The transatlantic slave trade involved the capture and transportation of millions of Africans across the Atlantic for a period of approximately four hundred years. European and New World merchants, traders, and ship captains were behind much of the organization of this huge forced migration. They also captured and loaded Africans onto slave ships themselves via raids, warfare, or trade. However, the traffic would not have evolved as it did had they failed to rely on a series of mechanisms of enslavement indigenous to Africa. Some of these mechanisms included judicial proceedings, debts, pawning, trickery, kidnapping, and, of course, warfare. Each of them had an impact on Africa and her children, both those who stayed behind and those scattered across the Atlantic. Nevertheless, these mechanisms helped sustain the traffic as a long-lasting and complex historical event.
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Mechanisms of Enslavement
Daniel B. Domingues da Silva
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Slavery and the Slave Trade in Ethiopia and Eritrea
Giulia Bonacci and Alexander Meckelburg
Slavery and the slave trade were persistent features of the cultural, social, and economic fabric of the Ethiopian-Eritrean region, which is historically constituted by various polities and societies across the Christian, Semitic-speaking highlands and the Rift Valley with its surrounding lowland regions, bordered by the Nile Valley on the west and the Red Sea coast to the east. The connectedness of this vast region through long-distance trade routes reaching the Mediterranean, the Red Sea, and the Indian Ocean world is attested in sources since antiquity. There were multiple ways into enslavement: wars, raids, debt, birth, or trade, which involved various actors, be they shifta (bandits), soldiers, traders, or kings. Slave markets dotted the region along the general trade routes, and slaves were distributed into various social categories and labor occupations. While the expansion of the Ethiopian empire turned an increasing number of peasants into servants of the feudal class, the 19th century saw both a growth in the volume of slaves traded in the region and a growth in sources related to slavery thanks to increasing international attention. Despite a pronounced commitment to abolition by Ethiopian rulers since the late 19th century, abolition happened late and slowly. Legacies of slavery play a role in the continuing exclusion and marginalization of persons of slave descent in the 21st century.
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British Slave Trade in the Atlantic
Elise A. Mitchell
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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Slavery in Somalia
Francesca Declich
It is apparent from the earliest extant written sources that slave labor had always formed part of the socioeconomic texture of Somali-speaking society. In both livelihood systems, farming and pastoralism, slaves were an important part of the labor force. Slaves were drawn from Cushitic-language-speaking areas, coming overland along caravan routes across the Ethiopian borders, and from Bantu-speaking groups whose members were sold in coastal ports. An important dynamic of dependency, sometimes regarded as slavery, asserted itself with the recurring migrations in Somalia prompted by the movements of pastoralist nomadic Somali-speaking people in search of pasture land and water for dromedaries. In connection with political changes in the Western Indian Ocean countries after 1800, imports of slaves from Bantu-speaking countries to the Somali territories increased. An unquantifiable percentage of imported slaves were absorbed in a patron-client system whose features have yet to be clearly described and which constitutes a central characteristic of enslavement in the Somali country. Abolition and pre-Independence post-abolition policies did not erase the inequalities accompanying the patron-clientship system; rather, they fixed and solidified such earlier social stratification in a simplified racial designation of those who had to perform compulsory labor and those who were entitled to privileges within the colony.
