Chapter 14: Economic Transformations

Commerce In People: The Atlantic Slave Trade

The Atlantic slave trade impacted the early modern era so greatly that its commercial ties contributed to a
global next of exchange. The Atlantic slave trade is the most recent owning and exchange of human beings
that existed on a large scale. Between 1500 and 1866, “this trade in human beings took an estimated 12.5
million people from African societies, shipped them across the Atlantic in the infamous Middle Passage,
and deposited some 10.7 million of them in the Americas, where they lived out their often-brief lives as
slave” (Strayer, 620). The slave trade added African descent into the European and Native American mix
of the Americas. Slavery came in many forms, because before the 1500, the Mediterranean and Indian
Ocean basins were where most of the Old World slave trade occurred. This means that the slavery
practices that grew in the Americas varied greatly from the Old World practices. The first way was the
huge size of the trafficking to the Americas and the major impact it had to the centrality of the economies.
Another difference was that slavery in the Americas was largely based on plantation agriculture,
dehumanizing slaves to property. Slave status was also inherited in the Americas, with little hope of
freedom. The most distinctive practice of slavery in the Americas was the racial differentiation.
The demand for slave labor was the main cause of its expansion, but the exchange was largely controlled
by Africans. One of the consequences of the Atlantic slave trade was the new trans-regional connections
as Africa of the Atlantic trading world.