The Spanish and Portuguese and their American territories saw the disembarkation of almost two-thirds of all the enslaved carried from Africa. They were the first colonizers of the Atlantic and chose those areas that were best for obtaining slaves and putting them to work in the Americas. Almost every port large enough to launch a transoceanic voyage at some point entered the slave trade. Rio de Janeiro and Bahia (now Salvador) dispatched more vessels to Africa than did any European port, and overall sent out more voyages than did Europe. Thus the typical slave-trading voyage was not triangular, but rather bilateral. The Americas were the center of the slave trade because of their millennia-long isolation from the rest of the world, the inability of their Indigenous populations to resist Old World pathogens, and the very high land–labor ratios that resulted. Voyages to Africa from the Americas were quicker than those from Europe and the plantations and mines quickly generated a pool of investors willing to underpin the slave trade. In Brazil, especially, these small investors included free and enslaved Blacks, including even some enslaved crew. Close to half the merchandise traded for slaves came to be produced in the Americas rather than in Europe.

The chapter reviews the scholarly interpretations of abolition that have appeared in the last two decades. One group, influenced by Eric Williams, looks for economic motivations stemming from a decline of the British plantation sector; a second focuses on rebellions by slaves, the chief of which was that in St. Domingue, which gave birth to Haiti in 1802. Some in this category see the slaves freeing themselves. Others argue for long-run changes in public attitudes toward violence within Western Europe, especially England, that occurred in the 150 years after the British established their Caribbean plantations. In the eighteenth century the nascent London press began to report slaves resistance to enslavement both on board slave ships and in Caribbean colonies. These reports became more frequent and more detailed as the century progressed. Other cruelties such as burning at the stake, abandoning children, masters’ right to chastise their servants, and the lords’ power over their serfs (in mainland Europe) either ceased or became less frequently exercised. At the same time awareness of Africans and their forced use in the Americas as represented in the London press greatly increased after 1750. Where “slaves” meant English captives in North Africa at the beginning of the century, by 1800 the term referred to Blacks in the Americas.

Slave vessels dispatched from Northwest Europe were larger and more heavily armed than their Iberian and American counterparts. The barricado, a heavy wooden barrier located midship, separating off men-slaves, was a central feature not found among slavers in the South Atlantic. The Portuguese operated vessels in which many crew were Black, including some enslaved. These were able to talk to captives in their own language and provide some assurance that they would not be eaten on arrival and would have some familiarity with their new environmrnt. Rebellions of slaves on Portuguese vessels were unusual. The Portuguese/Brazilians also did very little ship trading. Instead, they used bulking centers on land to hold slaves prior to their embarkation en masse. This reduced the time a captive would spend on board, which was already shorter than those of their Northwestern European rivals because of the shorter voyage times to Brazil from most parts of Africa. The Portuguese were thus the most efficient of all national slave traders. The bulking centers in Upper Guinea and Angola were connected to trade routes through to the interior and manned by lançados, usually half-African and half-European. The shipping part of their system was adopted by all slave traders in the nineteenth century.

The book is an attempt to rewrite Atlantic history by reassessing the story of the slave trade. As already noted, it is based on the digital humanities project www.slavevoyages.org, which at the time of writing is fourteen years old. If we include its CD-ROM predecessor published by Cambridge University Press in 1999, the data it provides have been in the public domain for a quarter-century. In that time many millions of visitors, whether scholars, students, the media, or interested members of the public have drawn on it in ways that its compilers and editors could never have imagined. Many more again have passed through exhibitions around the Atlantic world, including the permanent display of Washington, DC’s National Museum of African American History and Culture, and the Nantes Memorial to the Abolition of Slavery that have incorporated its offerings. Few discussions of the slave trade fail to cite this resource. It is often described as a model of what the social sciences should be trying to achieve – presenting reliable, accessible, and renewable data to the interested public along with some basic interpretations. Consistent with this assessment, it has received financial support from a range of countries that almost matches the reach of the slave trade itself. In what many will see as appropriate, the only continent that has not contributed funding to its development is Africa. Public and private financial support over the years amounts to several million US dollars.