Impact Of Slave Trade

The slave trade in African captives, already well underway in Europe and the Atlantic islands since at least the fifteenth century, morphed into the historical period known as the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade when Europeans who made the voyage to the Americas in the sixteenth century began shipping Africans as cargo along with other commodities being transported to the New World. By the middle of the century, dedicated slave ships had begun to transport captured peoples across the route known as the Middle Passage directly from Africa to the Western hemisphere, and particularly in the Caribbean and Brazil. The slave trade reached its pinnacle in the eighteenth century as 80% of all slaves from this time period sailed after 1700. However, the end of the eighteenth century was also the beginning of the end for the systemic, lawful chattel slavery that had entitled elites to legal ownership of other humans. …show more content…
Much of the accounting of this time involves economic and legislative history, conditions of the enslaved, and an accounting of who went where. However, it is the abolition movement that has truly sparked the most debate amongst both its contemporaries as well as with historians throughout the past several centuries. It is these movements in which the rise of autonomy and the notion of human rights developed. In understanding this time period, many historians have studied unusual sources for clues. This practice remains little analyzed as a whole. However, the use of atypical sources can typically be found in the historian’s methodology, referenced within the arguments, or listed in the