The chapter reviews the scholarly interpretations of abolition that have appeared in the last two decades. One group, influenced by Eric Williams, looks for economic motivations stemming from a decline of the British plantation sector; a second focuses on rebellions by slaves, the chief of which was that in St. Domingue, which gave birth to Haiti in 1802. Some in this category see the slaves freeing themselves. Others argue for long-run changes in public attitudes toward violence within Western Europe, especially England, that occurred in the 150 years after the British established their Caribbean plantations. In the eighteenth century the nascent London press began to report slaves resistance to enslavement both on board slave ships and in Caribbean colonies. These reports became more frequent and more detailed as the century progressed. Other cruelties such as burning at the stake, abandoning children, masters’ right to chastise their servants, and the lords’ power over their serfs (in mainland Europe) either ceased or became less frequently exercised. At the same time awareness of Africans and their forced use in the Americas as represented in the London press greatly increased after 1750. Where “slaves” meant English captives in North Africa at the beginning of the century, by 1800 the term referred to Blacks in the Americas.

Slave vessels dispatched from Northwest Europe were larger and more heavily armed than their Iberian and American counterparts. The barricado, a heavy wooden barrier located midship, separating off men-slaves, was a central feature not found among slavers in the South Atlantic. The Portuguese operated vessels in which many crew were Black, including some enslaved. These were able to talk to captives in their own language and provide some assurance that they would not be eaten on arrival and would have some familiarity with their new environmrnt. Rebellions of slaves on Portuguese vessels were unusual. The Portuguese/Brazilians also did very little ship trading. Instead, they used bulking centers on land to hold slaves prior to their embarkation en masse. This reduced the time a captive would spend on board, which was already shorter than those of their Northwestern European rivals because of the shorter voyage times to Brazil from most parts of Africa. The Portuguese were thus the most efficient of all national slave traders. The bulking centers in Upper Guinea and Angola were connected to trade routes through to the interior and manned by lançados, usually half-African and half-European. The shipping part of their system was adopted by all slave traders in the nineteenth century.

The book is an attempt to rewrite Atlantic history by reassessing the story of the slave trade. As already noted, it is based on the digital humanities project www.slavevoyages.org, which at the time of writing is fourteen years old. If we include its CD-ROM predecessor published by Cambridge University Press in 1999, the data it provides have been in the public domain for a quarter-century. In that time many millions of visitors, whether scholars, students, the media, or interested members of the public have drawn on it in ways that its compilers and editors could never have imagined. Many more again have passed through exhibitions around the Atlantic world, including the permanent display of Washington, DC’s National Museum of African American History and Culture, and the Nantes Memorial to the Abolition of Slavery that have incorporated its offerings. Few discussions of the slave trade fail to cite this resource. It is often described as a model of what the social sciences should be trying to achieve – presenting reliable, accessible, and renewable data to the interested public along with some basic interpretations. Consistent with this assessment, it has received financial support from a range of countries that almost matches the reach of the slave trade itself. In what many will see as appropriate, the only continent that has not contributed funding to its development is Africa. Public and private financial support over the years amounts to several million US dollars.

For 350 years, African and European slave merchants traded with each other on the African coast as equals. Europeans generally recognized and accepted African rules on who could and could not be enslaved. When they did not, then trading relations would break down. The African names database allows the identification of the major slave-trading groups, at least for the nineteenth century. For most parts of the African Coast the ruling authority’s role was not to sell large numbers of people, but rather to provide a secure environment in which slave trading could take place. A wide-ranging database of African sellers shows that while large traders certainly existed, the great majority of sellers sold just five or fewer captives. The chapter evaluates the positions of four major Africanist scholars on relations between Europeans and Africans in light of the new quantitative work. It concludes that only one, John Thornton, has made arguments consistent with the new findings. Also it is now clear that slave traders in Africa, like those in Europe and the Americas, fronted a large labor force for growing provisions, guard-duty, and distribution of trading goods, especially in West Africa. Abolition is not likely to have had economic motives either at the level of the individual or the state.

The Northwest Europeans were latecomers to Atlantic slavery and had to make do with second-best trading locations. It was the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century economic growth of the English and Dutch that allowed them to break into the Iberian Atlantic system rather than the two countries needing the slave trade to stimulate their economic development. Northwest Europeans never broached the Portuguese strongholds of Guinea-Bissau and Angola as slave-supply centers and were able to use Brazilian gold to hold their own in the Bight of Benin. And the British and the Dutch sold many of the slaves that they did buy to the Spanish Americas. The British made repeated unsuccessful attempts to break into the Brazilian market. The traffic was widely supported in most European countries, given that preparation for a successful voyage absorbed a large labor force and many thousands of investors.

More than 200,000 Africans were freed from slave ships after 1807 as a result of British policy. Most were processed by Mixed Commission or Vice-Admiralty Courts and assigned the status of “Liberated Africans,” but their freedom was severely restricted by “apprenticeships” of varying lengths supposedly to prepare them for entering a free labor market. However those entering Cuban or Brazilian jurisdictions had lives little different from slaves. In Sierra Leone, by contrast, apprenticeships were short-term and did not involve plantation labor. Photographic, anthropometric, and per capita income evidence indicates that most did not do as well as the poor European migrants who were emigrating in large numbers to the Americas at this period. Liberated Africans did not have the same opportunities as Whites because of racism. They did not have access to the land distributed by the Homestead Act, and could not enter labor markets on the same terms as Whites. In other words, the anti-Black attitudes that made the transatlantic slave trade possible continued after its abolition. The Liberated African records allow us to examine the African origins of enslaved people. The nineteenth-century slave trade from West Africa had a preponderance of Yoruba, Igbo, and Mende speakers.

Review of the inhumane practices of people in both New and Old Worlds prior to Columbian contact. Slave trading and cruelty were widespread, and slave trading was extensive. Most slaves were female, employed in domestic or agricultural environments (with little evidence of gang-labor), and came from a wide range of geographic areas and cultures. Most were born into slavery or were enslaved as a result of raids and wars in which many men on the losing side were killed. Slave markets existed across Eurasia, though in the pre-contact New World such markets were less common. After 1500, transatlantic trafficking came to draw exclusively on Africa or at least on Black people, probably because of the long isolation of the Americas from the rest of the world, and the inability of its Indigenous population to resist harmful pathogens from the Old World. Before 1820 migration to the New World was dominated by Africans rather than Europeans and by males (in contrast to the female-dominated slave populations of the Old World). White slaves were scarcely ever present in the New World.