Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade — Quick Reference Notes

Timeframe: part of a $400$ -year span from the late $15^{th}$ to the late $19^{th}$ centuries.
Major regions of capture: Senegambia, Sierra Leone & Windward Coast, the Gold Coast, the Bight of Benin, the Bight of Biafra, and West Central Africa (Kongo and Angola).
Historical framing: W.E.B. Du Bois described the Atlantic slave trade as "the most magnificent drama in the last thousand years of human history" in a negative sense.
Trigger warnings: topics include sexual violence and extreme violence.

Middle Passage: approximately $12.4\times 10^6$ people shipped across the Atlantic as part of a three-leg triangular trade.
Triangular trade legs: (1) Europe to Africa with cargo (texts, iron, alcohol, firearms, gunpowder), (2) Africa to the Americas with enslaved people, (3) Americas to Europe with sugar and tobacco.
Death toll on the Middle Passage: around $2\times 10^6$ enslaved people died.

Emphasis on enslaved voices, e.g., Olaudah Equiano (1789): vivid account of capture, voyage, and dehumanization.
Origins of captives: prisoners of war, criminals, and poor individuals traded by African groups; some were sold by Africans to Europeans for goods.
Important distinction: being captured by Africans for sale is not the same as hereditary, generational chattel slavery in the Americas (slavery as a permanent condition).
Orlando Patterson definition: "Slavery is the permanent, violent, and personal domination of natally alienated and generally dishonored persons."

Ship conditions: crowded, chained, and unsanitary; limited air and relief, extreme stench.
Diseases: yellow fever, malaria, smallpox, dysentery, etc.
Violence and sexual violence: torture, rape, and coercive control were common.
Forms of resistance: revolts, refusing to eat, jumping overboard, etc.
Self-preservation as resistance: attempting suicide or suicide attempts could undermine economic incentives for captors.
Speculum orum: a screw-like device used to force-feed resisting captives; could cause severe injury.
Other coercive tools: hot coals on lips, thumb-screws.
Overall: staying alive under these conditions was itself an act of resistance.

Historian Marcus Rediker identifies 1700–1808 as the most destructive window of the trade (roughly $frac{2}{3}$ of total enslaved Africans trafficked during this period).
Survival rates: for every $100$ taken from interior regions, about $64$ reached the coast; of those, ~ $48$ survived the transatlantic voyage; of the voyage survivors, only about $28\text{--}30$ would survive the first 3–4 years in the colony.

Terminology: the series uses "enslaved" rather than "slave" to center personhood and acknowledge involuntary bondage.

Royal African Company: chartered monopoly on English trade to Africa; founded in $1672$ ; peak activity $1675$ – $1725$ ; later periods described as a period of "free trade."

Policy timeline: prohibited African slave trade starting in $1787$ ; reopened in $1803$ ; federal prohibition enacted in $1808$ .
Impact: between $1803$ and $1808$ , over $3.5\times 10^4$ enslaved people were brought to South Carolina, more than any similar period elsewhere in the colony/state.
Charleston’s role: entry point for about $40\%$ of enslaved Africans brought to North America via the Middle Passage (often likened to an Ellis Island, though circumstances differed).

International end: United States ended the international slave trade in $1808$ ; Britain in $1807$ .
Ongoing illegal trafficking: despite bans, both nations continued illicit trading for years after these dates.
Domestic slave trade: continued in the U.S. after the international ban; abolition in Britain completed in $1833$ .
Slavery ends in the United States after the Civil War (completion ~ $1865$ ).
Brazil: final Western Hemisphere nation to abolish slavery in $1888$ .

The Trans-Atlantic slave trade was a centuries-long, violent system with deep global impact on Black and white life.
This history informs ongoing understandings of racism, labor systems, and global economic development.
Further episodes will continue to unpack these consequences.

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