Peak of Atlantic Slave Trade
The transatlantic slave trade reached its greatest intensity in the eighteenth century, and the decades from about 1700 mark the point at which it became the organising fact of the Atlantic economy. Roughly 12.5 million people were embarked from Africa across the whole period, and around 10.7 million survived the crossing. About six million of them were carried in the eighteenth century alone. The driver was sugar. Caribbean plantations consumed labour at a rate that made continuous importation necessary — mortality on the sugar islands exceeded births throughout, so the population had to be replaced rather than reproduced, which is the structural difference between the Caribbean and the North American mainland. Britain became the largest carrier after the Treaty of Utrecht in 1713 gave it the asiento, the contract to supply the Spanish colonies. Liverpool, Bristol and London built their eighteenth-century wealth on it, along with Nantes, Lisbon and Rhode Island. The Middle Passage took six to twelve weeks in conditions designed around the arithmetic of tight packing, and killed on average about fifteen per cent of those aboard, with crew mortality often comparable. The trade was supplied by African states and merchants who sold captives taken in war, raiding and judicial condemnation, in exchange for textiles, iron, firearms and cowries — an exchange that fed further warfare in the interior. Resistance was constant: shipboard revolts occurred on roughly one voyage in ten. Denmark abolished its trade in 1803, Britain and the United States in 1807 and 1808. Brazil, which took by far the largest share of all, abolished slavery itself only in 1888. Nothing about the system was incidental to the wealth it produced.
- Year: 1700 CE
- Category: Economic
