Nearly 3.4 million Africans departed Atlantic Africa on British slave ships destined for the Americas between the 16th century and the first decade of the 19th century, when the British abolished the trade. The vast majority of these enslaved Africans were taken as war captives in West (primarily the Bight of Benin and the Bight of Biafra) and West Central Africa before being sold to European slave traders. Most of them struggled to survive treacherous journeys to the Americas between the 1670s and 1807. Much of this trade was driven by sugar production in the Caribbean, where the majority of enslaved Africans were sold. These Africans also endured secondary and tertiary voyages to North and South America, where they arrived in British and Spanish territories. The British slave trade reached its zenith in the second half of the 18th century, when the ports of Liverpool in England and Bonny in the Bight of Biafra rose to prominence as slave trading hubs. A discussion of the history of the British slave trade from its inception in the 16th century through the era of abolition in the early 19th century includes a description of the historiographical literature and online resources for teaching and learning.
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British Slave Trade in the Atlantic
Elise A. Mitchell
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Africa and Its Diasporas under Slavery
Walter Hawthorne
Diasporas result when people from the same place, real or imagined, migrate to another place, settle together, and produce new generations. African diasporas before 1900 resulted from forced migrations, spurred by the trade in enslaved people from the continent into the Atlantic and Indian Oceans, Red Sea, and across the Sahara Desert. The identities that Africans in diasporas professed and cultures that they created and recreated differed across time and space. Among the things that shaped African diasporic cultures were the nature of linkages to African homelands and the political, economic, religious, and social structures of the broader societies in which African diasporas were situated. These and other factors meant that African diasporas in Indian Ocean societies were very different from those in Atlantic Ocean societies. Generally, over time enslaved Africans in diaspora around the Indian Ocean sought to become part of broader cosmopolitan communities and did not associate themselves with an African homeland. Enslaved Africans in diaspora around the Atlantic Ocean built communities that were apart from those of their enslavers and identified with African homelands. However, in some periods, societies with slaves in the Americas offered opportunities for enslaved people to become part of dominant institutions, and some enslaved people could take advantage of those opportunities to forge new lives for themselves and others. Everywhere African diasporas formed, those people who composed them shaped local and global histories in ways that are evident today.
