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The extent of slavery within Africa and the trade in slaves to other regions is not known precisely. Although the Atlantic slave trade has been best studied, estimates range from 8 million people to 20 million. [162] The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database estimates that the Atlantic slave trade took around 12.8 million people between 1450 and ...
The Spaniards were the first Europeans to use African slaves in the New World on islands such as Cuba and Hispaniola, due to a shortage of labor caused by the spread of diseases, and so the Spanish colonists gradually became involved in the Atlantic slave trade. The first African slaves arrived in Hispaniola in 1501; [353] by 1517, the natives ...
After Europeans had settled in the Gulf of Guinea, the trans-Saharan slave trade became less important. [citation needed] Arabs were sometimes made into slaves in the trans-Saharan slave trade. [44] [45] In Mecca, Arab women were sold as slaves according to Ibn Butlan, and certain rulers in West Africa had slave girls of Arab origin.
The East African slave trade flourished greatly from the second half of the nineteenth century, when Said bin Sultan, an Oman Sultan, made Zanzibar his capital and expanded international commercial activities and plantation economy in cloves and coconuts. During this period demands for slaves grew drastically.
Both Thornton and Fage contend that while African political elite may have ultimately benefited from the slave trade, their decision to participate may have been influenced more by what they could lose by not participating. In Fage's article "Slavery and the Slave Trade in the Context of West African History", he notes that for West Africans "...
When the Atlantic slave trade began, many of the local slave systems began supplying captives for chattel slave markets outside Africa. Although the Atlantic slave trade was not the only slave trade from Africa, it was the largest in volume and intensity. As Elikia M'bokolo wrote in Le Monde diplomatique:
Slavery in Africa has a long history, within Africa since before historical records, but intensifying with the trans-Saharan and Indian Ocean slave trade [2] [3] and again with the trans-Atlantic slave trade; [4] the demand for slaves created an entire series of kingdoms which existed in a state of perpetual warfare in order to generate the ...
Multiple forms of slavery and servitude have existed throughout African history, and were shaped by indigenous practices of slavery as well as the Roman institution of slavery [72] (and the later Christian views on slavery), the Islamic institutions of slavery via the Muslim slave trade, and eventually the Atlantic slave trade.