The Atlantic Slave Trade and Its Effects
How the Atlantic trade began and grew, its scale from the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database, regions of embarkation in West Africa, how captives were taken (war, raiding, judicial enslavement), coastal states and European forts, the Middle Passage, abolition (Britain 1807, the West Africa Squadron, the last voyages to Cuba in the 1860s), the shift to "legitimate commerce", and debates about long-term effects.
Scale, routes and consequences
The trade drew on African political economies as well as European demand: captives were taken in wars, raids and through judicial and debt enslavement, then sold through coastal states and brokers to European ships anchored off forts such as Elmina and Cape Coast or trading at ports like Ouidah, Lagos, Bonny and Calabar. Britain abolished its trade in 1807 and its navy's West Africa Squadron intercepted slave ships, freeing captives at Freetown; the trade to Brazil largely ended after 1850 and the last documented voyages to Cuba were in the 1860s.
Debates: Walter Rodney's How Europe Underdeveloped Africa (1972) argued the trade drained Africa; John Thornton (1992) emphasised African agency and states' control of the trade; Nathan Nunn's quantitative study (2008) found that regions with more people taken have lower incomes today. These views are not fully exclusive and are best read together.
David Eltis and David Richardson, Atlas of the Transatlantic Slave Trade (2010) and slavevoyages.org; Paul Lovejoy, Transformations in Slavery (3rd ed., 2012); Walter Rodney (1972); John Thornton, Africa and Africans in the Making of the Atlantic World (1992); Nathan Nunn, "The Long-Term Effects of Africa's Slave Trades" (2008).