ABSTRACT
The Atlantic slave trade, which lasted from the mid-fifteenth century until the last quarter of the nineteenth century, was a distinctive event in both global history and the history of slavery. There have been, of course, other large coerced migrations in history, notably in the mid-twentieth century when millions of people in Europe and Asia were moved from place to place in a very short period of time. Moreover, voluntary migration has often exceeded the levels of migration recorded in the Atlantic slave trade. Between 1815 and 1930, 51.7 million people left Europe for other destinations, mostly in the New World, of whom the British alone contributed 18.7 million, or 36 per cent (Richards, 2004: 4–6). As Gwyn Campbell notes in Chapter 3 of this volume, the total volume of the slave trade in the Indian Ocean World probably equalled and perhaps exceeded the volume of captives in the Atlantic slave trade.
