The Transatlantic Slave Trade and the Making of the African Diaspora

Between the early 1500s and the 1860s, European and American traders forcibly carried about 12. 5 million Africans across the Atlantic, the largest forced migration in history. Roughly 10. 7 million survived the Middle Passage and were enslaved in Brazil, the Caribbean, Spanish America and North America.

The trade depended on networks linking European ports, African rulers and merchants who sold captives, and plantation owners in the Americas, so responsibility was spread across many actors, though power and profit lay heavily with European and colonial buyers. It devastated communities in West and Central Africa and created a brutal system of hereditary bondage in the Americas. Yet enslaved people also preserved and rebuilt languages, beliefs, music and family ties, creating the African diaspora.

Understanding this history is essential to explaining the population, culture and inequalities of the Atlantic world.