FILE HF-0014
Atlantic Slave Trade
West and Central African coast; the Americas, Multiple (West/Central Africa; the Americas) · c. 1500s–1860s
From the early 16th century to the 1860s, European and American traders forcibly transported an estimated 12.5 million Africans across the Atlantic Ocean into slavery in the Americas, in a trade organized around chartered national trading companies, plantation economies, and legal systems that treated enslaved people as property across generations. An estimated 1.8 million people died during the Middle Passage crossing alone.