Summary

By the time the transatlantic slave trade ended in 1866, around 12.5 million enslaved Africans had been forcibly embarked from hundreds of coastal slave-trading regions stretching from Senegal to Mozambique to populate most regions in the Americas from Newfoundland to Patagonia. For over three centuries, these displaced people were vital for the western hemisphere’s European conquest, settlement, and economic growth. Every major European nation and some of its colonies, such as Cuba, Brazil, and the United States, outfitted slaving expeditions. Based on the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database (Voyages) and the most recent scholarship, this article addresses a selection of demographic topics which have remained at the core of the historiographical debates on the transatlantic slave trade, such as the number of enslaved Africans carried to the Americas, the mortality rate during the middle passage, African regions of provenance and destination, national carriers in the transportation of Africans, shipboard rebellions, and the gender and age of the captives. These demographic parameters, such as embarkation and disembarkation regions, mortality rate, the nationality of the carriers, or shipboard revolts, were interdependent and experienced significant temporal and regional changes.