The Trans-Atlantic
Slave Trade
Barbara Anderson
African Studies Center, UNC-Chapel Hill
November 2008
b_anderson@unc.edu
www.global.unc.edu/africa
Origins of the trans-Atlantic Slave
Trade
 Begin with the Age of
Exploration—the Portuguese, not
Columbus!
 African and Middle Eastern
science and technology were
central
 Portuguese explore west coast of
Africa, looking for Asia
Long-distance trading throughout this area, including slaves
European Invasion and Occupation
of the Americas
 1441 Portuguese in West
Africa
 1492 Columbus
 1498 Vasco de Gama
 1500 Cabral to Brazil
 1517 Spain gives Portugal 1st
Asiento
 1542 only African slaves in
Spanish colonies
SUGAR AND GOLD
MINING AND MONOCULTURE CASH CROPS
http://www.mariner.org/exploration/mm_images/F2131E26_vol2_p248_MoulinASucre_large.jpg
Slave exports from Africa
1450-1600
1601-1700
1701-1800
1801-1900
Total
376,000
1,868,000
6,133,000
3,330,000
11,698,000
3.1%
16.0
52.4**
28.5
**This is also the century that most Americans can trace their
African ancestors to.
Destination of Slaves
Europe
U.S. (Mainland North Am.)
Caribbean
Brazil
Spanish Am.
2%
5%
42%
38%
13%
Why did Africans sell
slaves to Europeans?
Were they “selling their
own people?”
Africans did NOT “sell their own”:
 Slavery in most of Africa
 (and rest of the world!)
 Long-distance trading
 No racial or national identity
 Local and/or lineage loyalty
 Prisoners of War or other outsiders
 African resistance occurred, but infrequent
How do we depict
the trade?
What do we need the trade to
be?
http://www.nps.gov/history/ethnography/aah/aaheritage/histContextsA.htm
http://hitchcock.itc.virginia.edu/SlaveTrade/collection/lar
http://exploringafrica.matrix.msu.edu/images/slave_routes.jpg
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/low/england/1718422.stm
Places in the slave trade
 Liverpool
 Senegambia
 Dahomey
 Kongo
 Rio de Janeiro
 Jamaica
 Cuba
 Charleston
 Boston
Goree Warehouses, Liverpool
Where the ships were headed
Goree Island, Senegal
Omar Ibn Sayyid, 1770-1864
Charleston, South Carolina 1807
Venture Smith, 1729-1805
 Born in West Africa
 Enslaved at age 6
 Marched to the coast
 Sold to Rhode Island ship
 Lived in colonial New
England
 Purchased self and family
Africans in America DVD
Chicago and the slave trade???
 Many Black Chicagoans whose families moved here in
the late 19th or early 20th century came from Mississippi
 These Americans may have had ancestors who
experienced the INTERNAL SLAVE TRADE, 18201860, having been marched or shipped from the Upper
South
 AND/OR they may have been brought directly in to
the Lower Mississippi by the French during the
colonial period, probably from Senegambia.
Resources for teaching:
 Africans in America 4-part video/DVD and web
site http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/aia/
 http://docsouth.unc.edu/neh/ for narratives of
Africans
 http://hitchcock.itc.virginia.edu/Slavery/index.ph
p for images of slave trade (also AIA above)
 http://exploringafrica.matrix.msu.edu/teachers/c
urriculum/m7b/activity1.php lesson plans and
overview of slave trade
Book Resources for Teachers
 Lindsay, Lisa (2008)
 Diouf, Sylvaine A. (1998)
Captives as Commodities:
The Transatlantic Slave
Trade
 Thomas, Hugh (1997) The 
slave trade : the story of
the Atlantic slave trade,
1440-1870

 Klein, Herbert (1999) The
Atlantic Slave Trade
Servants of Allah: African
Muslims Enslaved in the
Americas
Wright, Donald (2000)
African Americans in the
Colonial Era, 2nd Ed.
Hine et al. (2006) The
African American Odyssey
(Textbook)