The transatlantic slave trade

Assembled from 20 blocks · 1 evidence · 16 related

1. Story
2. The forced transport of African people across the Atlantic, which over roughly three and a half centuries moved on the order of twelve and a half million embarked captives, of whom something close to eleven million survived the crossing to be landed in the Americas. It belongs in this Journey for a structural reason rather than a moral one alone: it used the same wind system, the same ship types, the same navigational methods and often the same capital as the trades in pepper and silver, and it expanded because the plantation complex needed labour on a scale that the collapsing indigenous population could not supply and European migration would not. The destinations are frequently misunderstood — the large majority of captives were landed in Brazil and the Caribbean rather than in North America — and the trade continued long after the voyages that opened the route, peaking in the eighteenth century. It is documented in unusual quantitative detail because it was a licensed, insured and taxed business: the surviving ship registers, insurance records and customs returns have been assembled into a voyage-level database, which is why estimates for it are firmer than for almost any other early-modern migration.
3. Knowledge
4. The post-contact population collapse of the Americas
5. The transatlantic slave trade
6. Connections
7. Sugar
8. The post-contact population collapse of the Americas
9. The transatlantic slave trade reaches its peak volume
10. The Middle Passage
11. The transatlantic trade in enslaved people operates
12. The Columbian Exchange
13. The transatlantic slave trade
14. The 1610 CO₂ minimum ("Orbis spike")
15. Smallpox reaches Tenochtitlan
16. Atmospheric CO₂ reaches a minimum recorded in Antarctic ice
17. Earth system impacts of the European arrival and Great Dying in the Americas after 1492
18. Historia general de las cosas de Nueva España (Florentine Codex), Book XII
19. Evidence
20. Voyage-level estimates of the number of captives embarked in Africa and disembarked in the Americas, by period and region, assembled from ship registers, insurance records and customs returns. V55 verification basis: NOT consulted in this session — slavevoyages.org was probed and refused by the egress proxy. The figures quoted in this pack (roughly 12.5 million embarked, roughly 10.7 million disembarked) are from the author's knowledge of the database. IT IS REVISED CONTINUOUSLY, so a curator must take current figures directly from the site rather than from this record.