Origins of African Slavery and the Organization of the Atlantic Trade

Slavery was not an invention of the Atlantic world: it had existed in Africa, the Islamic world, and the Mediterranean since antiquity. From the eighth century, the trans-Saharan trade moved enslaved Africans northward across the desert under Arab and Berber merchants, a traffic historians estimate displaced somewhere between 6 and 10 million people between the eighth and nineteenth centuries, alongside a parallel Indian Ocean trade toward Persia, India, and Arabia; within Africa itself, slavery took many internal forms, including domestic servitude, war captivity, and enslavement for debt, and powerful states such as Mali and Songhai were themselves embedded in networks trading in enslaved people.