The Beginning of the Transatlantic Slave Triangle (1 gen 1500 anni – 1 gen 1615 anni)

Descrizione:

When: 16th until 19th century

Where: Africa to the Americas

The transatlantic slave trade was one of three parts of the "triangular trade" that transported between 10 million and 12 million enslaved Africans across the Atlantic Ocean to the Americans from the 16th to the 19th century.

The transatlantic slave trade generally followed a triangular route:

1. Traders set out from European ports towards Africa's west coast. There they bought people in exchange for goods and loaded them into the ships.

2. The voyage across the Atlantic, known as the Middle Passage, generally took 6 to 8 weeks. Once in the Americas those Africans who had survived the journey were offloaded for sale and put to work as enslaved labor.

3. The ships then returned to Europe with goods such as sugar, coffee, tobacco, rice, and later cotton, which had been produced by enslaved labor.

The triangle, involving three continents, was complete. European capital, African labor, and American land and resources combined to supply a European market.

While the Portuguese used African slave labor in sugar plantations in South Africa, Cape Verde, and Madeira by the 1480s, the Spanish took African slaves to the Caribbean after 1502. Still, Portuguese traders dominated the market for another 150 years. During parts of the 1600s, the Dutch took over and became the foremost traders of enslaved people.
In the following century, English and French merchants controlled about half of the transatlantic slave trade, taking a large percentage of their human cargo from the region of West Africa between the Sénégal and Niger rivers.

Probably no more than a few hundred thousand Africans were taken to the Americas before 1600. In the 17th century, however, demand for enslaved labor rose sharply with the growth of sugar plantations in the Caribbean and tobacco plantations in the Chesapeake region in North America.

In 1713 the British and Spanish agreed that the British would have a monopoly of the slave trade with the Spanish colonies.

The slave trade had disastrous effects in in Africa. Economic incentives for warlords and tribes to engage in the trade of enslaved people fostered an atmosphere of both lawlessness and violence.
Depopulation and the persistent fear of captivity rendered economic and agricultural development virtually impossible in much of West Africa. A large percentage of the people captured were females in their child-bearing years and young adolescent males who would have normally started a family.
They were, for instance, farmers, merchants, priests, soldiers, goldsmiths and musicians.
European slaveholders typically left behind the older, disabled, or otherwise dependent-groups least able to contribute to the overall economic well-being of their societies.

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