Atlantic Slave Trade

The consequences of the slave trade for African societies are being debated. The slave trade’s harshest critics point out that removal of millions of young men and women led to depopulation that stifled African creativity and production. They argue, too, that slaving and slave trading stimulated warfare, corrupted laws (making more crimes punishable by enslavement), stifled technological advancement, and created a class of elite rulers and traders. Some argue that the slave trade was the beginning of a dependency relationship with Europe. This relationship was based on the exchange of Africa’s valuable primary products for European manufactured goods, which continued after the slave trade ended, through a colonial period and beyond. In this sense, the slave trade was the first step toward modern Africa’s current status as a region where technological development has yet to match that of more industrialized nations.

Those who argue that the effects were less dramatic believe that serious depopulation occurred only in specific locations and only in the 18th century, when the trade was at its height. Some suggest that warfare caused slave trading rather than vice versa or that African production of such items as cloth and metals grew rather than declined through the slave-trade years. Some argue that African societies were likely to become dependent on Europe’s industrial economy, as others did in the 19th and 20th centuries, without regard to its history of slave trading.

One might think that ending the slave trade would be beneficial for all Africans, but such was not the case. Many coastal groups had been exchanging humans for merchandise for centuries. Their economies were geared to slave exporting, and they were dependent on the commodities they obtained for slaves. Stopping the slave trade caused economic hardship, especially for groups who had no products to substitute for slave exports. Some nearer the Sahara or Africa’s eastern coast continued the trade in a different direction; others were able to make the transition to legitimate commerce, such as growing peanuts or extracting palm oil. Still others found additional uses for slaves in their own societies. But many had little economic alternative to the slave trade, and for them the 19th century brought hard economic times.

Although the Atlantic slave trade was an economic phenomenon, the millions of Africans who crossed the Atlantic had enormous demographic, social, cultural, and intellectual effects on the Americas. For over three and one-half centuries more Africans crossed the Atlantic than Europeans. Today, people of African descent are the dominant elements of populations throughout the Caribbean and are significant parts of the population in North and South America. African culture mixed with European and Native American ways to define life in the multicultural American setting. African elements are identifiable today in American religions. The Vodun religion of Haiti and the Candomblé religion of Brazil are two examples. More subtle elements, such as call-and-response singing, appear in churches in North America. African influence is also apparent in music (the African roots of blues and jazz are well documented), dance, language (the Gullah dialect of coastal South Carolina retains much African vocabulary), family practices, architecture, foods, dress, and more.

The fact that nearly all people of African descent in the Americas were slaves has been an important factor in the growth and persistence of racism in the Western world. Europeans based judgments of people on physical appearance before the Atlantic slave trade, but once dark skin alone became associated with slave status, racism leapt forward. Moreover, forcing slaves to work inhumanly hard and behave in prescribed ways required punishing them beyond civilized norms and the limits of the law. To justify such punishment, people classified slaves as different, even subhuman. Race became the obvious marker of such differences. The resulting negative perceptions of persons of African descent have been difficult to eradicate over the years since the Atlantic trade, and New World slavery, have ended.