How Many Enslaved People Were Taken from Africa?

Information about how many enslaved people were stolen from Africa and shipped across the Atlantic to the Americas during the sixteenth century can only be estimated as few records exist for this period. However, from the seventeenth century onward, increasingly accurate records, such as ship manifests, are available.

The First Trans-Atlantic Trade of Enslaved People 

At the beginning of the 1600s, enslaved people for the Trans-Atlantic slave trade were captured in Senegambia and the Windward Coast. This region had had a long history of providing enslaved people for the Islamic trans-Saharan trade. Around 1650 the Kingdom of the Kongo, which the Portuguese had ties with, started exporting enslaved people. The focus of the Trans-Atlantic slave trade moved to here and neighboring northern Angola. Kongo and Angola would continue to be substantial exporters of enslaved people until the nineteenth century. Senegambia would provide a steady trickle of enslaved people through the centuries, but never on the same scale as the other regions of Africa.

Rapid Expansion

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Origins of the Trans-Atlantic Trade of Enslaved People

By Alistair Boddy-Evans

From the 1670s the "Slave Coast" (Bight of Benin) underwent a rapid expansion of trade in enslaved people which continued until the nineteenth century. Gold Coast export of enslaved people rose sharply in the eighteenth century but dropped markedly when Britain abolished slavery in 1808 and commenced anti-slavery patrols along the coast.

The Bight of Biafra, centered on the Niger Delta and the Cross River, became a significant exporter of enslaved people from the 1740s and, and along with its neighbor the Bight of Benin, dominated the Trans-Atlantic slave trade until its effective end in the mid-nineteenth century. These two regions alone account for two-thirds of the Trans-Atlantic slave trade in the first half of the 1800s.

The Slave Trade Declines

The scale of the Trans-Atlantic slave trade declined during the Napoleonic wars in Europe (1799 to 1815) but quickly rebounded once peace returned. Britain abolished slavery in 1808 and British patrols effectively ended the trade in enslaved peoples along the Gold Coast and up to Senegambia. When the port of Lagos was taken by the British in 1840, the trade of enslaved people from the Bight of Benin also collapsed.

The trade of enslaved people from the Bight of Biafra gradually declined in the nineteenth century, partially as a result of British patrols and a reduction in demand for enslaved people from America, but also because of local shortages of enslaved people. To fulfill the demand, the significant tribes in the region (such and the Luba, Lunda, and Kazanje) turned on each other using the Cokwe (hunters from further inland) as mercenaries. People were captured and enslaved as a result of raids. The Cokwe, however, became dependent on this new form of employment and turned on their employers when the coastal trade of enslaved people evaporated.

The increased activities of British anti-slavery patrols along the west-African coast resulted in a brief upturn in trade from west-central and south-east Africa as increasingly desperate Trans-Atlantic slave ships visited ports under Portuguese protection. The authorities there were inclined to look the other way.

With a general abolition of slavery in effect by the end of the nineteenth century, Africa started to be seen as a different resource: instead of enslaved people, the continent was being eyed for its land and minerals. The scramble for Africa was on, and its people would be coerced into 'employment' in mines and on plantations.

Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Data

The greatest raw-data resource for those investigating the Trans-Atlantic slave trade is the WEB du Bois database. However, its scope is restricted to trade destined for the Americas and does not include those sent to African plantation islands and Europe.