1.9 The Slave Trade

Portuguese ships began taking enslaved Africans from the West African coast in the 1440s. The Portuguese then set up sugar plantations, large farms growing one cash crop with forced labor, on Atlantic islands like Madeira and São Tomé. This plantation model moved to Brazil in the 1500s and then to the Caribbean.

Sugar was extremely profitable in Europe and extremely labor-intensive to grow and process. As disease and forced labor destroyed Indigenous populations (see 1.8), and European indentured workers proved too few, planters turned to enslaved Africans.

Historians often describe a triangular trade: ships carried European manufactured goods like cloth, metal goods and guns to West Africa; exchanged them for enslaved people; carried those captives across the Atlantic; and brought sugar, tobacco and other plantation products back to Europe. Real routes were often messier, but the triangle captures the three-continent link.

Europeans mostly stayed in forts on the coast, where disease and African military power kept them out of the interior. African rulers and merchants sold people captured in wars or raids in exchange for European goods. The Spanish crown sold an asiento, a license to supply enslaved Africans to its colonies, to foreign merchants.

The Middle Passage was the voyage across the Atlantic, the middle leg of the triangle. Captives were chained below deck in crowded, filthy conditions for weeks. On average more than one in ten died during the crossing, and death rates were higher on many voyages.

Chattel slavery meant enslaved people were treated as property that could be bought and sold, and the status passed from mother to child. Over time, Europeans increasingly justified it with ideas of racial difference.

Scholars estimate that about 12.5 million Africans were forced onto ships from 1501 to 1866, and about 10.7 million survived the voyage. Brazil received the largest share, and most of the trade took place after 1650, with the 1700s as its peak.

• Americas: plantation economies built on enslaved labor, planter societies in which a small group of wealthy white landowners ruled an enslaved majority, and large African-descended populations with their own cultures and resistance, including revolts and runaway communities.
• Africa: the loss of millions of mostly young people, more warfare and raiding, and some coastal states growing powerful from the trade.
• Europe: profits for merchants, planters and ports; cheap sugar and tobacco that helped create a consumer culture (see 3.4).