The Americas (1492- 1620s)
Slavery was a common institution in many societies in the pre-modern world. Before Columbus’s explorations in the Americas, slavery was common in Africa. And Europeans had already begun to employ Africans as slaves in Portugal and Spain and in their Atlantic islands. Though Africans were employed in a number of pioneering American settlements, they only became economically vital after the widespread development of sugar plantations in Brazil by c. 1560. Cane sugar, originally imported from the Mediterranean and Atlantic islands, transformed the taste of the western world - what could be more British than a sweet cup of tea? Yet all this was made possible by African slave labour.

The West Indies (1620-1655)
The British followed the Brazilian pattern and turned to sugar and slaves after trying other crops and labour systems in their new Caribbean colonies, led by St.Kitts (1623) and Barbados (1625) The lead was then taken by the larger and more luxuriant island of Jamaica (1655). In Virginia and Maryland, Africans were drafted into new tobacco plantations (the slaves often being trans-shipped via the Caribbean).

In North America and the Caribbean, black slaves inevitably drifted into all corners of the local economy. They made possible rice cultivation in South Carolina, later still cotton across the U.S. South. But as early as 1700 slaves could be found throughout the settled Americas in both town and country, working on ships (including the slave ships) and in most corners of the economy. But their prime task was to produce export crops for Europe.

The Slave Trade (1500-1860)
Something like 70% of all Africans shipped across the Atlantic were destined to work in the sugar fields. The numbers involved were staggering. Of the twelve millions loaded onto the slave ships, some ten and a half million survived, landing mainly in the Caribbean and Brazil. North America received less than 10% of the total. The British however did not pioneer slavery in the Americas, but they, more than any other people, perfected it. Of the approximate 27,000 slave voyages we know of, about 12,000 were British/British colonial. Of those, 6,000 sailed from Liverpool.

Prosperity flowed to most corners of the slave economy - except of course to the slaves. The British economy benefited hugely. The slave ships bound for Africa were filled with British (and Asian) goods to be exchanged for African slaves. Dozens of British ports dispatched slave ships, though the trade was dominated by London, Bristol and Liverpool. Thousands of British people worked on those ships and in servicing them; British business and finance (dominated by London of course) prospered from the expanding Atlantic trade. Similarly, slave-grown produce returning to British ports (sugar and rum, tobacco , rice and coffee) spawned their own industries in Britain. And the plantations of the Americas were able to function because of the imports from Europe, Africa and North America.

In fact profits from the slave trade were rarely exceptional, and the commercial risks were enormous. Voyages were long, dangerous, and the human cargoes both volatile and prone to devastating diseases. Nonetheless, the fact that so many traders and others persisted in slave trading is the clearest indication of the profits they hoped to reap. What emerges in the Atlantic in the years, 1560-1860 was a complex, inter-related economic system which linked three continents. But the essential lubricant of that system was the African slave.

The eighteenth century was the pinnacle of the Atlantic slave system. Some made slave-based fortunes on a lavish scale. The Pinneys of St Kitts and Bristol, the Beckfords of Jamaica, London and Fonthill, the Lascelles/Harewoods of Barbados, Jamaica and Yorkshire are among the most prominent of slave traders, planters and merchants whose slave-based wealth enabled them to return to live a lavish life-style in Britain. Like the Indian Nabobs they grew wealthy on colonial pickings. But they were also exceptional. At the other end of the spectrum were the thousands of men on the slave ships whose lives were miserable, ill-rewarded and often short. Trading and lingering on the African coast was dangerous for Europeans, and few ships failed to lose crewmen to local diseases. Slave ships aimed to leave as soon as possible, but they had to persist, trawling up and down the coast, until they had filled their holds with Africans. The condition of the Africans below decks was wretched beyond compare. The months taken to cross the Atlantic was a communal trauma of filth, death and disease which scarred the survivors and which entered slave folk memory.