade, no Negroes, no Negroes, no sugar; no Sugar, no Islands, no Islands, no Continent, no Continent, no Trade; that is to say farewell to your American Trade, your West Indian Trade.” –Daniel Defoe, 1713

Introduction: Atlantic history

units of analysis

"the scene of a vast interaction rather than merely the transfer of Europeans onto American shores.  Instead of a European discovery of a new world, we might better consider it as a sudden and harsh  encounter between two old worlds that transformed both and integrated them into a single New World.  Our focus is upon the creation of new human geographies resulting from this interaction, and that means those developing not only westward upon the body of America but eastward upon the body of Europe, and inward upon and laterally along the body of Africa.  For it is certain that the geography of each was changed: radically on the American side. . . more subtly on the European side, with new movements of people, goods, capital, and information flowing through an established spatial system and slowly altering its proportions and directions;  slowly and unevenly on the African side, making connections with existing commercial systems but eventually grotesquely altering the scale and meaning of old institutions" (Meinig, Atlantic America (1986), 4, 65).

 

II. African slavery and slave trading

El Mina (est. 1482)
Asante
Oyo Empire

II. chronology and geography

A. overview

1440-1867 12,000,000 slaves survived shipment to Atlantic ports

mortality rate: 10-20%

Migration to British America

	Britons	Africans
1600-1800	1,042,100	2,333,150

[source: Armitage and Braddick, The British Atlantic World, 41]

B. Portuguese pioneers

Sao Tome > Spanish Caribbean (1526)

Cartagena (1549)

Brazil (1560)

John Hawkins (1562)

C. the British and the sugar revolution

Portuguese retook Brazil in 1654

Dutch

Barbados

Company of Royal Adventurers into Africa (1663)

Royal African Company (1672-1698)

1670s

1562-1807 3.4 million slaves

regional sources of slaves [note especially the Bight of Biafra]

 

[source: Oxford History of the British Empire]

 

D. empires of liberty

six imperial systems: English, French, Portuguese, Spanish, Dutch, Danish

Saint Domingue

Cuba

West Central Africa (1751-1850)

busiest slaving ports:

Luanda (West Central Africa)

Whydah (Slave Coast)

Bonny (Bight of Biafra)

E. the nineteenth century

shift to free trade

Brazil and Cuba

1830-1850 1.3 million slaves shipped

III. captivity and the middle passage [Amistad clip]

Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database