System of oppression · 1526–1808
The Transatlantic Slave Trade
Over roughly three centuries, some 12.5 million Africans were forced across the Atlantic — the largest forced migration in human history — to build the wealth of the Americas.
Between the early 1500s and 1808, when the United States banned the importation of enslaved people, an estimated 12.5 million Africans were loaded onto slave ships; about 10.7 million survived the Middle Passage. The trade was not a side business — it financed merchants, banks, insurers, shipbuilders, and ports on both sides of the ocean.
The crossing itself was an atrocity: people were packed below decks for weeks or months, and roughly one in seven died at sea. Those who survived arrived in a system designed to erase their names, languages, and histories — and met it with constant, creative resistance.
The SlaveVoyages database now documents more than 36,000 individual voyages, turning an abstraction into named ships, dates, and numbers.
On the timeline
- August 1526· debatedFirst enslaved Africans in what is now the US
Spanish colonists bring enslaved Africans to San Miguel de Gualdape on the present-day Carolina/Georgia coast — decades before 1619.
- 1576Portugal founds Luanda
The Portuguese establish Luanda in Angola — soon the largest slaving port in the Atlantic and the source of most Africans taken to the early Chesapeake.
- August 20, 1619· debated"20 and odd" Africans arrive at Point Comfort
An English privateer trades roughly two dozen captive Angolans to Virginia colonists at Old Point Comfort — a foundational moment whose exact legal status (enslaved vs. indentured) historians still debate.
- 1672The Royal African Company chartered
England grants a monopoly on the West African trade to the Royal African Company, which ships tens of thousands of enslaved people to its American colonies.
- c. 1707Sullivan's Island — the gateway to North America
Charleston, with its quarantine "pest houses" on Sullivan's Island, becomes the entry point for nearly half of all enslaved Africans brought to North America.
- 1808New Orleans becomes America's largest slave market
After the 1808 ban on imports, New Orleans grows into the hub of the domestic slave trade, where more than 135,000 people are bought and sold.
Resources
Peabody-winning series; Parts 1–2 cover the colonial era and the Revolution.
Reconstructs the slave ship as the brutal crucible at the birth of African American culture.
Recovers the large, overlooked population of enslaved African Muslims.
Scholarly overview of the 12.5-million-person forced migration.
Searchable database of 36,000+ documented slave voyages and captive records.
Award-winning account of enslavement from African ports through the Middle Passage, from the captives' vantage point.
Of ~12.5 million embarked, only ~388,000 were shipped directly to North America.
Maps of where captives embarked in Africa and disembarked in the Americas.
Black divers documenting the wrecks of slave ships and tracing ancestry.
Argues Africans were in the Americas long before 1619.
The web
Connections to other moments, systems, and investigations — the links rarely drawn together.
- profited from (incoming)·InstitutionLloyd's of London
Lloyd's underwrote the ships of the slave trade.
- connects to (incoming)·ThreadAfrican Kingdoms & Heritage
Most enslaved Africans came from the very kingdoms — Kongo, Ndongo, the Mali and Songhai successor states — whose civilizations the trade worked to erase.
- caused (incoming)·ThreadGreed — The Root
The Atlantic trade existed to turn human beings into profit; it was a business before it was anything else.
- enabled·ThreadRacial Capitalism (Profit)
The Atlantic trade financed the merchants, banks, insurers, and ports of a rising capitalist economy on both sides of the ocean.
- connects to (incoming)·ThreadWest-Central Africa (Kongo & Angola)
West-Central Africa was the single largest source region of the entire trade.
- enabled (incoming)·EventThe Royal African Company chartered
The RAC industrialized the English slave trade to the colonies.
- profited from (incoming)·InstitutionBrown University
Brown's founders and benefactors profited from slaving voyages.