African Slave Trade In The 18th Century

“A slave is a human being who is the property of, and entirely subject to, another human being under the religious, social and legal conventions of the society in which he or she lives.” In many African communities, people viewed slaves as ones with no rights, and ones who should be property. In other cases, people viewed slaves as dependents, or people in which they are heavily dependent on. However, due to the need of recruitment, some African communities accepted slaves into the military and governmental fields. Although from various ethnic groups, most Africans were the same color as their slave, displaying the irony in slavery. Most African slaves were bought to carry out meek or household labor, to serve as the wife of the slave owner,

The first major group of European dealers in West Africa was the Portuguese, followed by the British and the French.”African sellers often kidnapped slaves and brought them to markets on the coast. At these markets, European and American purchasers traded materials such as cloth, iron, guns, alcohol, and decorative items that were helpful to the merchants in turn for purchasing slaves. Most frequently, slave sellers were found to be men, and they used their expanded wealth to improve their prestige. They used this to their advantage to contact themselves, through marriage, to other wealthy families in their kingdom. The Africans who were enslaved were generally prisoners of war or captives from slave raids. “As the demand for slaves grew, so did the practice of systematic slave raiding, which increased in scope and efficiency with the introduction of firearms to Africa in the 17th century. By the 18th century, most African slaves were acquired through slave raids, which penetrated farther and farther inland.” Those unlucky enough to be captured in certain invasions were forced to march certain paths, sometimes for a few hundred miles, to markets on the coast to be traded for simple materials in return. From the mid-fifteenth to the late-nineteenth century, European and American slave sellers obtained roughly 12

While the Atlantic slave trade was fading away around 1850, the trans-Saharan and East African slave trades were at their peaks. In the 1850s the Ottoman Empire nominally banned slavery in a great part of the Islamic world, yet this had just a minor impact on the slave trade. One of the main justifications European powers gave for colonizing nearly the whole African landmass during the 1880s and 1890s was the longing to end slave trade and servitude in Africa. By the beginning of the twentieth century, European strengths had vanquished most African slave trading states, and the trans-Saharan and East African slave trades arrived at an end. Slaves who got to be freed frequently did as such by getting away and going to the colonial authorities or by basically leaving the regions in which they had been held to take up living arrangement somewhere else.In a few spots, enslaved people held that status for the rest of their lives, in spite of the legal prohibition. It was not until the 1930s that slavery in Africa was completely eliminated. The ending of the slave trade and slavery in Africa had far reaching consequences for the African continent. Numerous societies that for quite a long time had taken an interest in an economy taking into account slave labor and the exchanging of slaves experienced issues finding better approaches to sort out work and to gain wealth. Meanwhile,