describe about the slave trade
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Answer:
The Atlantic slave trade or transatlantic slave trade involved the transportation by slave traders of enslaved African people, mainly to the Americas. The slave trade regularly used the triangular trade route and its Middle Passage, and existed from the 16th to the 19th centuries. The vast majority of those who were enslaved and transported in the transatlantic slave trade were people from central and western Africa, who had been sold by other West Africans to Western European slave traders (with a small number being captured directly by the slave traders in coastal raids), who brought them to the Americas. The South Atlantic and Caribbean economies especially were dependent on the supply of secure labour for the production of commodity crops, making goods and clothing to sell in Europe. This was crucial to those western European countries which, in the late 17th and 18th centuries, were vying with each other to create overseas empires.
The Portuguese, in the 16th century, were the first to engage in the Atlantic slave trade. In 1526, they completed the first transatlantic slave voyage to Brazil, and other European countries soon followed. Shipowners regarded the slaves as cargo to be transported to the Americas as quickly and cheaply as possible, there to be sold to work on coffee, tobacco, cocoa, sugar and cotton plantations, gold and silver mines, rice fields, construction industry, cutting timber for ships, in skilled labour, and as domestic servants. The first Africans imported to the English colonies were classified as "indentured servants", like workers coming from England, and also as "apprentices for life". By the middle of the 17th century, slavery had hardened as a racial caste, with the slaves and their offspring being legally the property of their owners, and children born to slave mothers were also slaves. As property, the people were considered merchandise or units of labour, and were sold at markets with other goods and services.
The major Atlantic slave trading nations, ordered by trade volume, were: the Portuguese, the British, the French, the Spanish, and the Dutch Empires. Several had established outposts on the African coast where they purchased slaves from local African leaders. These slaves were managed by a factor who was established on or near the coast to expedite the shipping of slaves to the New World. Slaves were kept in a factory while awaiting shipment. Current estimates are that about 12 to 12.8 million Africans were shipped across the Atlantic over a span of 400 years,194 although the number purchased by the traders was considerably higher, as the passage had a high death rate. Near the beginning of the 19th century, various governments acted to ban the trade, although illegal smuggling still occurred. In the early 21st century, several governments issued apologies for the transatlantic slave trade.
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Answer:
In 1807, the British government passed an Act of Parliament abolishing the slave trade throughout the British Empire. Slavery itself would persist in the British colonies until its final abolition in 1838. However, abolitionists would continue campaigning against the international trade of slaves after this date.
The slave trade refers to the transatlantic trading patterns which were established as early as the mid-17th century. Trading ships would set sail from Europe with a cargo of manufactured goods to the west coast of Africa. There, these goods would be traded, over weeks and months, for captured people provided by African traders. European traders found it easier to do business with African intermediaries who raided settlements far away from the African coast and brought those young and healthy enough to the coast to be sold into slavery.
Once full, the European trader's ship would depart for the Americas or the Caribbean on the notorious 'Middle Passage'. During this voyage, the slaves would be kept in the ship's hold, crammed close together with little or no space to move. Conditions were squalid and many people did not survive the voyage. On the final leg of the transatlantic route, European ships returned home with cargoes of sugar, rum, tobacco and other 'luxury' items. It has been estimated that, by the 1790s, 480,000 people were enslaved in the British Colonies.
The majority of those sold into slavery were destined to work on plantations in the Caribbean and the Americas, where huge areas of the American continent had been colonized by European countries. These plantations produced products such as sugar or tobacco, meant for consumption back in Europe.
Those who supported the slave trade argued that it made important contributions to the country's economy and to the rise of consumerism in Britain. Despite this, towards the end of the eighteenth century, people began to campaign against slavery. However, since trading was so profitable for those involved, the 'Abolitionists' (those who campaigned for the abolition of the slave trade) were fiercely opposed by a pro-slavery West Indian lobby. Those who still supported slavery used persuasive arguments, or 'propaganda', to indicate the necessity of the slave trade though the abolitionists also used propaganda to further their cause.
The role of many slaves themselves in bringing slavery to an end is often overlooked. Resistance among slaves in the Caribbean was not uncommon. Indeed, slaves in the French colony of St Domingue seized control of the island and it was eventually declared to be the republic of Haiti. Figures such as Olaudah Equiano and Mary Prince, by adding their eye witness accounts to abolitionist literature, also made a major contribution to the abolition campaigns
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