Module Introduction

According to W.E.B. Du Bois, one of the preeminent black intellectuals and activists of the late 19th and 20th centuries, the African slave trade, which transported between 10 and 15 million Africans across the Atlantic to work as slaves in the Americas, was the most important “drama in the last thousand years of human history.” The trade tore Africans away from “the dark beauty of their mother continent into the new-found Eldorado of the West. They descended into Hell.” Module 2 examines the tragic history of the transatlantic slave trade that occurred between European and African traders along the west coast of Africa from the late fifteenth through the nineteenth century. It addresses why Europeans came to Africa to acquire slave labor, why powerful African kingdoms who controlled trade along the coast of Africa sold human beings to European traders in exchange for foreign commodities, how the trade generated early ideas of racial difference and systems of racism, and how the trade transformed Africa and the lives of the Africans who found themselves ensnared in a slave system sustained by cold, calculating economic rationality and human brutality.

Rather than a primitive, archaic system, the transatlantic slave trade, and the labor performed by African and African-American slaves, created the modern Western world – one characterized by a global, interconnected system of capitalist expansion. The trade regarded human beings as commodities who themselves labored to produce commodities – gold, silver, sugar, tobacco, cotton – that generated profits for plantation owners, manufacturers, and merchants. African and African-American slaves resisted enslavement at every stage and found ways to create new communities, new kinship networks, and new cultures in defiance of an inherently dehumanizing system of racial slavery that survived for more than four hundred years. ⁽¹⁾