West African Coastal Kingdoms and the Atlantic Slave Trade: Escalating Raiding and Sales

By the 1670s, the Atlantic slave trade had profoundly disrupted West African societies. The Royal African Company's demand for enslaved people incentivized wars between African kingdoms to generate captives for sale. Dahomey, Asante, and other polities expanded militarily in part to capture people for sale to European traders. Coastal communities were raided by slave catchers. Scholars estimate that between 1650 and 1700, roughly 400,000 to 500,000 people were enslaved and transported across the Atlantic, with mortality during capture, holding, and transport meaning the actual human cost was far higher.