Supplying the Slave Trade: European Enslavers and African Markets in the Eighteenth-Century Atlantic

How European enslavers tried to meet African consumer demand for their trade goods in the eighteenth-century transatlantic slave trade

The enormous evil that was the transatlantic slave trade resulted from millions of commercial actions. In Atlantic Africa, European enslavers and African merchants exchanged bundles of goods for small numbers of enslaved people over and over again. To purchase captives, European enslavers needed to meet the tastes and preferences of their African trading partners, which varied over time and across the coast. How did they know what their African customers wanted?

Anne Ruderman's extensive research into the transatlantic slave trade reveals how enslavers obtained information about consumer demand from the African coast, worked with suppliers to acquire the right trade goods, and then brought those goods to the markets where they were wanted. African consumer demand shaped the transatlantic slave trade, both on the African coast and deep in the European interior, as European enslavers ranged far and wide to get the trade goods their partners desired.

The legacy of race-based slavery continues to define socioeconomic structures, institutions, opportunities, and daily life in modern Europe, Africa, and the Americas. The transatlantic slave trade set this process of racial inequity in motion. And behind the commerce in captives were the trade goods that made it possible.