Slave Trade

Slave Trade
Name	Slave Trade
Period	Various (ancient–modern)
Regions	Worldwide
Participants	Various states, merchants, corporations, armed groups

Contents

Slave Trade

The term refers to organized systems of capture, transport, and commodification of human beings across time and place, involving actors such as Roman Empire, Ottoman Empire, Portuguese Empire, Spanish Empire, British Empire, Dutch Republic, and French Colonial Empire. Episodes include interactions among polities like Mali Empire, Songhai Empire, Kingdom of Kongo, Ashanti Confederacy, Benin Kingdom, and later nation-states such as United States and Brazil. Networks incorporated merchant houses, chartered companies such as the Dutch East India Company and British East India Company, and ports like Lisbon, Seville, Liverpool, Bristol, Antwerp, Alexandria, Zanzibar, Rio de Janeiro, Charleston, South Carolina, and Havana.

Definition and historical overview

Scholars trace systems from antiquity—involving centers like Ancient Greece, Achaemenid Empire, Carthage, Han Dynasty, and Roman Republic—through medieval circuits centered on Baghdad, Cordoba, Venice, and Constantinople to Early Modern transoceanic expansion tied to Age of Discovery, Atlantic slave trade, and the Indian Ocean slave trade. State actors such as the Mongol Empire, Safavid dynasty, Mamluk Sultanate, and Mughal Empire participated alongside non‑state actors like the Barbary pirates and mercantile families of Genoa and Florence. Later abolitionist and international legal responses involved entities such as the British Parliament, United Nations, League of Nations, Congress of Vienna, and national courts in France and the United States.

Significant regional systems include the Atlantic slave trade linking West Africa ports such as Goree Island, Elmina Castle, and Bonny with American destinations including Saint-Domingue, Puerto Rico, Mexico (New Spain), Peru (Viceroyalty of Peru), Cuba, Colombia (New Granada), and Jamaica. The Trans-Saharan slave trade connected regions like Timbuktu, Gao, Mogadishu, and Tunis to markets in Cairo and Tripoli. The Indian Ocean slave trade ran between East Africa, Zanzibar, Mombasa, Socotra, and hubs such as Muscat, Calicut, Malacca, and Batavia. Other patterns include servile commerce in Siberia tied to Russian Empire expansion, bondage in Ottoman Balkans and Crimea associated with the Crimean Khanate, and internal coerced labor systems in China (Qing dynasty) and Japan (Edo period).

Slave trafficking reshaped commodity chains with plantations producing sugar, tobacco, cotton, coffee, and indigo for markets in Amsterdam, London, Paris, and Seville; financiers in Amsterdam Stock Exchange and Royal African Company profited alongside insurers such as Lloyd's of London. Demographic effects altered urban centers like Accra, Lagos, Luanda, Beira, and Freetown and influenced social hierarchies in Haiti, Barbados, Georgia (U.S. state), and Louisiana. Cultural syncretism produced religious and artistic forms in locales such as New Orleans, Salvador, Bahia, Kingston, Jamaica, and Cape Verde. Long-term economic distortions implicated institutions including Bank of England and legacies visible in wealth disparities in United Kingdom, United States, Brazil, and Portugal.

Legal regimes ranged from codifications like the Code Noir and colonial statutes in Spanish America to Islamic legal opinions issued in centers such as Cairo and Damascus. Abolitionist movements mobilized figures and organizations including William Wilberforce, Olaudah Equiano, Toussaint Louverture, Frederick Douglass, Sojourner Truth, Granville Sharp, Haitian Revolution, Society for Effecting the Abolition of the Slave Trade, American Colonization Society, and legislative acts like the Slave Trade Act 1807, Abolition of Slavery Act 1833, Thirteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution, and treaties brokered at Congress of Vienna and through bilateral accords involving Sierra Leone and Liberia. Judicial decisions in courts of Britain, France, and the United States Supreme Court influenced enforcement and emancipation.

Capture often involved warfare by states such as the Asante Empire or raids by groups allied to merchants like the Portuguese Brazil interests; intermediaries included coastal elites in Dahomey and Benin City. Transport employed ships from fleets maintained by Royal Navy, privateers, and merchants from Genoa, Bordeaux, Bristol, and Lisbon, traversing routes like the Middle Passage to ports including Kingstown, Manila, San Juan, and Buenos Aires. Markets and sale occurred in urban centers such as Salvador, Bahia, Santo Domingo, Cadiz, Barcelona, New York City, and Liverpool, using auction houses, slave pens, and military markets. Logistics relied on institutions like the Royal African Company, Compagnie du Sénégal, and shipping registers maintained in Amsterdam and Seville.

Enslaved people resisted through rebellion and legal action exemplified by uprisings such as the Haitian Revolution, Stono Rebellion, Nat Turner's rebellion, Demerara rebellion of 1823, Cato Street Conspiracy (contextual actors), and maroon communities like those of Palmares and Jamaican Maroons. Cultural resistance produced creole languages and religions such as Candomblé, Vodou, Santería, and Haitian Creole; intellectual voices included Ignatius Sancho, Phillis Wheatley, Denis Diderot (criticisms), and Alexander Falconbridge (accounts). Escape networks and shelters involved locations like Freetown, Havana (free communities), and routes used in the Underground Railroad.

Contemporary legacies surface in structural inequalities addressed by institutions like the United Nations, European Union, International Labour Organization, U.S. Department of State, and NGOs including Anti‑Slavery International and Human Rights Watch. Modern manifestations include human trafficking networks linked to regions like Southeast Asia hubs in Thailand, Cambodia, Myanmar, labor exploitation in Qatar and United Arab Emirates tied to migrant labor, forced marriage and debt bondage in South Asia with cases in India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh, and child exploitation in mining and agriculture in Democratic Republic of the Congo, Ghana, and Côte d'Ivoire. Reparative debates engage institutions such as African Union, Caricom, and national legislatures in Brazil, Netherlands, United Kingdom, and United States regarding restitutions, apologies, and development aid.

Category:Slavery