Guns and Gun Violence Within the Transatlantic Slave Trade

This paper discusses the development of a teaching module for undergraduate history majors that focuses on connections between early modern European arms manufacturing and the transatlantic slave trade through the analysis of lists of European commodities used in the slave trade in eighteenth-century West Africa. The module seeks to help students identify the deep historical ties between profit-making, gun violence, and the commodification of human beings as disposable objects.