Slavery - the ownership and control of one human being by another, to the point of total obedience – is one of the grimmest phenomena of history, and sadly has been present in many times and places across the globe. People from all ethnic groups have been slaves, and slave masters. But today in the West, the main historical example of slavery that comes to mind is the Atlantic trade in black slaves between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries. The abiding image is of the slave ships, carrying Africans across the Atlantic in packed and utterly inhumane conditions, on a journey that all too many did not survive. How did this trade develop? What part did Britain play in it? And what factors brought it to an end?

The Rise of the Atlantic Slave Trade
An Atlantic trade in African slaves began in 1444, when the Portuguese began to ship slaves from West Africa to Europe. For the next hundred years, the main markets for these slaves were in Europe and the Atlantic islands. However, the discovery of the Americas in 1492 led to the creation of new colonies with a great need for cheap labour, and from the mid-sixteenth century European ships were carrying African slaves to Brazil, the Caribbean, and North America, in steadily increasing quantities. At first the Portuguese were the main organisers of the trade, but by the second half of the seventeenth century the countries of north-west Europe were becoming involved. During the eighteenth century, Britain was one of the foremost slave-trading powers, alongside the French, the Dutch, the Portuguese, and the Spanish, all of whom had colonies in the New World. A “triangular trade” operated, whereby ships carried European manufactures to Africa and exchanged them for slaves, who were then taken to the Americas, where they were traded for sugar, cotton, indigo, molasses, and other goods, which were brought back to Europe. It is estimated that, between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries, over twelve million Africans were transported across the Atlantic, most of whom came from West Africa.

At each stage in the slaves’ journey from Africa to the Americas, they faced great dangers and possible death. The first stage was the capture of people on the African mainland, and their movement to the coast. This was organised by local African rulers. European traders tended not to venture within Africa at this time because of the unsolved threat from disease, and waited instead at coastal trading stations for their cargo. African rulers had been engaged in slavery for many centuries already, capturing slaves for their own use or for sale to the Middle East; but the Atlantic trade marked a profound expansion of African slave dealings.

Those slaves who survived capture and the journey to the coast would then face the perilous Atlantic crossing, which was every bit as terrible as popular memory would have it, although some attempts were made to improve conditions during the closing years of the trade. Mainly through dehydration, between ten and twenty-five per cent of the slaves would die routinely before the end of the voyage. Then, having reached the Americas, those who survived the crossing faced a life of slavery on colonial plantations. Here, at least some slaves might find a material standard of life that was better than what they had left behind in Africa; but they were still denied their freedom and dignity, and could be treated with considerable brutality by their masters. The attempts by slaves to run away, and on occasion to revolt, were a testament to their continued suffering. On top of this, many died early in the plantations because of disease, with Brazil having an especially tragic record of high mortality. The deaths of slaves in America, and the low birth-rate of slave communities, meant that a continual influx of new slaves from Africa was needed.

Britain did not create the Atlantic slave trade, but there is no denying that it was heavily involved with the trade at its height during the eighteenth century. In these years, well over one-and-a-half million slaves were carried to the British Caribbean and to British North America, out of a total of over six million captives brought to the Americas as a whole. The port of Bristol grew up and thrived on the basis of the trade, and the British public benefited from large quantities of cheap slave-produced imports.

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Content last updated: 03/03/2005

About our expert

Dr Will Hardy has taught as an Associate Lecturer for the Open University in the London region for the past nine years. Before this, he gained a double-first for his degree in History at Cambridge, and a doctorate in History at Oxford.

Will has a long-running research interest in the contemporary perception of industrial change in Britain between the 1780s and the 1840s, and has just finished writing his first book, The Origins of the Idea of the Industrial Revolution.

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