Transatlantic slave trade

The transatlantic slave trade was the forced transport of enslaved Africans across the Atlantic Ocean to the Americas. It connected African capture and sale, European and American shipping and finance, plantation and urban labor demand, and colonial legal systems that made enslaved status inheritable. Modern reconstructions such as SlaveVoyages estimate that roughly 12.5 million Africans were embarked on Atlantic slave ships and about 10.7 million disembarked in the Americas.

The trade is unusually measurable because merchants and states kept shipping records, port books, insurance papers, customs accounts, plantation records, court documents, newspapers, and naval-capture records. Those sources make routes and destination patterns visible, but they do not fully count deaths in inland wars, raids, forced marches, holding pens, epidemics, or coastal confinement before embarkation. They also do not count every person born into slavery in the Americas or every person later moved through internal slave trades.

Destination matters to the trade's history. Brazil was the largest receiving region, with about 4.8 million direct arrivals from Africa; the Caribbean plantation complex was another major center, including Jamaica, Saint-Domingue, Cuba, Barbados, and other sugar colonies. Mainland British North America and the later United States received a much smaller direct transatlantic share, about 389,000 people, while becoming a large slave society through hereditary slavery, natural increase, cotton expansion, and internal sale. These differences show why direct Atlantic arrivals, final destination after re-export, enslaved population stock, births into slavery, and legal abolition dates are separate measurements.

The Atlantic trade was not only a maritime route. It became a durable system when repeated voyages, credit, insurance, forts, brokers, plantation demand, imperial revenue, and racial law made the forced movement of people routine. Abolitionist evidence such as the Brookes slave ship diagram tried to make shipboard crowding visible, while the databases built from surviving records show the larger geography of forced migration.

References

• SlaveVoyages: Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database.
• Library of Congress, Stowage of the British slave ship "Brookes" under the regulated slave trade act of 1788.
• Thomas Maciejewski, The History of Slavery, claim matrix and manuscript source apparatus, 2026.