1700s

Between 1700 and 1750, mortality rates on slave ships averaged 15–20% per voyage. Captives resisted through hunger strikes, suicide by jumping overboard, and insurrection. Crews were instructed to shoot those attempting suicide, revealing how common self-liberation through death had become.

By 1700 the transatlantic slave trade had transported an estimated 1.5 million Africans to the Americas since 1500. In the first half of the eighteenth century volume surged: approximately 2 million more were transported between 1700 and 1750. English, Portuguese, French, and Dutch merchants competed for supremacy, transforming West African politics and depopulating entire coastal regions.

Between 1700 and 1750, mortality rates on slave ships averaged 15–20% per voyage. Enslaved Africans were chained below decks in spaces less than 18 inches high. Dysentery, smallpox, and dehydration were primary killers. Captives resisted through hunger strikes, suicide by jumping overboard, and insurrection. Ship crews were instructed to shoot those attempting suicide, revealing how common the act of self-liberation through death was.

Virginia consolidates decades of piecemeal legislation into a comprehensive slave code. Enslaved people are declared real estate, cannot own property, cannot testify against white people, and may be dismembered for running away. The code also bars free Black people from holding public office and strips previously granted rights. Serves as a model for other colonies.

Colonial court records document cases of enslaved women accused of infanticide — killing newborns to prevent them from being born into slavery. Other documented acts include self-mutilation to avoid sale and hunger strikes. These acts were simultaneously individual resistance and tragic evidence of the depth of slavery's violence. Colonial courts executed women for infanticide even as they enslaved their children by law.

Colonial court records document cases of enslaved women accused of infanticide — killing newborns to prevent birth into slavery — alongside self-mutilation to avoid sale and hunger strikes. Colonial courts executed women for infanticide even while their living children were enslaved by law.

In 1704, the South Carolina colonial legislature became the first in the English colonies to formally codify a slave patrol system, embedding it within the existing volunteer militia structure. The system was based on Barbadian models that white South Carolinians had imported along with the plantation economy. Slave patrollers were empowered to search enslaved people's quarters for weapons, break up any gatherings of enslaved people, patrol roads and paths to catch runaways, and administer immediate physical punishment. White men who refused patrol duty faced stiff fines. This institutionalized surveillance and terror apparatus was a direct precursor to American policing and represented the first formal state apparatus built specifically to control an enslaved population.

The English slave ship Henrietta Marie completes what is believed to be its last voyage, transporting approximately 190 enslaved Africans to Jamaica and Barbados. The ship subsequently sank off Florida. When recovered by archaeologists in the 1970s–80s, its cargo of shackles, trade goods, and artifacts became the most complete physical record of the English slave trade ever recovered.

Beginning around 1704 in the Carolinas, armed slave patrols policed the enslaved — stopping, searching, and whipping any Black person found without a pass. Historians trace American policing directly to them.

For generations, self-emancipated people build hidden communities deep in the Great Dismal Swamp, living beyond the reach of slaveholders.

Colonial Virginia consolidates slavery into a sweeping legal code defining the enslaved as property.

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.