Slaves Embarked on Voyages by Nation During the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade
No exploration of maritime history in the early modern period would be complete without a look at the largest driver of maritime trade during the later part of this period, the trade in human slaves. The history of African slavery in the Americas began not long after the European discovery of the West Indies. Early Spaniards in the New World attempted to keep native Americans in slavery to work, both in mines and large-scale agricultural ventures, through the encomienda system, however this proved unsustainable given the unprecedented death rates among the natives. Instead the Spaniards (and soon the Portuguese) turned to the use of African laborers to work in the emerging sugar industry in the West Indies and Brazil (Wiesner-Hanks, 260). With the expansion of exploration and colonization by other nations in the Americas, the profitable slave trade exploded with most Western European nations taking part in the expansion of slave trading. The slave trade is often conceptualized in the simplified idea of the ‘triangular trade,’ a trading network that brought European manufactured goods to the West coast of Africa where European merchants exchanged these goods for slaves. These slaves were then carried across the Atlantic on a dangerous voyage that has become known as the infamous ‘Middle Passage’ on the way to the Americas. The final leg of this journey brought raw materials such as sugar or cotton from the new world back to Europe for the production of manufactured goods. Of course, unsurprisingly, this international trading network was much more complicated than this simplified triangle. There was tremendous trade within Europe during this time that was tangentially related to the slave trade. Iron, for instance, which was an important trade item for the English and Dutch in the slave trade, had to be sourced in Sweden or Germany, two areas that did not independently participate in the transatlantic slave trade but affected it through their metal exports (Evans & Rydén, 42). Inter-African trade was also common during this period with slave raiders often trading slaves over large areas, both along the coast, and from interior areas within the continent. Later, with the ascendance of the British colony in North America, and later the United States, the triangular trade began to look more like a square with the growth of industry in the Northeastern U.S. where ships were built, and perhaps more importantly, rum was made from the sugar brought up from the Caribbean before being shipped back across the Atlantic.
All data from The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database