The transatlantic slave trade
History · Key Stage 3 · The School
What happened, stated plainly
Between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries, European traders forcibly transported an estimated twelve million African people across the Atlantic to be enslaved on plantations in the Americas. Around one and a half million died on the voyage. Britain was the largest carrier for much of the eighteenth century, and British ports, banks and manufacturers were built partly on the proceeds.
The triangular trade
Ships left Bristol, Liverpool or London carrying manufactured goods — cloth, guns, iron — to the West African coast, where they were exchanged for captured people. The second leg, the Middle Passage, carried those people to the Caribbean and the Americas. The third returned with sugar, tobacco and cotton. Every leg was profitable, which is why it continued for three centuries.
The Middle Passage
People were chained below decks for six to ten weeks in spaces too low to stand in, with little water and no sanitation. Disease, thirst and violence killed roughly one in eight. Resistance was constant — there were hundreds of recorded shipboard revolts — and it was met with force. Contemporary plans of the ship Brookes, drawn by abolitionists from the traders’ own figures, show how the packing was calculated.
Why it ended, and who ended it
In 1807 Britain banned the trade in captive Africans, but slavery stayed legal in the British West Indies. In Jamaica, Samuel Sharpe, a Baptist deacon held in slavery, planned a strike. Workers would refuse to work after Christmas 1831 unless they were paid. When the demands were rejected, it became a revolt. Estimates of how many joined run from 20,000 to 60,000. The revolt was crushed in January 1832, and Sharpe was hanged in May. The History of Parliament says reports of the crushing reached the Commons, where freeing people at once was called for. It also says over 200 MPs elected in 1832 had taken a campaigners' pledge for immediate freedom. In 1833 Parliament passed a law to end slavery in the British West Indies. Even so, adults had to work unpaid for their old owners until 1838. Gordon Barnes, writing in 2017, argues that many histories credit campaigners and government in Britain, but that freedom was won in the colonies through revolt. So a fair answer credits the campaigners and the people who rose up.