Empires and the transatlantic slave trade

The search for trade did not stay peaceful. As European kingdoms reached new lands, they began to take them over. This part of the story is hard to read, but it is important to understand, because its effects are still felt today.

Conquest and colonisation

In the Americas, Spanish soldiers conquered the Aztec Empire in 1521 and the Inca Empire in the 1530s. Diseases such as smallpox, which the local people had never met, killed a very large share of the population. Europeans set up colonies, took land and made mines and plantations to grow crops for sale in Europe.

The trade

From the 1500s to the 1800s, about 12.5 million African people were captured and forced onto ships across the Atlantic Ocean. Many did not survive the crossing. Those who did were forced to work on plantations. Ships carried goods from Europe to West Africa, enslaved people to the Americas, and sugar, cotton and tobacco back to Europe. Historians call this the triangular trade.

Resistance

Enslaved people resisted in every way they could: by keeping their languages, music and beliefs, by running away, and by rising up. In the Haitian Revolution (1791–1804), enslaved people won their freedom and created an independent country. Olaudah Equiano, who had been enslaved as a boy, bought his freedom and wrote a best-selling book about his life that helped turn people against the trade.

Ending the trade

Britain banned the slave trade in 1807 and slavery in most of its colonies in 1833. The United States ended slavery in 1865. The wealth built from slavery, and the racism used to justify it, shaped the world long after.