Trans-Atlantic slave trade in the context of "Trans-Atlantic trade"

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⭐ Core Definition: Trans-Atlantic slave trade

The Atlantic slave trade or transatlantic slave trade involved the transportation by slave traders of enslaved African people to the Americas. European slave ships regularly used the triangular trade route and its Middle Passage. Europeans established a coastal slave trade in the 15th century, and trade to the Americas began in the 16th century, lasting through the 19th century. The vast majority of those who were transported in the transatlantic slave trade were from Central Africa and West Africa and had been sold by West African slave traders to European slave traders, while others had been captured directly by the slave traders in coastal raids. European slave traders gathered and imprisoned the enslaved at forts on the African coast and then brought them to the Western hemisphere. Some Portuguese and Europeans participated in slave raids. As the National Museums Liverpool explains: "European traders captured some Africans in raids along the coast, but bought most of them from local African or African-European dealers." European slave traders generally did not participate in slave raids. This was primarily because life expectancy for Europeans in sub-Saharan Africa was less than one year during the period of the slave trade due to malaria that was endemic to the African continent. Portuguese coastal raiders found that slave raiding was too costly and often ineffective and opted for established commercial relations.

The colonial South Atlantic and Caribbean economies were particularly dependent on slave labour for the production of sugarcane and other commodities. This was viewed as crucial by those Western European states which were vying with one another to create overseas empires. The Portuguese, in the 16th century, were the first to transport slaves across the Atlantic. In 1526, they completed the first transatlantic slave voyage to Brazil. Other Europeans soon followed. Shipowners regarded the slaves as cargo to be transported to the Americas as quickly and cheaply as possible, there to be sold to work on coffee, tobacco, cocoa, sugar, and cotton plantations, gold and silver mines, rice fields, the construction industry, cutting timber for ships, as skilled labour, and as domestic servants. The first enslaved Africans sent to the English colonies were classified as indentured servants, with legal standing similar to that of contract-based workers coming from Britain and Ireland. By the middle of the 17th century, slavery had hardened as a racial caste, with African slaves and their future offspring being legally the property of their owners, as children born to slave mothers were also slaves (partus sequitur ventrem). As property, the people were considered merchandise or units of labour, and were sold at markets with other goods and services.

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👉 Trans-Atlantic slave trade in the context of Trans-Atlantic trade

Trans-Atlantic trade refers to trade that involves African, Asian and Latin American economies' mercantile interactions with the Western World. It is typically distinct from the Trans-Atlantic slave trade, which is generally understood to be of a different era and range of goods sold.

Transnational corporations of the 19th and 20th century feature prominently in this trade, and in many parts of the world it has considerably weakened many historic long-distance trade systems, like the famous Silk Road trade in Asia or the Trans-Sahara trade route systems in Africa. Most of the products traded in Trans-Atlantic trade were and are made in Europe. The transnational corporations, many based in developing countries, created distribution channels of finished products and flooded their markets. Trans-Atlantic trade also includes exports of raw materials to Europe for manufacturing purposes.

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Trans-Atlantic slave trade in the context of Asiento de Negros

The Asiento de Negros (lit.'agreement of blacks') was a monopoly contract between the Spanish Crown and various merchants for the right to provide enslaved Africans to colonies in the Spanish Americas. The Spanish Empire rarely engaged in the transatlantic slave trade directly from Africa itself, choosing instead to contract out the importation to foreign merchants from nations more prominent in that part of the world, typically Portuguese and Genoese, but later the Dutch, French, and British. The Asiento did not concern French or British Caribbean, or Brazil, but only Spanish America.

The 1479 Treaty of Alcáçovas divided the Atlantic Ocean and other parts of the globe into two zones of influence, Spanish and Portuguese. The Spanish acquired the west side, washing South America and the West Indies, whilst the Portuguese obtained the east side, washing the west coast of Africa – and also the Indian Ocean beyond. The Spanish relied on enslaved African labourers to support their American colonial project, but now lacked any trading or territorial foothold in West Africa, the principal source of slave labour. The Spanish relied on Portuguese slave traders to fill their requirements. The contract was usually obtained by foreign merchant banks that cooperated with local or foreign traders, that specialized in shipping. Different organisations and individuals would bid for the right to hold the asiento.

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Trans-Atlantic slave trade in the context of Slavery in contemporary Africa

The continent of Africa is one of the regions most rife with contemporary slavery. Slavery in Africa has a long history, within Africa since before historical records, but intensifying with the trans-Saharan and Indian Ocean slave trade and again with the trans-Atlantic and Barbary slave trade; the demand for slaves created an entire series of kingdoms which existed in a state of perpetual warfare in order to generate the prisoners of war necessary for the lucrative export of slaves. These patterns persisted into the colonial period during the late 19th and early 20th century. Although the colonial authorities attempted to suppress slavery around 1900, their attempts were largely ineffective. Even after decolonization, slavery continues in many parts of Africa despite being officially illegal.

Slavery in the Sahel region (and to a lesser extent the Horn of Africa) exists along the racial and cultural boundary of Arabized Berbers in the north and darker Africans in the south. Slavery in the Sahel states of Mauritania, Mali, Niger, Chad and Sudan in particular, continues a centuries-old pattern of hereditary servitude. Other forms of traditional slavery exist in parts of Ghana, Benin, Togo and Nigeria. There are other, non-traditional forms of slavery in Africa today, mostly involving human trafficking and the enslavement of child soldiers and child labourers, e.g. human trafficking in Angola, and human trafficking of children from Togo, Benin and Nigeria to Gabon and Cameroon.

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Trans-Atlantic slave trade in the context of British African-Caribbean people

British African-Caribbean people or British Afro-Caribbean people are an ethnic group in the United Kingdom. They are British citizens or residents of recent Caribbean heritage who further trace much of their ancestry to West and Central Africa. This includes multi-racial Afro-Caribbean people.

The earliest generations of Afro-Caribbean people to migrate to Britain trace their ancestry to a wide range of Afro-Caribbean ethnic groups, who themselves descend from the disparate African ethnic groups transported to the colonial Caribbean as part of the trans-Atlantic slave trade. British African Caribbeans may also have ancestry from European and Asian settlers, as well as from various Indigenous peoples of the Caribbean. The population includes those with origins in Jamaica, Trinidad and Tobago, The Bahamas, Saint Kitts and Nevis, Barbados, Grenada, Antigua and Barbuda, Saint Lucia, Dominica, Montserrat, British Virgin Islands, Turks and Caicos Islands, Cayman Islands, Anguilla, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, Guyana, Belize, and elsewhere.

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Trans-Atlantic slave trade in the context of Omar ibn Said

Omar ibn Said (Arabic: عمر بن سعيد, romanizedʿUmar bin Saeed or Omar ben Saeed; c. 1770–1864) was a Fula Muslim scholar from Futa Toro in West Africa (present-day Senegal), who was enslaved and transported to the United States in 1807 during the Trans-Atlantic slave trade. Remaining enslaved for the remainder of his life, he wrote a series of Arabic-language works on history and theology, including a short autobiography.

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Trans-Atlantic slave trade in the context of Music of Africa

The continent of Africa and its music is vast and highly diverse, with different regions and nations maintaining distinct musical traditions. African music includes genres such as makwaya, highlife, mbube, township music, jùjú, fuji, jaiva, afrobeat, afrofusion, mbalax, Congolese rumba, soukous, ndombolo, makossa, kizomba, and taarab, among others. African music also uses a wide variety of instruments from across the continent. The music and dance traditions of the African diaspora, shaped to varying degrees by African musical traditions, include American genres such as Dixieland jazz, blues, and jazz, as well as Caribbean styles such as calypso (see kaiso), and soca. Latin American music genres including cumbia, salsa, son cubano, rumba, conga, bomba, samba, and zouk developed from the music of enslaved Africans and have, in turn, influenced contemporary African popular music.

Like the music of Asia, India, and the Middle East, African music is highly rhythmic. Its complex rhythmic patterns often involve one rhythm played against another to create a polyrhythm. A common example is the three-against-two rhythm, comparable to a triplet played against straight notes. Sub-Saharan African music traditions frequently rely on a wide array of percussion instruments, including xylophones, djembes, drums, and tone-producing instruments such as the mbira or "thumb piano".

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Trans-Atlantic slave trade in the context of Isu people

The Isu people// are the largest group of the Igbo people of Nigeria.Isuama, in which the purest Igbo is said to be spoken, is to be found the heart of the Igbo nationality; consequently it is quite reasonable to look among its people for the original fountain-head from which all the other clans have sprung. This inference too is supported not only by the purity of the language, but by this right of dispensing or rather of confer-ring royalty which is undoubtedly the prerogative of the Nri or N'shi people.In the pre-colonial era, the Igbo people were protected from external invasion by the dense forests of the region, which also encouraged diversity. Thus as warriors the neighboring Oratta (Uratta) people (Owerri people) looked down on the Isu people, who were traders.

Isuama is the name given to the south-central part of Igboland, which was a major source of slaves during the period of the trans-Atlantic slave trade.The name has been carried across the Atlantic, where it is found in the name of Cuban society Carabali Isuama.This name pays homage to the group's ancestry in the Isuama area of Igboland to the north of the Kalabari Ijaw people.At one time the Isuama language was spoken in Cuba, but eventually it and other Cross River languages was displaced by the standard Abakua language called Brikamo.

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