Slavery is often associated with African peoples, but transatlantic slaving began and ended in Europe. By the early thirteenth century, Italian merchants set up slaving ports and used captive “Slavs” (root of the term slave), among others, to produce sugar for export. This trade network stretched from the Atlantic Ocean to the Black Sea. On the Atlantic end, Portugal and Spain extended the Italian model of plantation slavery to islands and coastal areas from northwest to west central Africa by the sixteenth century. In the previous century, the “Slavs” and other captives (hailing from such places as modern-day Slovakia, Bosnia, Croatia, and Poland, to name a few) were being increasingly replaced by African ones brought to Portugal, Spain, and France. This new market in African captives was fed by Portuguese slaving voyages as well as Arab-Muslim slaving across the Sahara desert and through various North African ports.

Portuguese slave raids and trade with African rulers along the African continent’s western coast led to Portuguese and Spanish dominance of the Atlantic slave trade until the mid-seventeenth century. After that, despite Dutch, Danish, Swedish, French, and German slaving competitors, England dominated the north Atlantic until the first decade of the nineteenth century. Portugal and Brazil dominated the south Atlantic commerce until the end of that century. Over 450 years, transatlantic slaving in Africa evolved geographically from northern Senegambia to west central Africa and southeast Africa. In the process, the prized commodity and currency were African bodies, convertible to gold. Enslaved people were literally the gold standard of commerce on which the world economy ran. African merchants involved in transatlantic slaving depended on credit extended from European slaving companies. Guns, trade goods, and captives were all purchased on credit. If money was the catalyst for transatlantic slaving, credit kept the system in motion.

Historians estimate that 13 to 15 million Africans were introduced to the one-way Atlantic crossing. But these figures do not include those who resisted and escaped, drowned with sinking ships, or were thrown overboard. It also omits those who died along the routes to the coast or on the ship, and those who were left in Africa to pick up the pieces created by the forced departure of relatives. Of that number, there are only several dozen firsthand accounts of what must have been a brutal experience. Survivors described the passage en route to the Americas and, upon landing, being branded, auctioned, and dispatched for work in a rice field, sugar plantation, mine, ranch, or urban setting. Those able to dictate or write about such experiences in the United States used such terms as  “enslavers,” “suffered in the middle passage,” “kidnapped,” “horrid,” and “their business was to steal negroes from Africa.” Almost all used the word “stolen” to refer to their or their ancestors’ removal from an African homeland.

Using the available records, it is difficult to tell the exact number of lives affected. Over the course of four centuries, millions of Africans embarked for the Americas (North, Central, South America and the Caribbean), yet only some 50,000 went to Europe. These numbers are still being debated, but such estimates tell us something significant about long-term patterns: 45 percent of all recorded Africans exported to the Americas came from the west central African region. Almost the same percentage landed in the Caribbean region. Perhaps no more than 4 or 5 percent landed in the United States. Almost two-thirds of the captives were adult males and 15 to 20 percent were children, most of whom came in the eighteenth and first half of the nineteenth century, especially from west central Africa.

In ways that we might not fully appreciate, transatlantic slaving has deep and enduring relevance to the modern world. African bodies as laborers and laboratories created modern medicine through autopsied and dying bodies. Their value as commodities and currency created economies. Banks were chartered through speculations on their value and insuring against it. Real estate emerged through the counting of African bodies as chattel. Factories supported and profited from slaving industries. Museums and universities were built and sustained by wealth derived from affluent slavers. Courts legalized their inhumanity. And intergenerational wealth and social standing accrued over the years on the backs of enslaved people. For the descendants of both captives and captors in the United States, the journey from mass enslavement, to mass segregation, to mass incarceration reminds us of the enduring significance of transatlantic slaving in modern life.