Transatlantic Slave Trade Reaches Peak Volume: 80,000 Africans Per Year in the 1760s

The transatlantic slave trade reached its maximum annual volume in the 1760s and 1770s, with an estimated 80,000 Africans transported per year across the Atlantic at the trade's peak. British traders alone were responsible for transporting approximately 3.1 million Africans total, of whom roughly 2.7 million survived the Middle Passage — a mortality rate of approximately 13 percent during the voyage, with additional deaths in the weeks of onshore holding before departure and in the period immediately after arrival. The peak years for shipboard revolts (1751-1775) coincided with this peak in trade volume. In the five years before the United States banned the importation of enslaved people in 1808, approximately 40,000 Africans arrived in Charleston alone. The scale of industrial human trafficking conducted across the Atlantic represented the largest forced migration in human history to that point — a demographic catastrophe for West and Central Africa and the foundation of colonial and early American economic wealth.