ABSTRACT
There was nothing quite like the Atlantic slave trade in the long and varied history of the trafficking in enslaved men, women, and children. Although the trans-Saharan slave trade conveyed captives to North Africa and the Middle East over a longer span of time, no previous system approximated the more than 12.5 million embarked from Africa for the Americas from 1492 to 1867. 1 In many eras before and after, slave traders transported their victims across vast distances, far from their place of birth. Yet the thousands of miles covered by the typical slave voyage, from Europe to Africa to the Americas, had few if any institutional precedents. The Atlantic slave trade, too, was exceptional in the way that it came to an end. Within the span of four decades, each of the nations responsible for its organization and conduct came to renounce it. In little more than a half century, the slave trade would be effectively suppressed. In other places and in other times, the long-distance trafficking of enslaved peoples sometimes experienced rapid fluctuations too, rising and falling with the onset of war, economic change, or shifts in the political fortunes of the authorities that made the trade possible. Never before, though, had a trade in slaves been denounced and then abolished by the governments of the same peoples who had created it. It is the singularity of this history that accounts in part for the volume and complexity of the scholarly literature about it.
