For 350 years, African and European slave merchants traded with each other on the African coast as equals. Europeans generally recognized and accepted African rules on who could and could not be enslaved. When they did not, then trading relations would break down. The African names database allows the identification of the major slave-trading groups, at least for the nineteenth century. For most parts of the African Coast the ruling authority’s role was not to sell large numbers of people, but rather to provide a secure environment in which slave trading could take place. A wide-ranging database of African sellers shows that while large traders certainly existed, the great majority of sellers sold just five or fewer captives. The chapter evaluates the positions of four major Africanist scholars on relations between Europeans and Africans in light of the new quantitative work. It concludes that only one, John Thornton, has made arguments consistent with the new findings. Also it is now clear that slave traders in Africa, like those in Europe and the Americas, fronted a large labor force for growing provisions, guard-duty, and distribution of trading goods, especially in West Africa. Abolition is not likely to have had economic motives either at the level of the individual or the state.

Review of the inhumane practices of people in both New and Old Worlds prior to Columbian contact. Slave trading and cruelty were widespread, and slave trading was extensive. Most slaves were female, employed in domestic or agricultural environments (with little evidence of gang-labor), and came from a wide range of geographic areas and cultures. Most were born into slavery or were enslaved as a result of raids and wars in which many men on the losing side were killed. Slave markets existed across Eurasia, though in the pre-contact New World such markets were less common. After 1500, transatlantic trafficking came to draw exclusively on Africa or at least on Black people, probably because of the long isolation of the Americas from the rest of the world, and the inability of its Indigenous population to resist harmful pathogens from the Old World. Before 1820 migration to the New World was dominated by Africans rather than Europeans and by males (in contrast to the female-dominated slave populations of the Old World). White slaves were scarcely ever present in the New World.