1. The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade
Barbara Anderson African Studies Center, UNC-Chapel Hill November

2. How did the trans-Atlantic slave trade begin
How did the trans-Atlantic slave trade begin? Why did Europeans choose Africans?

3. Origins of the trans-Atlantic Slave Trade
Begin with the Age of Exploration—the Portuguese, not Columbus!
African and Middle Eastern science and technology were central
Portuguese explore west coast of Africa, looking for Asia

5. Long-distance trading throughout this area, including slaves

6. European Invasion and Occupation of the Americas
1441 Portuguese in West Africa
1492 Columbus
1498 Vasco de Gama
1500 Cabral to Brazil
1517 Spain gives Portugal 1st Asiento
1542 only African slaves in Spanish colonies

7. WHY DID EUROPEANS NEED SLAVES?
SUGAR AND GOLD
MINING AND MONOCULTURE CASH CROPS

9. Slave exports from Africa
, % ,868, ,133, ** ,330, Total 11,698,000 **This is also the century that most Americans can trace their African ancestors to.

10. Destination of Slaves
Europe 2% U.S. (Mainland North Am.) 5% Caribbean 42% Brazil 38% Spanish Am. 13%

11. Why did Africans sell slaves to Europeans
Why did Africans sell slaves to Europeans? Were they “selling their own people?”

12. Africans did NOT “sell their own”:
Slavery in most of Africa
(and rest of the world!)
Long-distance trading
No racial or national identity
Local and/or lineage loyalty
Prisoners of War or other outsiders
African resistance occurred, but infrequent

13. How do we depict the trade?

14. What do we need the trade to be?

15. http://www. nps. gov/history/ethnography/aah/aaheritage/histContextsA

16. http://hitchcock. itc. virginia. edu/SlaveTrade/collection/large/D001

17. http://hitchcock. itc. virginia

20. Places in the slave trade
Liverpool
Senegambia
Dahomey
Kongo
Rio de Janeiro
Jamaica
Cuba
Charleston
Boston

21. Goree Warehouses, Liverpool

22. Where the ships were headed
Goree Island, Senegal

24. Omar Ibn Sayyid,

26. Charleston, South Carolina 1807

28. Venture Smith, 1729-1805 Born in West Africa Enslaved at age 6
Marched to the coast
Sold to Rhode Island ship
Lived in colonial New England
Purchased self and family
Africans in America DVD

29. Chicago and the slave trade???
Many Black Chicagoans whose families moved here in the late 19th or early 20th century came from Mississippi
These Americans may have had ancestors who experienced the INTERNAL SLAVE TRADE, , having been marched or shipped from the Upper South
AND/OR they may have been brought directly in to the Lower Mississippi by the French during the colonial period, probably from Senegambia.

30. Resources for teaching:
Africans in America 4-part video/DVD and web site
for narratives of Africans
for images of slave trade (also AIA above)
lesson plans and overview of slave trade

31. Book Resources for Teachers
Lindsay, Lisa (2008) Captives as Commodities: The Transatlantic Slave Trade
Diouf, Sylvaine A. (1998) Servants of Allah: African Muslims Enslaved in the Americas
Thomas, Hugh (1997) The slave trade : the story of the Atlantic slave trade,
Wright, Donald (2000) African Americans in the Colonial Era, 2nd Ed.
Hine et al. (2006) The African American Odyssey (Textbook)
Klein, Herbert (1999) The Atlantic Slave Trade