The Atlantic Slave Trade

1526–1867 CE — Global, The Atlantic world

Today: West Africa, the Americas, and Europe

Over three and a half centuries, roughly 12.5 million Africans were captured, sold, and shipped across the Atlantic to labor on the sugar, tobacco, and cotton plantations of the Americas; nearly two million died on the voyage. It was slavery on an industrial scale, justified by a racial ideology invented largely to excuse it, and it built much of the wealth of the Atlantic economies. The racial ideology that justified it was constructed alongside the trade itself — a belief system built to explain what was already profitable.

Worth knowing: Insurance records tell the story with awful clarity: enslaved people were legally classified as cargo, and a British court case in 1783 turned on whether an insurer had to pay for 132 people thrown overboard — argued not as murder, but as a claim for lost property.

Pattern: Migration pressure — Large movements of peoples — pushed or pulled — reshape the societies they leave and the ones they enter.

Entry 156 of 240 in Precedent, a walk through the whole human story in order.