ABSTRACT
The colonial economies of the Atlantic Ocean were established from scratch during the second colonial ‘wave’. These were the ‘plantation economies’. Alternatively, the precolonial economies were comprehensively reorganised, as the fur trade did in North America. Colonialism now organised production; not primarily extracted tribute. Slavery is a trans-historical and a global phenomenon, a very ancient institution dating back to classical antiquity and even before that. Raids to obtain slaves had been carried out for centuries across both shores of the Mediterranean Sea. Depending on how this institution is defined, slavery characterises many eras, including this one. But the Atlantic slave trade and chattel slavery are a specific phenomenon. The trade lasted roughly four centuries, between the sixteenth and the nineteenth century. Between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries, the Atlantic slave trade involved the transportation of enslaved humans from west and central Africa to the ‘New World’, but the trade was wider and implicated four continents over four centuries.
