Atlantic slave trade facts for kids

A Liverpool Slave Ship by William Jackson. Merseyside Maritime Museum

The Atlantic slave trade was the selling of African people as slaves by Europeans that happened in and around the Atlantic Ocean. It lasted from the 15th century to the 19th century. Most of the enslaved people were shipped from West Africa and brought over to the New World on slave ships. This was also called the Middle Passage.

Some enslaved people were captured in battles or through raids and kidnapping. Some were sold into slavery as punishment or to pay a debt, usually by other Africans. Then they were shackled together and marched to the coast on journeys lasting weeks or months. When they arrived they were imprisoned in forts where they were purchased by Europeans. Most historians today think that between 12 million and 13 million Africans arrived in the New World.

The Dahomian army was involved and traded slaves for weapons to protect themselves. King Gezo of Dahomey said in the 1840s:

The slave trade is the ruling principle of my people. It is the source and the glory of their wealth...the mother lulls the child to sleep with notes of triumph over an enemy reduced to slavery...

Slave trade

The slave-trade is sometimes called the Maafa by African and African-American scholars. It means catastrophe in Kiswahili. Some slave ships worked a three-part economic cycle often called the triangular trade. It tied the economies of several regions and continents together. The main triangular trading countries were England, The Netherlands, France, Spain and Portugal. Other ships just worked the slave trade.

Christopher Columbus first came to the Americas in 1492 while seeking the West Indies. This led to an economic reason for the transatlantic slave trade. Enslaved people were first imported in large numbers for mining and later to grow sugarcane in plantations. Slavery is much more ancient than the transatlantic trade. Slaves were used in many ancient societies.

Beginning of the end

In the 18th century, opposition developed against the slave trade in Britain, America, and some parts of Europe. In Britain and America, opposition to the trade was led by the Religious Society of Friends (Quakers) and establishment Evangelicals such as William Wilberforce. People who protested against the trade were opposed by the owners of land in the Americas. After 1772, slaves became free upon entering the British isles.

Denmark was the first country to ban the slave trade, in 1792, which took effect in 1803. Britain banned the slave trade in 1807, imposing stiff fines for any slave found aboard a British ship (Slave Trade Act). The Royal Navy acted to stop other nations from continuing the slave trade. On 22 February 1807, the work of William Wilberforce was rewarded with victory. By an overwhelming 283 votes for to 16 against, the motion to abolish the Atlantic slave trade was carried in the House of Commons. Enslaved people continued to be sent to the Spanish colonies of Puerto Rico and Cuba until much later in the 19th century.

Related pages

• African slave trade
• Middle Passage
• Slave ship
• Slavery

Images for kids

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  Stowage of a British slave ship, Brookes (1788)

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  Reproduction of a handbill advertising a slave auction in Charleston, South Carolina, in 1769.

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  The Slave Trade by Auguste François Biard, 1840

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  Portrait of Ayuba Suleiman Diallo (Job ben Solomon), painted by William Hoare in the 18th century

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  Wedgwood anti-slavery medallion, produced in 1787 by Josiah Wedgwood

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  Slave traders in Gorée, Senegal, 18th century.

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  A slave being inspected

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  Slave trade out of Africa, 1500–1900

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  Diagram of a slave ship from the Atlantic slave trade. From an Abstract of Evidence delivered before a select committee of the House of Commons in 1790 and 1791.

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  Charles II of Spain. On November 7, 1693, Charles issued a Royal Decree, providing sanctuary in Spanish Florida for fugitive slaves from the British colony of South Carolina.

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  West Central Africa was the most common source region of Africa, and Portuguese America (Brazil) was the most common destination.

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  Slaves processing tobacco in 17th-century Virginia

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  Cowrie shells were used as money in the slave trade

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  Slaving guns (Birmingham History Galleries). In the second half of the 18th century, Europeans sold 300,000 rifles a year in Africa, maintaining the endemic state of war in which men, who were taken prisoner, were sold to supply the demand for slaves.

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  This map argues that import prohibitions and high duties on sugar were artificially inflating prices and inhibiting manufacturing in England. 1823

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  A Linen Market with enslaved Africans. West Indies, circa 1780

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  West Indian Creole woman, with her black servant, circa 1780

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  William Wilberforce (1759–1833), politician and philanthropist who was a leader of the movement to abolish the slave trade.

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  "Am I not a woman and a sister?" antislavery medallion from the late 18th century

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  Capture of slave ship El Almirante by the British Royal Navy in the 1800s. HMS Black Joke freed 466 slaves.

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  Recently bought slaves in Brazil on their way to the farms of the landowners who bought them c. 1830

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  A 19th-century lithograph showing a sugarcane plantation in Suriname

See also

In Spanish: Comercio atlántico de esclavos para niños