The Atlantic Slave Trade
Millions of captives are shipped from the Bights of Benin and Biafra to the Americas, scattering Yoruba, Igbo and other peoples across the Atlantic.
- Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database — SlaveVoyages
- Transformations in Slavery: A History of Slavery in Africa — Paul E. Lovejoy, Cambridge University Press (2011)
- A History of Nigeria — Toyin Falola and Matthew M. Heaton, Cambridge University Press (2008)
Ports such as Lagos, Badagry, Bonny and Old Calabar became major points of the Atlantic slave trade. According to the SlaveVoyages database, about two million captives were embarked from the Bight of Benin and about 1.6 million from the Bight of Biafra between 1501 and 1900, though these regions also include parts of today’s Benin, Togo and Cameroon.
- Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database — SlaveVoyages
- Transformations in Slavery: A History of Slavery in Africa — Paul E. Lovejoy, Cambridge University Press (2011)
- A History of Nigeria — Toyin Falola and Matthew M. Heaton, Cambridge University Press (2008)
The trade’s effects at home were profound. It encouraged wars and kidnapping, enriched coastal middlemen and states that sold captives, and deepened slavery inside West Africa itself, so that by the nineteenth century large numbers of enslaved people worked on farms and plantations within the region. After Britain’s abolition, palm oil for European soap and machinery replaced people as the main export, but many of the same trading networks carried it.
- Transformations in Slavery: A History of Slavery in Africa — Paul E. Lovejoy, Cambridge University Press (2011)
- A History of Nigeria — Toyin Falola and Matthew M. Heaton, Cambridge University Press (2008)
Britain abolished its trade in 1807 and used its navy to suppress others, which became a pretext for intervention: it bombarded Lagos in 1851 and annexed it in 1861.
- A History of Nigeria — Toyin Falola and Matthew M. Heaton, Cambridge University Press (2008)
- A History of Nigeria — Toyin Falola and Matthew M. Heaton, Cambridge University Press (2008)
Some Nigerian voices, including traditional rulers and civil society groups, have called for African kings and elites to acknowledge their part in the trade, alongside demands for reparations from Europe and the Americas.
- Transformations in Slavery: A History of Slavery in Africa — Paul E. Lovejoy, Cambridge University Press (2011)
- A History of Nigeria — Toyin Falola and Matthew M. Heaton, Cambridge University Press (2008)
Historians stress that European demand and guns drove the trade's scale, while African states and merchants controlled supply on the coast; the trade also deepened slavery within West Africa itself.
- Transformations in Slavery: A History of Slavery in Africa — Paul E. Lovejoy, Cambridge University Press (2011)
Brazil was not only a destination. Many slave ships were owned and outfitted by merchants in Rio and Salvador, who traded Brazilian tobacco and cachaça for captives directly with African ports. Brazilian historians increasingly treat the trade as a South Atlantic system run from Brazil as much as from Lisbon.
- Slavery in Brazil — Herbert S. Klein and Francisco Vidal Luna, Cambridge University Press (2010)
- Brazil: A Biography — Lilia M. Schwarcz and Heloisa M. Starling, Allen Lane (2018)
Why it matters today
The trade drained people and fuelled war along the coast for three centuries, and its descendants are everywhere in the Americas: Yoruba religion lives on in Brazil and Cuba, and many African Americans trace roots to Nigeria. Nigerians also debate the role of their own ancestors and rulers who sold captives.
Brazil received more enslaved Africans than any other country, nearly five million by most estimates, and Salvador da Bahia still feels like an Atlantic city facing Africa. Candomblé's orixás, many Yoruba words and dishes like acarajé came on these ships, and so did the racial hierarchy Brazil is still unpicking.