The Slave Trade and Africa

Wiping out Indigenous populations, or pushing them farther afield, cleared the way for European occupation. But there was a problem: Who was going to work the land? Where Indigenous labor could not be recruited or forced, Europeans turned to indentured workers and increasingly to imported enslaved African peoples. Although the chattel slave trade began in the mid-fifteenth century, only in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries did the numbers of human exports from Africa begin to soar and feed mercantilist regimes. (See Map 13.4.) By 1820, four enslaved Africans had crossed the Atlantic for every free European. (See Analyzing Global Developments: The Atlantic Trade in Enslaved African People (1501–1900).) At the same time, the departure of so many inhabitants depopulated and destabilized many parts of Africa.

Map 13.3 is titled, Caribbean Colonies, 1625 to 1763.

MAP 13.3 | Caribbean Colonies, 1625–1763

The Caribbean was a region of expanding trade in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

What were its major exports and imports?
Who were its main colonizers and trading partners?
According to your reading, how did the transformation of this region shape other societies in the Atlantic world?

Capturing and Shipping Enslaved People

Merchants in Europe and the Americas prospered as the slave trade soared, but their fortunes depended on trading and political networks in Africa. Because European slave traders feared African diseases, mainly malaria, they confined themselves to the coast, where they supplied powerful interior states with firearms with which to conquer other indigenous peoples and ship their defeated adversaries to the enslavers.

Before the Europeans’ arrival, Africa had long-standing enslaving networks, mainly flowing across the Sahara to North Africa and Egypt and eastward to the Red Sea and the Swahili coast of East Africa. From the Red Sea and Swahili coast destinations, Muslim and Hindu merchants shipped enslaved humans to ports around the Indian Ocean. However, their numbers could not match the chattel volume destined for the Americas once plantation agriculture began to spread. Indeed, 12.5 million Africans departed for forcible enslavement and shipment to Atlantic ports from the early fifteenth century until 1867, when the last voyage took place.

The enslavement ports along the African coast became gruesome entrepôts. Many captives perished before losing sight of Africa. Stuck in vast holding camps where disease and hunger were rampant, the enslaved were then forced aboard vessels in cramped and wretched conditions. These ships waited for weeks to fill their holds while their human cargoes wasted away belowdecks. Crew members tossed dead Africans overboard as they loaded on other Africans from the shore. When the cargo hold was full, the ships set sail. In their wake, crews continued to dump bodies. Most died of gastrointestinal diseases leading to dehydration. Smallpox and dysentery were also scourges. Either way, death was slow and agonizing. Because high mortality led to lost profits, enslavers learned to carry better food and more fresh water as the trade became more sophisticated. Still, when enslaver ships finally reached New World ports, they reeked of disease and excrement. (See Global Themes and Sources: Primary Source 13.1.)

Slavery’s Gender Imbalance

In moving so many from Africa to the Americas, the slave trade played havoc with the ratios of men to women in both places because most people shipped to the Americas were men. European slave traders sought “well-formed” and strong men between the ages of ten and twenty-five, even though many plantation owners came to realize that women of the same age worked as hard as men. Although the numbers indicate Europeans’ preferences for male laborers, they also reflect African enslavers’ desire to keep enslaved women, primarily for household work. The gender imbalance made it difficult for enslaved people to have children in the Americas. So enslavers had to return to Africa to procure more human beings to force into bondage—especially for the Caribbean islands, where death rates were so high.

Enslaved men outnumbered enslaved women in the New World, but in the regions of Africa where captives were seized, women outnumbered men. Female captives were especially prized in Africa because of their traditional role in the production of grains, leathers, and cotton. Indeed, the Atlantic slave trade made the role of those women who remained in Africa even more essential for ensuring the subsistence of children and the aged. Moreover, the slave trade reinforced the traditional practice of polygyny—allowing relatively scarce men to take several wives. But in some states, notably the supplier kingdom of Dahomey, on the West African coast, women managed to assert power because of their large numbers and heightened importance. In fact, Dahomean women became so deeply involved in succession disputes that their intrigues could make the difference between winning and losing political power. Ultimately, though, the fact that some women rose to power in a few societies did not diminish the destabilizing effects of the Atlantic slave trade or the chaos that the raiding and trading wrought on the relations among African states.

Africa’s New Slave-Supplying States

Africans did not passively let captives fall into the arms of European buyers; instead, local political leaders and merchants were energetic suppliers. This activity promoted the growth of centralized political systems, particularly in West African rain forest areas. The trade also shifted control of wealth away from households owning large herds or lands to those who profited from the capture and exchange of enslaved people—urban merchants and warrior elites.

Portrait of Queen Nzinga wearing a crown and looking to her right. — **Queen Nzinga.** The slave trade shifted political alliances and created new politics up and down the African coast. In what is now Angola, the Mbundu people formed a great kingdom. Under Queen Nzinga of Ndongo and Matamba, they flourished. She was adept at managing Portuguese relations and, after her brother died, rose to the throne to rule for thirty-seven years. Under her reign, her state flourished and she deftly played off the Dutch against Portuguese interlopers.

Map 13.4 is titled, The African Slave Trade, 1440-1867.

MAP 13.4 | The African Slave Trade, 1440–1867

The Atlantic slave trade flourished in the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries, linking many parts of Africa with the Americas.

What were the main areas in Africa from which people were taken and enslaved?
What were the main areas that they were taken to in the Americas?
Based on your reading, how and where did the slave trade reshape African societies?

Analyzing Global Developments

The Atlantic Trade in Enslaved African People (1501–1900)

The world’s leading slave traders were also the world’s most important maritime powers during the period from 1501 to 1900. The following tables focus on which countries transported enslaved human beings and where they ended up. The Spanish and Portuguese established the first European empires in the Americas and created the model for the early slave trade. But northern European powers like Great Britain and France, reflecting their growing strength in maritime commerce, dominated the Atlantic slave trade between 1642 and 1808. In the final phase of the Atlantic slave trade, 1808–1867, the northern European powers and the United States disengaged from the trade, allowing the Portuguese and the Spanish once again to dominate the trade now centered largely on Cuba and Brazil.

In recent decades, scholars of the Atlantic slave trade have created the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database, which can be accessed at the Slave Voyages Web site (www .slavevoyages.org). Constructed from nearly 35,000 documented voyages during this period, this database incorporates roughly 80 percent of the ventures that set out for Africa to obtain enslaved laborers from all around the Atlantic world during this era. Through painstaking research, historians have been able to reconstruct the Atlantic world slave trade and offer a clear insight into the experiences of all those involved and the impact of this trade on the global economy during four centuries.

Number of Enslaved People Taken from Africa to the Americas by Nationality of Vessels That Carried Them (1501–1867)
Vessel Nationality	Number of People
Portugal/Brazil	5,849,300
Great Britain	3,259,900
France	1,380,970
Spain/Uruguay	1,060,900
Netherlands	555,300
United States	305,800
Baltic States	110,400
Total Atlantic World	12,522,570
Disembarkation of Enslaved People from Africa to the Americas (1501–1900)
Disembarking Country/Colony	Number of People
Brazil (Portugal)	4,720,000
Smaller Caribbean islands (mix)	1,750,000
Jamaica (Spain then Great Britain)	1,000,000
Saint-Domingue (Spain then France)	792,000
Cuba (Spain)	779,000
Spanish Caribbean mainland	390,000
United States	389,000
Dutch Guiana	294,000
Amazonia	142,000
Total	10,256,000

QUESTIONS FOR ANALYSIS

Which countries were the most heavily invested in the Atlantic slave trade based on the data in the first table? How do you know?
What was the relationship between the slave-trading countries and the colonies in the New World based on the entries in both tables?
Why is the total number of enslaved people traded different from the number of people that disembarked? Did you expect the differences between these two numbers to be greater than they are? If so, why?

Source: David Eltis and David Richardson, Atlas of the Transatlantic Slave Trade (2010).

THE KONGO KINGDOM In some parts of Africa, the booming slave trade wreaked havoc as local leaders feuded over control of the traffic; mercantilist rivalry along the African coast disrupted old states and produced new ones. In the Kongo kingdom, civil wars raged for over a century after 1665, and captured warriors were sold into slavery. As members of the royal family clashed, entire provinces saw their populations vanish. Most important to the conduct of war and the control of trade were firearms and gunpowder, which made capturing warriors highly efficient. Moreover, kidnapping became so prevalent that cultivators worked their fields bearing weapons, leaving their children behind in guarded stockades.

A drawing of captured Africans marching through a field.; A schematic of a slave trade ship. — **The Slave Trade.** Left: Africans were captured in the interior and then bound and marched to the coast. Right: After reaching the coast, the captured Africans would be crammed into the holds of enslaving vessels, where they suffered grievously from overcrowding and unsanitary conditions. Long voyages were especially deadly. If the winds failed or ships had to travel longer distances than usual, many of the captive people would die en route to the slave markets across the ocean.

Some leaders of the Kongo kingdom fought back. Consider Queen Nzinga (1583–1663), a masterful diplomat and a shrewd military planner. Having converted to Christianity, she managed to keep Portuguese enslavers at bay during her long reign. Even after Portuguese forces defeated her troops in battle, she conducted effective guerrilla warfare into her sixties.

Consider also the Christian visionary Dona Beatriz Kimpa Vita. Born in Kongo in 1684 and baptized as a Christian, she claimed at age twenty to have received visions from Saint Anthony of Padua. She believed that she died every Friday and was transported to heaven to converse with God, returning to earth on Monday to broadcast God’s commands to believers. Her message aimed to end the Kongo civil wars and re-create a unified kingdom. Although she gained a large following, she failed to win the support of leading political figures. In 1706, she was captured and burned at the stake.

OYO, ASANTE, AND OTHER GROUPS As some African merchants and warlords sold other Africans, their commercial success enabled them to consolidate political power and grow wealthy. Their wealth financed additional weapons, with which they subdued neighbors and extended political control. Among the most durable new polities was the Asante state, which arose in the West African tropical rain forest in 1701 and expanded through 1750. This state benefited from its access to gold, which it used to acquire firearms (from European traders) to raid nearby communities for servile workers. From its capital city at Kumasi, the state eventually encompassed almost all of present-day Ghana. Main roads spread out from the capital like spokes of a wheel, each approximately twenty days’ travel from the center. Through the Asante trading networks, African traders bought, bartered, and sold enslaved people, who wound up in the hands of European merchants waiting in ports with vessels carrying manufactured products and weaponry.

Also active in the slave trade—and enriched by it—was the Oyo Empire. This territory, which straddled the main trade routes, linked tropical rain forests with interior markets of the northern savanna areas. The empire’s strength rested on its impressive army brandishing weapons secured from trade with Europeans. Deploying cavalry units in the savanna and infantry units in the rain forest, the Oyo’s military campaigns became annual events, suspended only so that warriors could return home for agricultural duties. Every dry season, Oyo armies marched on their neighbors to capture entire villages.

Slavery and the emergence of new political organizations enriched and empowered some Africans, but they cost Africa dearly. For the princes, warriors, and merchants who organized the slave trade, their business (like that of Indigenous fur suppliers) enabled them to obtain European goods—especially alcohol, tobacco, textiles, and guns. The Atlantic system also tilted wealth away from rural dwellers and village elders and increasingly toward port cities. Across the landmass, the slave trade thinned the population. True, Africa was spared a demographic catastrophe equal to the devastation of Indigenous peoples. The introduction of American food crops—notably maize and cassava, producing many more calories per acre than the old staples of millet and sorghum—blunted the trade’s depopulating aspects. Yet some areas suffered grievously from three centuries of heavy involvement in the slave trade. The Atlantic trade enhanced the warrior class, who carried out raids for captives; the dislocations, internal power struggles, and economic hardships that followed precipitated the rise and fall of West African kingdoms.

A birds’ eye view illustration of the port of Loango. — **The Port of Loango.** Partly as a result of the profits of the slave trade, African rulers and merchants were able to create large and prosperous port cities such as Loango (pictured here), which was on the western coast of south-central Africa.

Since the seventeenth century saw the deportation of 2 million African men, women, and children to the Americas, it is worth asking whether the Little Ice Age was a factor in the fate of these peoples. Unfortunately, information on sub-Saharan Africa is not as rich as it is for Europe and Asia. Nonetheless, what we do know, mainly from travelers’ accounts, is that many of the areas from which enslaved Africans came—like Kongo, the interior of West Africa, and Senegambia—suffered from severe drought and witnessed a spike in the number of captives sold to enslavers.