Atlantic Slave Trade

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THE LONG TERM IMPACT OF THE ATLANTIC SLAVE TRADE ON SOCIAL DIVISION IN AMERICA The Atlantic slave trade was also known as the transatlantic slave trade and this refers to the trade in slaves that took place across the Atlantic ocean from the sixteenth through to the nineteenth centuries. The vast majority of slaves involved in the Atlantic trade were Africans from the central and western parts of the continent, who were sold by African slave dealers to European traders, who transported them to the colonies in North and South America. There, the slaves were made to labour on coffee, cocoa and cotton plantations, in gold and silver mines, in rice fields, the construction industry, timber, and shipping or in houses to work as servants. The shippers were, in order of scale, the Portuguese, the British, the French, the Spanish, the Dutch, and Americans. The traders had outposts on the African coast where they purchased people from African slave-traders. Current estimates are that about 12 million although the actual number of people taken from their homes is considerably higher. The slave trade is sometimes called the Maafa by Africans and African-American scholars, meaning "holocaust" or "great disaster" in Swahili. Some scholars, such as Marimba Ani and Maulana Karenga use the terms such as the African holocaust or the holocaust of enslavement. Slavery was one element of a three-part economic cycle. The triangular trade and its Middle Passage which ultimately involved four continents, four centuries and millions of people. The trading of slaves in America in the seventeenth century was a large industry. Slaves were captured from their homes in Africa, shipped to America under extremely poor conditions, and then sold to the highest bidder, put to work, and forced to live with the new conditions of America. There was no mercy for the slaves and their
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