The History of the World

The History of the World · Grades 10–13 · College · University

The Slave Trades

History · Level band: Grades 10–13 · College · University

DRAFT — CULTURAL REVIEW PENDING. These history classes are a publisher’s draft blend of the Collection’s history research into this history website, standing on its own website. Cultural review precedes any public release of this strand. Readings carry the research labels unchanged: DOCUMENTED · DEBATED · CLAIM · OWNER'S TEACHING. This page carries no advertising.

English edition — the language editions of the history classes are outstanding and will follow the site’s translation pattern; none is fabricated here.

For the teacher — teacher-facing guidance for this class stands in this box only; the reading below is the student reading. Senior band only (Grades 10–13 in the dossier's placement; this site's senior band): the mechanics of the trades, Middle Passage and mortality detail, the figures argued at full weight, compensation forensics and primary testimony read at length stay in this band. The foundations that may be taught earlier, in age-plain language and without the senior detail, are: that the trades happened, across the Atlantic, the Sahara and the Indian Ocean over many centuries; African civilisations first — students should meet Africa as kingdoms, cities, scholarship, agriculture and craft, Kongo among them, before they meet Africa as a place people were taken from; resistance at foundation level, named at story level (Palmares; Haiti 1804) without campaign or mortality detail; abolition as human action, in which the testimony and resistance of the enslaved themselves were central — Equiano's and Cugoano's books named as books real people wrote to end the trade; and the diaspora's gifts of knowledge, music, foodways and faith. If a younger student asks a direct question reaching into the senior list, answer truthfully and briefly at foundation level — never lie, never elaborate into the senior detail. Handling: no re-enactment, simulation or role-play of enslavement, sale or the crossings, at any band; testimony is read in the witnesses' own words or not at all, never paraphrased into graphic summary for effect; diaspora students are never asked to speak for this history, and no student is assigned an identity within it.

How to read the numbers in this class

DOCUMENTED — the discipline. The three trades in this class do not stand on equal evidence, and the class does not pretend they do. Every figure below is labelled by its kind — count, database reconstruction / estimate, commission estimate, scholarly reconstruction, or survey figure — and disputed figures are given as sourced ranges with the sources named. Conflicts are shown, never resolved, and never averaged into a false precision.

The transatlantic trade is documented voyage by voyage in a large database built from shipping, port and customs records; its headline figures are therefore stated as that database's estimates, with the database named every time. The trans-Saharan and Indian Ocean / East African trades ran for many more centuries, left no comparable voyage-by-voyage archive, and are reconstructed from caravan, customs, travel and later colonial records; their figures are given only as sourced ranges, with the disagreement between scholars shown in the text. A range is not a failure. It is the honest state of the evidence.

Four witness families, kept distinct: (1) databases and archival reconstructions — SlaveVoyages (the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database) and the Slave Compensation Commission records reconstructed by University College London's Legacies of British Slavery project [LBS]; (2) scholarly estimates and monographs — Ralph A. Austen, Paul E. Lovejoy, Abdul Sheriff, Patrick Manning, Nathan Nunn, David Eltis and David Richardson; (3) legislation and official acts, named and dated; (4) testimony of the enslaved and of African and diaspora voices — a witness family in its own right, not illustration for other people's records: Olaudah Equiano, The Interesting Narrative (London, 1789); Ottobah Cugoano, Thoughts and Sentiments on the Evil and Wicked Traffic of the Slavery and Commerce of the Human Species (London, 1787), the earliest major African abolitionist treatise published in Britain; Mahommah Gardo Baquaqua, Biography (Detroit, 1854, dictated to Samuel Moore), one of the very few book-length testimonies of enslavement in Brazil; and Afonso I of Kongo (Nzinga Mbemba), letters to João III of Portugal, 1526. Where testimony and archive disagree, this class says so. It does not silently prefer the archive.

1. The transatlantic trade

1.1 Scale — stated as the database's estimates

DOCUMENTED — database reconstruction / estimate. The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database (SlaveVoyages, hosted at Rice University; principal investigators including David Eltis and David Richardson) records some 36,000 transatlantic slaving voyages and estimates the trade as a whole [SV]: about 12.5 million Africans embarked on slave ships in Africa (the Estimates page gives 12,520,000); about 10.7 million disembarked alive, mainly in the Americas; the difference — more than 1.8 million people — is the database-derived estimate of deaths on the Middle Passage itself. These are estimates built up from documented voyages plus correction for missing voyages, not a census or a count. The database holds a trace of roughly 80–85% of voyages; the totals are the project's inference from that record. Students must be taught to say “SlaveVoyages estimates…”, not “exactly … were taken.”

DOCUMENTED — database reconstruction. Destinations: well over 90% of those who survived the crossing were landed in the Caribbean and South America; Brazil was the single largest receiving region, and only a minority — about 6% of captives — were carried directly to mainland North America [SV; ELTIS]. The popular picture in which most captives went to what became the United States is therefore wrong on the database's own figures. Chronology: direct Africa-to-Americas slaving voyages run from the 1520s to 1866–67; more than eight in ten of those carried were embarked in the century and a half after 1700, and over a quarter of the whole trade — about 3.2 million people embarked — took place after Britain abolished its own trade in 1807, while the trade was illegal and being suppressed [SV].

1.2 The Middle Passage

DOCUMENTED. The Middle Passage is the Atlantic crossing between embarkation in Africa and sale in the Americas, lasting weeks to months depending on route and weather. Its mortality is contained in the embarked/disembarked gap above: about 12.5 million embarked against about 10.7 million disembarked [SV — database estimate]. What the crossing was like is known in the first person from testimony, and this class rests that part of the account on the testimony rather than on traders' records: Equiano's Interesting Narrative (1789) describes his own capture as a child, sale and crossing [EQUIANO]; Cugoano (1787) likewise writes as a man who had been enslaved and carried across [CUGOANO]; Baquaqua's memoir (1854) gives the corresponding testimony for the later, illegal-era trade to Brazil [BAQUAQUA]. Deaths before embarkation — in wars and raids of capture, on the marches to the coast, and in coastal confinement — are not contained in the SlaveVoyages figures, which begin at embarkation. No database total for them exists. See the NOT VERIFIED register, NV-1.

1.3 The plantation systems the captives were carried to

DOCUMENTED. The demand that drove the trade was plantation production for Atlantic markets, above all: sugar in Brazil and the Caribbean — the largest destination complex, and the crop whose labour regime consumed captives at rates that required continuous importation to maintain plantation populations; tobacco, rice and later cotton in mainland North America; coffee in Saint-Domingue and later Brazil; gold and diamond mining in Brazil [ELTIS; KLEIN]. That plantation populations in the sugar colonies did not sustain themselves by natural increase, so that planters kept buying captives, is a documented demographic feature of those systems, in contrast to the enslaved population of the United States, which grew substantially by natural increase after importation ended [ELTIS; KLEIN]. The contrast matters: the same legal institution — chattel slavery — ran at very different human cost in different plantation economies, and the trade figures cannot be understood without it.

1.4 Who profited — documented at every end

DOCUMENTED — database reconstruction by carrier flag. SlaveVoyages breaks the embarked total down by carrier flag: Portugal (including Brazilian carriers) about 5.85 million; Great Britain about 3.26 million; France about 1.38 million; Spain about 1.06 million; the Netherlands about 554,000; the United States about 305,000; Denmark about 111,000 [SV]. Behind those flags stood named merchants, shipowners, insurers and outfitters in ports such as Liverpool, Nantes, Lisbon and Amsterdam, reconstructed in the trade literature [ELTIS].

DOCUMENTED. African sellers and intermediaries: captives were supplied to the coast through African political and commercial systems — war captives, judicial enslavement, kidnapping, and trade through African merchants and rulers who received European goods, including firearms and textiles, in exchange [LOVEJOY; THORNTON]. This is part of the documented record and is taught as such; it does not distribute the system's design evenly — the Atlantic market, its shipping, its plantation demand and its finance were European and American creations [ELTIS]. Afonso I's 1526 letters show an African ruler protesting, at the system's very beginning, that the trade as the Portuguese were running it was kidnapping his free subjects and emptying his kingdom — evidence both of African participation structures and of African resistance to what the trade was becoming [AFONSO].

DOCUMENTED. Planters and the metropolitan economies: plantation output — sugar, cotton, tobacco, coffee — entered European and North American consumption, manufacture and finance. The British case is documented in unusual completeness because of abolition compensation (§5): the UCL Legacies of British Slavery database identifies more than 40,000 individual slave-owners compensated in the 1830s and traces compensation money into British railways, finance, philanthropy and country houses [LBS; HALL]. Whether slavery's profits caused British industrialisation — Eric Williams's thesis in Capitalism and Slavery (1944) — remains a live scholarly dispute, DEBATED, and is taught as a dispute, not as settled fact [WILLIAMS; §6.2].

2. The trans-Saharan trade

2.1 What it was

DOCUMENTED. For roughly thirteen centuries, from the mid-7th century CE into the early 20th century, enslaved people were carried north across the Sahara from West, Central and East African regions of capture to markets in the Maghreb, Egypt, the Levant, the Arabian Peninsula and beyond [AUSTEN; LOVEJOY]. The routes were caravan routes, travelled on foot and by camel between desert staging points; the trade ran alongside, and through the same commercial system as, the trans-Saharan trade in gold, salt and manufactures [AUSTEN 2010]. Those taken were put to domestic service, agricultural and military labour, and concubinage in destination societies; a documented part of the trade was in boys castrated to serve as eunuchs, with the mortality of that practice itself recorded in the literature [AUSTEN; SEGAL]. This class carries no detail beyond that register.

2.2 The figures — a range, with the conflict shown

DEBATED — scholarly reconstructions, shown never resolved. There is no voyage database for this trade. Every total is a reconstruction. The scholarly positions, named, are:

The conflict, stated plainly: careful scholars working from overlapping evidence differ by millions, and Bairoch's figure differs from Austen's by a factor of more than three. This class does not average them and does not pick one. What can be said without exceeding the evidence: the trade ran for about thirteen centuries; the reconstructions of its specialist historians (Austen, Wright, Lovejoy) converge on millions — on the order of 6–9 million for the Saharan crossing itself — and diverge beyond that. Any teaching figure must be quoted with its author attached.

DOCUMENTED — framing, not a total. UNESCO's Slave Route Project (launched at Ouidah, Benin, 1994; since 2022, Routes of Enslaved Peoples) frames the trans-Saharan, Red Sea and Indian Ocean trades together with the Atlantic trade as one global history of enslavement to be studied across all the regions it touched [UNESCO]. That framing, not a UNESCO total, is what this class takes from the project: UNESCO does not publish a single authoritative head-count for the Saharan trade, and none is attributed to it here.

2.3 Duration and ending

DOCUMENTED. Unlike the Atlantic trade, the Saharan trade has no single abolition date. It declined under a combination of colonial suppression, the closing of destination markets, and changing transport (railways displacing caravans) in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and persisted in places into the 20th century [AUSTEN; LOVEJOY]. Its latest legal afterlife is Mauritania's: see §5.

3. The Indian Ocean / East African trade

3.1 What it was

DOCUMENTED. Enslaved Africans were carried from the East African coast and its hinterland across the Indian Ocean and the Red Sea — to Arabia, the Persian Gulf, India, and (in the 18th–19th centuries, in growing numbers) to the French sugar islands of Mauritius and Réunion and to plantation economies elsewhere — over a period reaching back into the first millennium CE and continuing into the 20th century [SHERIFF; AUSTEN]. Dhow traffic moved with the monsoons; Zanzibar became the trade's great 19th-century entrepôt under the Omani Sultanate [SHERIFF].

DOCUMENTED. Abdul Sheriff's Slaves, Spices and Ivory in Zanzibar (1987) documents the trade's decisive 19th-century transformation: as export of enslaved people was progressively restricted by treaty — the Moresby Treaty (1822) and the Hamerton Treaty (1845) with Britain, and the 1873 treaty under which Sultan Barghash closed Zanzibar's slave market — slave labour was increasingly retained on the East African coast itself to produce cloves on Zanzibar and Pemba and grain on the mainland coast for export [SHERIFF]. Emancipation in Zanzibar followed only in 1897, and the commissioners' records show 11,837 people formally emancipated between 1897 and 1907 — a count from commissioners' records — out of an enslaved population estimated at the clove economy's height at between 60,000 and 100,000 [SHERIFF, with Vijaya Teelock, in the Indian Ocean slavery literature].

DOCUMENTED. Earlier depth of the trade is witnessed by the Zanj Revolt (869–883 CE) — the great revolt of East African enslaved labourers in southern Iraq, which held Basra and resisted the Abbasid Caliphate for fourteen years [ZANJ]. It stands in this class for two facts at once: the Indian Ocean trade was already large in the 9th century, and resistance to it is as old as the trade itself (§4).

3.2 The figures — ranges and uncertainty, as with the Sahara

DEBATED — scholarly reconstructions and survey figures, shown never resolved. Austen's comparative estimate: the combined trans-Saharan, Red Sea and Indian Ocean trades were, in total, comparable in scale to the transatlantic trade (about 12.5 million embarked) — spread, however, over more than a millennium rather than three and a half centuries [AUSTEN 2010, p. 33, as cited by NUNN] — scholarly reconstruction. Estimates in wider circulation for the eastern maritime routes alone run to roughly 4–5 million over the centuries of the trade — a figure that appears in survey literature but rests on thinner reconstruction than Austen's combined modelling, recorded here as survey-level, not as a settled total. Older survey writing sometimes gives about 12 million for the eastern trades over twelve centuries (750 CE–20th century). That figure is incompatible with some of the component estimates in §2.2 and §3.2 read together, which is itself the lesson: the component reconstructions and the popular totals do not reconcile, and this class does not force them to. For the Indian Ocean trade there is no equivalent of SlaveVoyages; pre-17th-century volumes in particular are reconstructed from fragmentary references and cannot be verified to a total. See NOT VERIFIED register, NV-3.

4. Resistance — at every stage

DOCUMENTED. Resistance was not an epilogue to the trades; it was continuous with them.

4.1 Refusal and protest at the point of capture and sale

DOCUMENTED — testimony / contemporary protest. Afonso I of Kongo's letters of 1526 to João III of Portugal protest that traders “are kidnapping our people — children of this country, sons of our nobles and vassals, even people of our own family,” that the kingdom was being depopulated, and state his wish “that this kingdom not be a place for the trade or transport of slaves” [AFONSO]. Afonso was a slave-holding ruler of his time, not a modern abolitionist — the record carries that too — which is what makes the letters such strong evidence: even from inside the period's assumptions, the Atlantic trade's lawless expansion was named, in writing, by an African king, in 1526.

4.2 Shipboard revolt

DOCUMENTED. Revolt on slave ships is documented throughout the Atlantic trade's records — in ship logs, insurance cases and trial records — and captains' precautions (chains, nets, armed guards, keeping captives below) were themselves a response to its constant expectation [REDDIKER; RICHARDSON]. No complete count of revolts survives; see NOT VERIFIED register, NV-4.

DOCUMENTED — court record. La Amistad, 1839. Enslaved Africans — Mende people kidnapped in Sierra Leone and illegally carried to Cuba in defiance of Spain's treaty obligations — were put aboard the schooner La Amistad for transfer within Cuba. Led by Sengbe Pieh (Joseph Cinqué), they rose, killed the captain and cook, and ordered the surviving Spanish purchasers to sail them back to Africa; deceived, they were instead brought to the United States coast and seized. Their case went to the U.S. Supreme Court (United States v. The Amistad, 1841), which ruled that they were free people illegally enslaved, not property, and ordered them freed; 35 survivors returned to Sierra Leone in 1842 [AMISTAD — Supreme Court record, 40 U.S. 518 (1841) — count from the case record].

4.3 Maroon communities — freedom defended in arms

DOCUMENTED. Across the Americas, escaped enslaved people built autonomous communities — maroons — in mountains, swamps and forests, and defended them by war and treaty [PRICE]. Palmares and Zumbi (Brazil): the quilombo of Palmares, in the interior of Alagoas, grew from the early 1600s into a federation of settlements that survived most of the 17th century, resisting repeated Portuguese and Dutch expeditions. Its last great leader, Zumbi dos Palmares (c. 1655–1695), born free in Palmares, refused a treaty settlement that would have required returning escapees, and led the resistance until Palmares was destroyed in 1694 and he was killed on 20 November 1695 — a date now marked in Brazil as Black Consciousness Day [PALMARES; REIS/GOMES].

4.4 The Haitian Revolution, 1791–1804 — stated precisely

DOCUMENTED. The uprising that began in the French sugar colony of Saint-Domingue in August 1791, led in its decisive phase by Toussaint Louverture and after his capture and death in France by Jean-Jacques Dessalines, defeated French, Spanish and British forces in turn and ended on 1 January 1804 with the proclamation of the independent state of Haiti [DUBOIS; JAMES]. The precise claim, and the only form in which this class makes it: the Haitian Revolution is the only slave revolt in history that founded a state — the only uprising of enslaved people that overthrew the slave system that held them and established a sovereign state, free from slavery and ruled by the formerly enslaved and by free people of colour [DUBOIS; TROUILLOT].

DOCUMENTED — the price after victory, at its documented weight. In 1825 France, backed by warships, required Haiti to indemnify former French slave-owners as the price of diplomatic recognition — an original demand of 150 million gold francs, reduced to 90 million in 1838 — and Haiti's payments on that debt continued until 1947 [DUBOIS; NYT RANSOM — The Ransom investigation, 2022, with its archival reconstruction]. The total Haiti ultimately paid, reckoned with interest and refinancing charges, is disputed between reconstructions; see NOT VERIFIED register, NV-6. The principal and the duration are documented; no single all-in total is asserted here.

5. Abolition — dated and sourced

DOCUMENTED. Abolition was not one event. Trade abolition and emancipation of the already-enslaved were separate acts, often decades apart; compensation, where paid, was paid to owners. The sequence keeps those three things distinct.

5.1 The British compensation — who was paid, at its documented weight

DOCUMENTED — commission record / count. The Slavery Abolition Act 1833 appropriated £20 million — around 40% of the British government's annual expenditure — in compensation. It was paid to slave-owners, for the loss of their legally recognised “property” in enslaved people. The enslaved received nothing [LBS; UK1833]. The Slave Compensation Commission's records, reconstructed person by person by the UCL Legacies of British Slavery project, identify more than 40,000 compensated owners in the British Caribbean, Mauritius and the Cape — a count from the Commission's records — roughly half of them resident in Britain itself: merchants, clergy, widows, Members of Parliament and great families alongside colonial planters [LBS; HALL]. The money was raised by a government loan whose successor debt British taxpayers were still servicing into the 21st century (the loan stock was finally redeemed in 2015, as the UK Treasury itself confirmed) [TREASURY]. The compensation records are therefore not a footnote to abolition: they are the most complete census of slave-ownership at abolition, and the documentary spine for tracing slavery's wealth into modern Britain [LBS]. By contrast — and the contrast is the teaching point — Haiti was made to pay compensation in the opposite direction, the formerly enslaved paying the former owners (§4.4), and Brazil's 1888 abolition paid owners nothing and provided the freed with nothing [BRAZIL1888; DUBOIS].

5.2 What abolition law did not end

DOCUMENTED. Legal abolition and lived freedom diverged repeatedly in the record: British “apprenticeship” (1834–38) [UK1833]; the U.S. internal slave trade between 1808 and 1865; the illegal Atlantic trade to Cuba and Brazil, which carried about 3.2 million people after 1807 before its final suppression around the 1860s [SV — database estimate]; and descent-based slavery in Mauritania after 1981 and 2007 [MAURITANIA; UN reporting]. A history that ended at the statute dates would be teaching the statutes and calling it the history.

6. Legacies

6.1 The African diaspora's cultures

DOCUMENTED. The 10.7 million who survived the Atlantic crossing [SV — database estimate], and those carried east and north, founded diaspora cultures that are themselves primary historical evidence: languages (including the Creoles of the Caribbean and the Americas), musics, cuisines, agricultural knowledge (including African rice knowledge carried to Carolina and Brazilian cultivation [CARNEY]), and religious traditions carried, adapted and preserved under enslavement. UNESCO's Slave Route framing treats these “global transformations and cultural interactions” as one of the project's three stated objects of study [UNESCO]. Equiano, Cugoano and Baquaqua belong here as well as in §1: the diaspora's written testimony was itself an abolitionist force in Britain and America.

6.2 The wounds — as historians document them, conflicts shown

DEBATED — model. Demographic: Patrick Manning's demographic modelling holds that Africa's population stagnated across the era of the trades while other world regions grew — a model-based conclusion, taught as such, not as a counted fact [MANNING]. The counterfactual (what Africa's population would have been without the trades) cannot be verified; see NV-5.

DEBATED — argued causal claim. Economic and institutional: Nathan Nunn's econometric work (2008) finds that the African regions from which the most enslaved people were taken — across all four trades (Atlantic, trans-Saharan, Red Sea, Indian Ocean) — are the poorest in Africa today, and argues, with subsequent work by Nunn and Wantchekon (2011), for a channel through the erosion of trust [NUNN]. These are argued causal claims in a live literature, contested on method; this class presents them as Nunn's findings, not as consensus.

DEBATED — the Williams question, shown not resolved. Eric Williams's Capitalism and Slavery (1944) argued that slavery's profits financed British industrialisation and that abolition followed slavery's declining economic importance. Both halves have been attacked and defended for eighty years; Seymour Drescher's Econocide (1977) is the classic counter-argument that abolition destroyed a still-profitable system [WILLIAMS; DRESCHER]. Students examine Williams and Drescher against the LBS compensation evidence [LBS] rather than being handed a verdict.

6.3 Memory — UNESCO and the memorials

DOCUMENTED. UNESCO Slave Route Project — launched 1994 at Ouidah, Benin; objectives: to break the silence around the slave trades, establish their causes, forms and consequences across all regions touched, highlight the cultural interactions that resulted, and contribute to a culture of peace and intercultural dialogue [UNESCO]. The project was instrumental in the road to the 2001 Durban World Conference Against Racism, where the slave trade and slavery were recognised as crimes against humanity [UNESCO; DURBAN]. Memorial dates carried by the project: the UN International Day for the Remembrance of the Slave Trade and its Abolition, 23 August — chosen for the night of 22–23 August 1791, when the Saint-Domingue uprising began [UNESCO]; and the UN International Day of Remembrance of the Victims of Slavery and the Transatlantic Slave Trade, 25 March. Sites of memory documented under the project's umbrella include Ouidah's Door of No Return (Benin), Gorée Island (Senegal), the Cape Coast and Elmina castles (Ghana), and Zanzibar's slave-market site — each a place where the trades' architecture survives and where descendant communities' memory work continues [UNESCO].

NOT VERIFIED register — carried at its class

Claims a student or teacher will meet elsewhere that the dossier behind this class could not verify to a checkable source, and therefore does NOT assert. Nothing in this register may be taught as fact.

Study questions

Essay-grade work throughout. Argue from evidence, compare authorities, and evaluate claims — including evaluating the figures themselves. Every numerical claim in an answer must carry its source key; an unsourced number is an error of method.

Set 1 — The transatlantic trade: scale, passage, plantations, profit

  1. SlaveVoyages estimates about 12.5 million embarked and about 10.7 million disembarked alive [SV]. What kind of statement is an “estimate” built from about 36,000 documented voyages — what the database holds, what it infers, and what a student may and may not claim on its authority? Conclude with one correctly worded sentence a textbook could print.
  2. “Most enslaved Africans were taken to what became the United States.” Test this claim against the destination figures [SV; ELTIS]: where did most survivors land, why did receiving regions differ in how many captives they kept importing, and what does the sugar-colonies / United States contrast explain about the trade's human cost?
  3. Equiano, Cugoano and Baquaqua testify from inside the Middle Passage; the shipping record testifies from outside. Compare the two witness families on one crossing: what can testimony establish that manifests and logs cannot, what can the archive establish that a single testimony cannot, and how should a historian handle an apparent conflict between them?
  4. “Everyone profited.” Reconstruct, end by end, who profited — carriers by flag [SV], African suppliers and intermediaries, planters, merchants, insurers, metropolitan consumers — then evaluate: does the documented distribution of profit distribute responsibility in the same proportions? Distinguish profit, design of the system, and demand.
  5. Research prompt: choose one plantation crop complex (sugar, cotton, coffee, rice) and trace its labour regime, its demography, and what happened to its enslaved population when importation was cut off. Every figure keyed to its source.

Set 2 — The older trades: Sahara and Indian Ocean, and the discipline of the range

  1. Austen gives about 7.2 million for the trans-Saharan crossing; Lovejoy about 6 million for 650–1500 alone; Segal 11.5–14 million for the trade into the Islamic world; Bairoch about 25 million. Write an essay that does NOT choose a winner: lay out what each figure counts (route, period, destination), which disagreements are about evidence and which about definitions, and what an honest textbook may print.
  2. Compare the evidence base of the three trades: voyage-by-voyage records for the Atlantic; caravan, customs and travel records for the Sahara; monsoon dhow traffic and treaty-era records for the Indian Ocean. Why does the Atlantic admit a database and the others only ranges? What would have to survive for a “SlaveVoyages of the Sahara” to exist — and what does its absence do to public memory?
  3. Sheriff shows the East African trade changing shape under pressure: as export was restricted by the treaties of 1822, 1845 and 1873, enslaved labour was retained on the coast to produce cloves and grain for export [SHERIFF]. What does this transformation prove about the relationship between the slave trade and slavery itself — and why would a history that only tracks exports misread Zanzibar in 1880?
  4. The Zanj Revolt (869–883) and Afonso I's letters (1526) stand six centuries apart. Compare what each establishes — about scale, about resistance, and about the kind of source each is — and why this class places both in the same witness discipline as a modern database.
  5. UNESCO's Slave Route Project frames the Saharan, Red Sea, Indian Ocean and Atlantic trades as one global history [UNESCO]. Argue for or against that single frame: what is gained, what is risked in scale, duration and the blurring of distinct systems, and what framing would you print at the head of a school chapter?

Set 3 — Resistance and abolition: what actually ended the trades

  1. “The only slave revolt that founded a state.” State the Haitian claim with the precision §4.4 requires, then test the strongest rival candidates (the Zanj Revolt; Palmares; the great Caribbean and North American revolts) against its exact wording — and what does the exercise teach about superlative claims in history?
  2. Palmares survived most of the 17th century; the Amistad Africans freed themselves in a single night and then had to win their freedom again in a courtroom. Compare maroon state-building with revolt-plus-litigation — what each required, what each won, and why one produced a polity and the other a precedent. Include Zumbi's refusal of the treaty settlement.
  3. Denmark banned its trade in 1792, effective 1803 — and imports surged in the interval. Britain banned the trade in 1807 but emancipated only in 1833; the United States banned importation in 1808 while its internal trade grew for another half-century. Write on the gap between trade abolition and emancipation as the central structural fact of the abolition century.
  4. Follow the compensation money: Britain 1833, £20 million to owners and nothing to the enslaved [UK1833; LBS]; Haiti after 1825, the formerly enslaved made to pay the former owners [DUBOIS]; Brazil 1888, owners received nothing and the freed received nothing. Compare the three settlements as evidence of whose property claim each state recognised at abolition.
  5. Baquaqua was enslaved in the illegal-era trade to Brazil, decades after abolition was proclaimed [BAQUAQUA; SV]. Using his testimony and the database's post-1807 figures (about 3.2 million embarked after British abolition), evaluate “abolition ended the slave trade”: distinguish law, enforcement and lived reality, and give the date range an honest timeline should use for the Atlantic trade's end.

Set 4 — Legacies, memory, and the historian's verdict

  1. Williams argues slavery's profits financed British industrialisation and abolition followed economic decline; Drescher argues abolition destroyed a still-profitable system [WILLIAMS; DRESCHER]. Set both against the compensation evidence [LBS] — 40,000+ owners, roughly half resident in Britain, money traced into railways and finance — showing the conflict rather than resolving it, and identifying what further evidence would actually decide between them.
  2. Nunn finds the regions stripped most heavily by all four trades are the poorest today, arguing a channel through eroded trust [NUNN]; Manning's modelling holds Africa's population stagnated while other regions grew. Compare the two as kinds of claim — what would falsify each, and how should a student cite each without overstating it?
  3. The diaspora is evidence, not only aftermath: languages, musics, cuisines, rice knowledge (§6.1), and the written testimony that itself helped force abolition. Write on cultural survival under enslavement as a historical source, and how it corrects a history written only from traders' and planters' records.
  4. UNESCO chose 23 August — the anniversary of the Saint-Domingue uprising's first night — as the International Day for the Remembrance of the Slave Trade and its Abolition [UNESCO]. Write on memorial choices as historical arguments: what does it claim that the day marks a revolt rather than an abolition act, and how do the Door of No Return at Ouidah and the compensation records at UCL make two different arguments about where this history lives?
  5. Research prompt — the NOT VERIFIED exercise. Take one figure or claim in wide public circulation (a deaths-before-embarkation total, a single Sahara head-count, or an all-in Haiti repayment total). Trace it as far toward a primary or scholarly source as you can, report exactly where the chain of evidence breaks, and draft the NOT VERIFIED entry you would file, in this class's form.

Sources

SlaveVoyages — Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database (Rice University; Eltis, Richardson et al.), Estimates and Voyages databases [SV] · David Eltis & David Richardson, Atlas of the Transatlantic Slave Trade (Yale, 2010) [ELTIS] · Herbert S. Klein, The Atlantic Slave Trade (Cambridge, 2nd ed. 2010) [KLEIN] · Olaudah Equiano, The Interesting Narrative (London, 1789) [EQUIANO] · Ottobah Cugoano, Thoughts and Sentiments on the Evil of Slavery (London, 1787) [CUGOANO] · Mahommah Gardo Baquaqua, Biography (Detroit, 1854) [BAQUAQUA] · Afonso I of Kongo, letters to João III of Portugal (1526) [AFONSO] · Ralph A. Austen, estimates 1979–2010, incl. Trans-Saharan Africa in World History (Oxford, 2010) [AUSTEN] · Paul E. Lovejoy, Transformations in Slavery (Cambridge, 3rd ed. 2012) [LOVEJOY] · Ronald Segal, Islam's Black Slaves (2001) [SEGAL] · Abdul Sheriff, Slaves, Spices and Ivory in Zanzibar (1987) [SHERIFF] · Marcus Reddiker, The Slave Ship (2007) [REDDIKER] · United States v. The Amistad, 40 U.S. 518 (1841) [AMISTAD] · Richard Price (ed.), Maroon Societies (3rd ed. 1996) [PRICE] · Laurent Dubois, Avengers of the New World (2004) and Haiti: The Aftershocks of History (2012) [DUBOIS] · C. L. R. James, The Black Jacobins (1938) [JAMES] · Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Silencing the Past (1995) [TROUILLOT] · New York Times, The Ransom series (2022) [NYT RANSOM] · Danish Edict of 16 March 1792 [DANMARK] · Slave Trade Act 1807 [UK1807] · Slavery Abolition Act 1833 [UK1833] · UCL Centre for the Study of the Legacies of British Slavery database [LBS] · Catherine Hall et al., Legacies of British Slave-Ownership (Cambridge, 2014) [HALL] · HM Treasury confirmation (2018) on the 1833 loan stock redeemed in 2015 [TREASURY] · Act Prohibiting Importation of Slaves (1807, effective 1808) [US1808] · Emancipation Proclamation (1863); Thirteenth Amendment (1865) [US1865] · French decrees of 1794, 1802 and 27 April 1848 [FRANCE] · Lei Áurea, 13 May 1888 [BRAZIL1888] · Mauritanian abolition decree (1981); Law 2007-048; Law 2015-031; UN Special Rapporteur reporting [MAURITANIA] · Patrick Manning, demographic modelling [MANNING] · Nathan Nunn (2008); Nunn & Wantchekon (2011) [NUNN] · Eric Williams, Capitalism and Slavery (1944) [WILLIAMS] · Seymour Drescher, Econocide (1977) [DRESCHER] · Judith A. Carney, Black Rice (2001) [CARNEY] · John K. Thornton, Africa and Africans in the Making of the Atlantic World (2nd ed. 1998) [THORNTON] · UNESCO, Slave Route Project (1994) / Routes of Enslaved Peoples [UNESCO] · UN World Conference Against Racism, Durban Declaration (2001) [DURBAN] · Standard accounts of the Zanj Revolt, 869–883 CE [ZANJ].

Read beside this class: The Theft of Natural Resources · Africa — The Herero, the Nama, and the Congo · The Nations in the War Over Slavery · The Genocide Record · The Chronology

All Senior History Classes

Record: this class rests on the research file study_materials/world_true_history/slave_trades/RESEARCH_DOSSIER.md, with its student set grades-10-12_slave_trades.md (20 questions) and teacher_note.md filed beside it.