Atlantic Slave Trade at Peak
Around 1750, the transatlantic slave trade reached the height of its scale. In the middle decades of the eighteenth century, ships carried roughly 70,000 to 85,000 enslaved Africans across the Atlantic each year, making this one of the largest forced migrations in history. The trade reshaped societies on three continents, and its consequences for West and Central Africa, and for the Americas, are still felt today.
The trade had begun in the fifteenth century, when Portuguese mariners started taking captives from the African coast. It expanded dramatically after European colonizers established plantation economies in Brazil, the Caribbean, and mainland North America, growing sugar, tobacco, coffee, rice, and later cotton. Indigenous populations had been devastated by disease and violence, and planters turned to enslaved African labor. By the eighteenth century, Britain, France, Portugal, the Netherlands, and other powers all took part, and Britain had become the leading carrier. Historians estimate that about 12 million people were embarked over the full course of the trade, with roughly 10.5 million surviving the voyage.
Most captives came from West Central Africa (the region of present-day Angola and Congo), the Bight of Benin, the Bight of Biafra, and the Gold Coast. Many were seized in wars, raids, or through judicial punishments and debt, often by African states and merchants who traded with Europeans in exchange for textiles, metal goods, firearms, and other commodities. The scale of this commerce varied by region, and historians continue to debate how far it strengthened or undermined particular African polities. Captives were marched to coastal ports and held in forts or barracoons before being loaded onto ships. The Middle Passage lasted weeks or months, and crowding, disease, and brutality killed a significant share of those aboard, with mortality commonly estimated at over ten percent on average.
For African societies, the effects included population loss, especially among young adults, along with increased warfare, insecurity, and the rise of militarized states that depended on capturing people. Economists and historians have argued about long-term consequences, but many see links between the slave trade and later political fragmentation and economic disruption in affected areas. In the Americas, enslaved people built the wealth of plantation colonies while suffering extreme exploitation. Despite this, they preserved and adapted languages, religions, music, foodways, and family bonds, profoundly shaping American cultures.
The trade began to decline only after the late eighteenth century, as abolitionist movements grew and enslaved people resisted, most dramatically in the Haitian Revolution. Britain banned its slave trade in 1807, and other nations followed, though illegal shipments continued for decades. Slavery itself persisted in the Americas until the 1800s, ending last in Brazil in 1888.