Everything You Need To Know About The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade: What Really Happened?

The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade

I’m sure we’re all familiar with the major features of the Trans-Atlantic slave trade: European merchant vessels exchanged manufactured and processed goods for human cargo along the western coasts of Africa. These persons were then sold as laborers to large-scale agricultural producers in South America, Southeastern North America, and the Caribbean in exchange for cash crops, which could then be resold in New England in exchange for the manufactured and processed goods needed to purchase yet more slaves. This is an oversimplified version of a classic ‘triangle trade’, but provides a good general overview of the concept, widely accepted by academics and historians.

These established facts clash somewhat with the common contemporary image of bands of European merchant adventurers rampaging through African communities and kidnapping people to sell as slaves. If European merchants could simply steal their victims from their homes, why did they need commercial goods in order to obtain them? And if they simply purchased the slaves they needed from other European middlemen who conducted these abductions, why would they need to transport finished products across the Atlantic Ocean to do so? After all, the sophisticated and integrated commercial markets of Europe, North Africa, and the Levant were much closer, much easier to access for the middlemen themselves.

There is a second, less salubrious image which describes the western slave trade, one in which wealthy and powerful West African nations sold their own people into slavery, or attacked and raided their neighbors to take captives for this lucrative export market. Indeed, records from that period provide some support for this view, indicating that indigenous coastal towns and cities of West Africa grew larger and wealthier beginning in the late 16th century, while their satellite regions to the interior were steadily depopulated until formal slave markets were dismantled by European and American governments during the 19th century.

Which of these images is correct? Well, neither – and both. As in all things, the truth of what happened, and how, and why, is quite complicated, and requires the student to set aside preconceptions and try to see things they way the people we are studying might have seen them at the time.

Let’s take a step back and lay some groundwork. There are some important questions we need to ask before we can start sorting out who did what and for what reason. To start with:

• What is slavery?

• Why did Europeans need slave laborers?

• How did it all work?

Okay, let's get started:

What is a slave?

When we use a word like ‘slave’ or ‘slavery’, most of us conjure images of people in chains who are forced to perform agrarian labor under the eye of brutal whip-wielding overseers, all on behalf of plantation owner sipping lemonade on the porch of the Big House. This image of slavery is accurate to a very specific kind of slavery which developed after the Trans-Atlantic slave trade was established, and largely in response to the style of business which it promoted.

A good working definition for ‘slave’ is ‘a unit of labor which can be provided at little or no cost’. This description may seem cold or unfeeling, or to ignore cultural context, but it is important to frame this discussion in economic terms, since the primary motivations for the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade were economic in nature.

During the post-classical era (~500AD - ~1500 AD), which spans roughly from the fall of the Roman Empire to the beginning of the Colonial Era, the rights and responsibilities of a slave varied widely by region and culture.

In Northern Europe, most cultures practiced a form of slavery called thralldom, in which the slave (‘thrall’) was more along the order of what we would call a family retainer. Thralls could and often were treated brutally, but there were strict legal limits as to when and how a thrall could be so treated. A free individual could become a thrall by falling into debt, being captured by enemy warriors, or by disgracing themselves before the community. A free man could even sell himself or his family into slavery to raise money for some project or venture. It was not a permanent condition, but one in which the thrall could be freed or manumitted for loyal service or heroic deeds. Keep this in mind; many of the people which would later acquire African slaves in great numbers come from these cultures (Scandinavians, Celtics, Anglo-Saxons).

In Western and Sub-Saharan Africa, a very similar system was in place. Individuals could be captured on raids and reduced to slavery, something like prisoner-of-war status. These slaves were then bound to service until their labor had repaid the military costs of having been conquered, at which point the slave was considered a full member of his new village or society, although typically not free to return to his native home. It is also very important to remember that most of the African societies referenced herein were operating under some form of Muslim tradition, either through their rulers or because a large part of their populations were Muslim – and Islamic law did (and still does) prohibit the holding of Muslim slaves except for very specific offenses against God or the state, notably meaning blasphemers and prisoners-of-war held until reparations are paid.

If you’ve been paying attention, you might have noticed that slavery, when looked at in this sense, was largely a form of social stratification designed to enforce the repayment of a debt; in other words, it was an economic arrangement to service a moral obligation. Nearly all of the slaves transported to the Americas came from such a system, as did nearly all of those who wished to purchase slaves.

Americans are most familiar with slavery in the Mediterranean sense. Think of the bondage of the Hebrews under the Pharaohs of Egypt and you’ve got the right idea. This is dominion, chattel slavery in the sense in which modern historians tend to use the term: absolute dominion over another, justified by force majeure. This form of slavery was in vogue for millennia, from the Pillars of Hercules to the Bosphorus. Most of the slave merchants who would come to serve as middlemen in the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade came from these societies (Iberians, Italians, Berbers).

It is important to note that Mediterranean systems of slavery were not in any way based upon ethnicity, religion, or nationality, despite the fact that entire cultural groups were regularly placed into servitude. This region of the world had more interconnections than any other at the time, and a constant cycle of conquest, cultural/philosophical movements, and underclass uprisings led to a regular reshuffling of social orders in which individuals or societies were placed into slavery by those with access to superior military force. These societies typically prohibited the taking of slaves from among their own, and so felt justified in considering the status of slave as a permanent condition which could be alleviated only by the intervention of a force greater that that which set the conditions of bondage in the first place.

This could be as simple as escaping and returning to your own people, perhaps with the assistance of a raiding party, or as sophisticated as having your family buy you back from your captors. Once you managed to extricate yourself from slavery, you were once again co-equal with your former captors.

Conversely, Northern European and West African societies typically maintained social stratification after slave status was lifted, and this status was often heavily associated with a specific ethnic or cultural group. This led to the development of permanent underclasses composed of those who had once been or were descended from slaves. For instance, in England, the Welsh, Scots, and Picts were frequently taken as slaves and became a permanent underclass, and when the Northmen (Saxons, Jutes, Norse) invaded England, the English themselves became an underclass, and the Northmen in turn became an underclass following the Norman Invasion. In time, these classes’ reduced social status was codified into law through the establishment of clientelist political structures. You may be familiar with some of these system (The Sarauta system of the Hausa, the Feudal system of the Franks, the Emirates of early-modern Islamic nations). While the ethnic group at the head of these systems frequently changed, the systems themselves endured for centuries.

Take note of the broad trends in play here. The societies which would come to hold African slaves in North America were largely thralldom societies with strict social stratification, but also with robust mechanisms which allowed those in bondage to be released as full members of society. The societies from which the Africans who became slaves in the Americas originated were usually thralldom societies as well (although they did not use that Scandinavian terminology) and the specifics of the social contract varied widely among the diverse peoples of Sub-Saharan Africa. The societies which would come to acquire and transport African slaves to the Americas were largely from dominion societies in which a slave remains a slave until death, escape, or an act of magnanimity by the slaveholder.

So: What is a slave? What is slavery? Well, it’s something different to each culture. Miscommunications about what exactly was meant by ‘slave’ played a large role in the way the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade was to develop. Which brings us neatly to our second question: Why did Europeans need so much slave labor in the first place?

Labor Shortages:

Okay, we’ve established that slavery was a widely-practiced social condition, and that there were different rules in different places, among different cultures, and at different points in time. So what? What we know is that millions upon millions of Africans ended up in North and South America in a state of perpetual slavery. The next question to ask is, “Why did Europeans need so much slave labor? Surely there was sufficient supply among their own people, as had been for thousands of years. Why did they need to (quite literally) depopulate Western Africa?”

You’re going to get tired of hearing me say this, but let’s take a step back.

At the opening of the Colonial Era, European nations were beginning a systematic exploration of the rest of the world and establishing formal and informal relationships with the cultures they encountered. However, the common notion that Europeans sought to dominate everywhere they landed, and did so through violence and intimidation, is something of an exaggeration.

We should start by noting the concept of exploration. Organized efforts to actively seek out other places and other peoples is an almost uniquely European phenomenon, and had very little do do with the commonly discussed catalysts, religion and technological advancement. In fact, nearly all of the religions practiced in Europe at the time had roots in Western Asia, and nearly all of their technological development were obtained from studying North African and East Asian antiques. The famous navigational technology of the great explorers – Columbus, Vespucci, de Gama, Cortez, and their kind – was several centuries behind the naval and navigation methods being used by their contemporaries in Africa and Asia. As a consequence, when investor-sponsored European adventurers began venturing into Asia and Africa, they were seen as backwards, dirty, primitive savages on tiny little ships, and their presence was not seen as worthy of any military response.

Well, the Europeans noticed the disdain with which they were being received, and the strength of the established kingdoms and empires they were ‘discovering’. How could they conquer such places as Mughal India or Ming China, Songhai or Luba or the Great Fulo with a handful of leaky ships and ragged bands of traders and mercenaries? Well, they didn’t. Truth be told, Europeans were less interested in territorial expansion at the time than in acquiring an economic advantage over rival nations back in Europe. Their goal was to leverage trade to gain material wealth, and to use that wealth to finance military campaigns in service to their internal dynastic squabbles.

Once again we see a difference in how this plays out based on broad geocultural classifications. Mediterranean Europe adopted a strategy of mercantilist extraterritoriality – literally building forts on seemingly unclaimed pieces of land (usually small islands), claiming that that land now belongs to whichever monarch or nation from which the adventurers came, and establishing commercial arrangements with agricultural and industrial producers and local governments in the area. In this way, Mediterranean traders came to be widely accepted across both Africa and Asia as middlemen, conducting trade between different parts of the region. Northern Europe tended to establish relations directly with the ruling empires, and conducting long distance trading between Asia/Africa and European markets. They often ended up competing with one another, so that largely independent Dutch and English traders were frequently conducting military operations against one another in the Indian Ocean and off the Atlantic coast of Africa. Naturally, this engendered mistrust for Northern Europeans among Eastern Empires, who came to prefer to do business with Mediterraneans. Spanish and Portuguese merchants, in particular, became trusted trading partners in Asia and Africa, become a part of the fabric of commercial life.

This one subject alone is one that could be discussed for hours. For simplicity’s sake, we’re going to have to content ourselves with establishing that the Spanish and Portuguese were integral parts of everyday commercial life in West Africa, and (initially) limited their territorial acquisitions to coastal forts which acted as trade missions, and that these forts were armed not to subdue the native populace, but to protect themselves against other Europeans.

But what caused them to begin purchasing labor? Well, at the onset of the Colonial Era, the American continent was opened to Europeans, and here they found a very different environment than in Africa or Asia. In the Americas, the great old empires had largely collapsed prior to the arrival of organized European expeditions. There are several reasons for this. The earliest Europeans to reach the Americas some centuries previously had brought with them diseases which were even then ravaging Europe and Asia. By the time Columbus landed in Hispaniola, most of North America had been depopulated by disease. In South America, the largest empires were in the final throes of disintegration, as warfare and associated losses of agricultural productivity decimated the population. To make matters worse, the first wavefront of disease from North America was just beginning to affect what few population centers remained. Scholars estimate that 90% of Native Americans had already died by the time Europe began exploring America in earnest.

Presented with a post-apocalyptic landscape largely denuded of its population but possessed of immense wealth in natural resources – timber, precious minerals, arable farmland – Europeans naturally set about trying to developing those resources to finance interests back in Europe, each according to their accustomed patterns of behavior. Northern Europeans focused upon bringing North American lands into cultivation: agriculture, fishing and forestry occupations, broadly similar to their pattern of developing their own high-latitude countries. Mediterraneans set about seeking mineral wealth and rangeland. Gold and silver were found in great abundance in South America, and the climate proved ideal for raising herd-beasts.

Perhaps you can already see the problem already. With the new worlds being cultivated in precisely the same manner as the old, there was very little incentive for average Europeans to uproot, cross the Atlantic Ocean, and start a new life. So who was going do all the actual labor of developing these potential resources? Well, at first the Europeans tried hiring Native Americans as laborers, but quickly found that local economies did not mesh well with precious metal currency-based mercantilist operations. They had very little the natives wanted and could not pay them for services. Subsequent attempts to force natives into servitude also failed. There was so much land available and so few people occupying it that when faced with harsh treatment, the semi-nomadic cultural remnants would simply move elsewhere.

This brings us to the trade in African slaves. With no effective means of forcing enough native workers into their mines and fields, and the vast expense of importing European labor across an ocean, Europeans turned to those who would trade laborers for precious metals or finished goods: the sophisticated kingdoms of Sub-Saharan Africa.

The Slave Trade:

Now that we’ve established why Europeans turned to slavery for labor and what exactly was meant by ‘slave’, we come to the fundamental question before us: where did it all go wrong? Well, like most social catastrophes, it happened both very slowly and very rapidly.

We’ve already established that the different societies involved in the slave trade had very different ideas of what slavery was and how it should function. This is a good time to point out that these societies understood very well the different perspectives in play. Pre-Columbian European, African, and Western Asian slave markets had for centuries coexisted peacefully by adhering to pre-negotiated contracts stipulating the terms of a specific slave’s bondage – and, by and large, these contracts were honored. However, with the vast labor shortages created by the opening of the Americas, West African kingdoms were no longer negotiating directly with the eventual owners of their slaves, but with Spanish and Portuguese middlemen who were speculating on the value of these slaves, increased their profit margins by increasing volume, and thus had a driving material interest to encourage as much traffic as possible. This manifested itself in one of two ways:

1) American territories under the governance of Mediterraneans had a voracious appetite for African slaves. The sugar plantations of the Caribbean and South America ended up absorbing more than 70% of all human cargo from Africa. However, these societies also had long traditions of multiculturalism, a tradition which survived the passage to the New World. Spanish and Portuguese settlements tended to have much more social integration than their counterparts to the north, and surprisingly little social stratification based upon skin color alone; a significant number of slaveowners in South America were Creole or Mestizo.

When slaveowners placed an order for more laborers, they were doing so under treaties negotiated by the Iberian monarchs with various heads of state in Sub-Saharan Africa. Because both the middlemen and the purchaser were covered under these agreements, all parties were well aware that the laborers were supposed to be released from bondage after a certain period. In all fairness, large numbers were released after their terms of service were fulfilled, at least until slaveowners discovered this to be uneconomical. However, because of the immense labor shortages mentioned earlier, landowners in South America put a great deal of pressure on middlemen to bring slaves with long terms to serve or high values to be repaid. There was also virtually no oversight regarding contract enforcement, and no realistic way for African governments to become aware if terms were violated or ignored – which they of course eventually were. Furthermore, there were no secular laws, enforced or otherwise, governing the treatment of Indigenous Americans; when African slaves escaped or were released, they frequently went to live with the local natives. When Europeans raided indigenous villages for slave labor, many of these same people (and their descendants) were simply re-enslaved, this time without even the thin protection of an unenforced contract.

All this added up to the development of a large, ethnically ambiguous, and permanent social underclass composed of dark-skinned people, where the line between serf, slave, and simply a poor person was fluid and ill-defined. As these conditions cemented themselves, the type of colorism seen in South America today developed unrestrained.

2) North America was a different story. Less than 30% of all Africans shipped to the Americas ended up in North America, with 20% ending up in the Caribbean and 10% in what would become the United States. North America at the time was being populated by immigrants from Great Britain, the Low Countries, and Scandinavia. In direct contrast to what was happening in Iberian colonies and the Caribbean, North America initially had very little need for slave labor. The people settling there were economic and social refugees, and sought to establish patterns of life identical to those they could have led in Northern Europe, where chattel slavery was uncommon and unnecessary. As the commercial and diplomatic opportunities arising from undercutting Continental cash-crop firms became apparent, the American South began establishing large-scale plantations specializing in tobacco, cotton, and sugar.

You will recall that the cultures which settled the United States largely held thralldom traditions – as evidenced by their trafficking in White indentured servants – and that these traditions provided ample opportunity to conclude the terms of bondage and fully join society. You will also recall that while these measures were strictly enforced, so too was the social stratification. A former servant or slave, and all their descendants, would never be socially equal to a line of free men, even though they could be made legally so. These attitudes persisted even in the slave-holding South, where despite the occasional miscegenation, a mixing of racial and social classes did not occur on anything near the levels which were seen in South America. Incidental admixtures of European, African, and Native American genetics were comparatively uncommon, intentionally so even rarer, and consensual encounters almost non-existent. When the large-scale importation of African labor into the American South began in earnest, these social barriers made the dehumanization of Africans much easier, and thus their extreme mistreatment.

Also relevant are the different cultural contexts of suppliers, middlemen, and purchasers. African labor suppliers assumed that the same contractual conditions under which Spain and Portugal nominally operated would hold, since the same middlemen were conducting the exchange. Northern Europe had no such treaties with African governments, and their colonial subject were expressly forbidden to trade with Iberia. Spanish and Portuguese middlemen saw no reason to inform an English or American slaveowner of a contract which could never be enforced because the whole exchange was illegal. Thus North American settlers had no way of knowing that their purchases were labor contracts rather than chattel slavery, and African governments had no way of knowing that their people were being sold into perpetual servitude. (When that knowledge eventually spread, it led to a general refusal to continue the arrangement and the subsequent subjugation of many of these nations by Europeans, who then proceeded to begin abducting Africans themselves and selling them to the Americas. This period is from whence our legends of marauding bands of White people raiding villages in Africa come.)

I hope you notice the irony in that societies which habitually treated their servant classes moderately well culminated in the worst abuses of slavery imaginable (the English, Dutch, and French), while societies with long histories of brutal chattel slavery (Spain, Portugal) initially treated their enslaved populations comparatively well, though by no means gently. Unfortunately, when the economic benefits of a completely subjugated labor force became apparent, they, too, became casually brutal.

Putting It All Together:

So what happened to slavery? How did a globally common institution bounded by legal codes, societal norms, and enforcing institutions get so wildly out of control in the Americas? Three simple motivators: Miscommunications between cultures about the nature of the exchange, difficulties enforcing any agreements across the vastness of oceans, and the corrupting influence of extreme avarice.

I hope this information doesn’t come across as apologist on behalf of European slavers. ‘Slave’ is an emotionally-charged term for most Black people because of the brutality with which African slaves were treated, and no knowledge could make such treatment acceptable. This is also not an indictment of African slavers, who thought they were entering into quite a different socioeconomic arrangement. To their credit, most such African governments attempted to withdraw when the cost was realized, though this withdrawal ended up destroying many of their nations.

The intent of this article is twofold:

1) To challenge your base assumptions about the nature of slavery and the many ways in which it can go wrong if unethically applied, and

2) To generate some consideration about modern incarnations of this same phenomenon.

After all, any contemporary American who has worked in unhealthy conditions for subsistence wages can tell you: The most effective hold one can have on a slave is to convince him he’s already free.