The transatlantic slave trade
Twelve million people are shipped across the Atlantic as property.
- When
- —
- Duration
- 300 years
- Known to
- ± 25 years
- Era
- Early Modern, Holocene
Between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries some 12.5 million Africans are forcibly embarked for the Americas and around 10.7 million survive the Middle Passage. The trade is organised around plantation crops — sugar above all, then tobacco, rice and cotton — whose labour demands were lethal enough to require constant replacement. It reshapes the demography of three continents, funds European commercial expansion, and its consequences are not historical but present.