Transatlantic Slave Trade

The transatlantic slave trade (1500–1867) forcibly transported approximately 12.5 million Africans to the Americas — the largest forced migration in history. An estimated 2 million died during the Middle Passage. Enslaved people were sold primarily to sugar, tobacco, cotton, and rice plantations in Brazil, the Caribbean, and North America. The trade generated enormous wealth that financed European industrialization. The economic case for abolition (made by Adam Smith and others) combined with the moral case (Wilberforce, Equiano, Clarkson) to produce British abolition in 1807 and American prohibition in 1808 — though the illegal trade continued. Slavery itself was abolished gradually: British Empire (1833), United States (1865), Brazil (1888). The legacy of slavery — structural racism, wealth inequality, trauma — shapes societies across the Americas today.