Between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries, European traders and African intermediaries forcibly transported an estimated 12 million or more enslaved Africans across the Atlantic to labor primarily on plantations and in mines in the Americas. The trade often followed a triangular pattern in which European ships carried manufactured goods to Africa, enslaved people to the Americas, and colonial commodities like sugar, tobacco, and cotton back to Europe. Enslaved people endured brutal conditions during capture, the Middle Passage crossing, and generations of forced labor, and mortality at every stage was extremely high.
Relevance to Trade History
One of the largest forced migrations in human history, it was central to the economic development of Atlantic colonial economies and caused immense, lasting human suffering.
Read the full story in our article Atlantic Trade and the Human Cost of Enslavement.
Source: Slave Voyages Database, Emory University. See our Sources & Methodology page for how we select and verify references.