European Slavery on the Eve of the Transatlantic Trade

The transatlantic trade in enslaved people was not a sudden or opportunistic movement occasioned by advances in maritime technology and access to a “New World” by Europeans. Rather, it emerged from centuries-long developments in European technology, commerce, law, governance, culture, religion, gender norms, diplomatic relations, and nation-building, culminating in competitive efforts by nascent nation states – British, French, Dutch, Portuguese, Spanish, Danish, and Swedish – to profit from the trade in enslaved Africans.

There were fundamental differences between European and “New World” slavery (as there would also be between slavery in what would ultimately be the United States and the Caribbean, other parts of North America, and Central and South America). Among others, these include:

1. scale, the transatlantic trade being orders of magnitude larger than the earlier forms of European trade;
2. justification for enslavement, the transatlantic being racial rather than religious, as in the European construct;
3. the gendered deployment of stolen labor, primarily in non-gendered agricultural settings rather than domestic (primarily female) or galley warfare (exclusively male) settings as in much of Europe;
4. the likelihood of lifetime enslavement being very high, rather than at least some expectation of paths out of enslavement through manumission, purchase, or flight; and
5. the presence of enslaved people in the lived realities of enslavers and their families, rather than being, as in most of Europe, far distant and effectively invisible.

Some regions of Europe had seen slavery evolve and die out prior to the rise of the transatlantic trade; in others, slavery persisted and even expanded after the transatlantic trade was suppressed.

Visual information will include maps; tables; quotes; pictures of technology; and pictures of Europeans, including people forcibly brought from other places, people who participated, directly or indirectly, in this trade, abolitionists, and free Black Europeans.