Answer to Question #237585 in History for Mojalefa

Question

The Atlantic Slave Trade

Answer 1

From the 16th through the 19th centuries, the Atlantic slave trade or transatlantic slave trade took place across the Atlantic ocean. The great majority of slaves brought to the New World were Africans from the continent's central and western regions. Africans were sold to European slave traffickers, who subsequently transported them to North and South American colonies. Before the late eighteenth century, Africans who arrived through the slave trade was the most numerous Old-World immigrants in North and South America.

The South Atlantic economic system produced products and clothes for sale in Europe while also expanding the number of African slaves transported to the New World. This was critical for European countries fighting for colonial empires in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

The earliest Africans brought to the English colonies were "indentured servants" or "apprentices for life." They and their descendants became the property of their owners by the middle of the seventeenth century legally. They were commodities or units of labor as property, and they were sold in markets alongside other products and services.

The Portuguese were the first to participate in the slave trade in the New World, and others quickly followed. Slaves were considered cargo by ship owners, to be transported as quickly and cheaply as possible to the Americas, where they would be sold to labor in coffee, tobacco, cocoa, cotton, and sugar plantations, gold and silver mines, rice fields, the construction industry, cutting timber for ships, and as house servants.

The Portuguese, British, French, Spanish, Dutch, and Americans were the top Atlantic slave merchants in trade volume. They had set up outposts on the African coast, where they bought slaves from local African tribe chiefs. According to current estimates, around 12 million were carried over the Atlantic, while the real quantity acquired by dealers is far greater.

African and African-American academics refer to the slave trade as the Maafa, which means "holocaust" or "great calamity" in Swahili. Like Marimba Ani and Maulana Karenga, some academics refer to the Holocaust as an African Holocaust or Holocaust of Enslavement. Slavery was one component of a three-part economic cycle—the triangle trade and its Middle Passage—that spanned four continents, four centuries, and millions of people.