The Transatlantic Slave Trade: Crash Course Black American History #1

Summary

The transatlantic slave trade lasted nearly four centuries, from the late fifteenth to the late nineteenth century. Most captives were taken from six regions of western and central Africa: Senegambia; Sierra Leone and the Windward Coast; the Gold Coast; the Bight of Benin; the Bight of Biafra; and West Central Africa, including Kongo and Angola.

An estimated 12.4 million Africans were loaded onto slave ships. The Middle Passage was the second leg of the triangular trade:

1. Ships carried goods such as textiles, iron, alcohol, firearms, and gunpowder from Europe to Africa.
2. Those goods were exchanged for captured people, who were transported across the Atlantic.
3. In the Americas, enslaved people were sold, and ships took commodities such as sugar and tobacco back to Europe.

About 2 million captives died during the Middle Passage. Their bodies were often thrown overboard.

Most captives were not taken to what became the United States. The video estimates that around 5% were brought there directly; about 41% went to Brazil, while millions more were sent to the Caribbean and elsewhere in South America.

Captivity and the Middle Passage

The episode centers enslaved people’s own accounts as essential evidence. In his autobiography, The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, Equiano describes his terror after capture and his experience aboard a ship: unfamiliar people and language, chained captives, an oppressive stench, extreme crowding, heat, sickness, and death.

Captives entered the trade under different circumstances. Some were prisoners of war, some were accused of crimes, and some were poor people traded to settle debts. Some Africans sold captives to European traders. The host emphasizes that acknowledging these circumstances does not lessen European responsibility for the trade or make them equivalent to hereditary chattel slavery in the Americas, where people and their descendants could be held in bondage across generations.

Conditions aboard ships were brutal. Captives were packed together, chained, and forced to sleep, eat, and relieve themselves in the same confined spaces. Poor ventilation, crowding, disease, beatings, torture, and sexual violence—including the rape of enslaved women by sailors—were widespread.

Captives resisted in both collective and individual ways. Some organized revolts against crews; others refused food or jumped overboard. The video explains that suicide or attempted suicide could be a way to assert control over one’s fate and deny enslavers the financial value they sought. Some captives believed the ocean could carry them home, while enslavers sometimes placed nets along ships to prevent people from jumping. Crews used force-feeding devices and other forms of torture to break resistance. The episode also frames survival itself, under such conditions, as an act of resistance.

Scale and mortality

Historian Marcus Rediker identifies 1700–1808 as the trade’s most destructive period. Roughly two-thirds of the total number of enslaved Africans trafficked to the Americas were taken during those years.

The episode cites a stark estimate of losses: out of every 100 people taken from Africa’s interior, 64 survived to the coast, 48 survived the Atlantic crossing, and only 28–30 survived their first three or four years in the colony.

The host explains why the series prefers “enslaved person” to “slave”: the term centers the personhood of those held in bondage and makes clear that enslavement was imposed on them, not an inherent state of being.

Trade and abolition

England’s Royal African Company, founded in 1672, held a monopoly on English trade to Africa. Its most active period was 1675–1725, and it remained involved during the early eighteenth-century era described as “free trade”—a term the host notes is ironic in this context.

South Carolina illustrates the trade’s changing legal status in the United States. It prohibited the African slave trade in 1787, reopened it in 1803, and continued until the federal ban took effect in 1808. More than 35,000 enslaved people were brought to South Carolina from 1803 to 1808. Charleston was an entry point for about 40% of enslaved Africans brought to North America through the Middle Passage.

Britain outlawed the international trade in 1807, and the United States did so in 1808, but illegal trafficking continued. Ending the international trade did not end slavery or the domestic slave trade. Britain abolished slavery in 1833; slavery in the United States ended only after the Civil War; and Brazil, which received the largest share of captives, abolished slavery in 1888.

The episode presents the transatlantic slave trade as a centuries-long system of violence that profoundly shaped Black and white life and the wider world.

Speakers and sources featured

• Clint Smith — host and narrator.
• W. E. B. Du Bois — quoted on the historical significance of the Atlantic slave trade.
• Olaudah Equiano — quoted from his autobiography, The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano.
• Orlando Patterson — quoted on the nature of slavery.
• Marcus Rediker — historian cited on the trade’s most destructive period.
• Jill Lepore — historian cited for estimates of mortality.
• Ira Berlin — historian cited on South Carolina’s slave-trade laws.
• Thought Cafe — identified as the animation team.