Slave trade refers to the trade with slaves , that is the buying and selling of people as goods . Often times this refers to the enslavement of black Africans and their transport across the Atlantic to North America and the Caribbean since early modern times, but slave trade has existed on various routes from ancient times to very recently and in many parts of the world.
The enslavement of people by other people has been and is justified in different ways. The ideological basis was always the attempt to prove the superiority of one group over another. The transitions to forced labor and serfdom are often fluid.
There were slaves throughout ancient Europe . However, it cannot be determined exactly to what extent the slave trade was important alongside the slavery that was passed on from slave parents to their children born in the household, because there are no reliable statistics for antiquity and antiquity . Much is based on considerations that have been reconstructed from the relatively few literary , epigraphic and archaeological sources . Basically, one can assume that the extent of the slave trade was different at different times.
In ancient times there were several ways to get into slavery. This included debt bondage , legally enforced slavery, birth into slavery, kidnapping , the sale of former servants and, above all, enslavement in the course of acts of war. Later child abandonment was added as a cause of slavery.
The most important source of procurement was initially kidnapping, particularly piracy . Such pirate trips are already reported in Homer . The phenomenon of mass slavery began with the creation of large slave markets, which first appeared around 600 BC. Chr. Were built. According to Theopompos , it was the Greeks in Chios who opened the first slave market. In the course of the Peloponnesian War , the population of entire cities - especially women and children, but also often men - were sold into slavery.
In the Hellenistic world, with increasing instability and cruel warfare, the importance of the slave trade grew, especially by sea. In agriculture in Egypt and the Middle East, the importance of slaves was less than in Greece, but presumably every mercenary or soldier had a slave as a boy. In addition, there was the increasing demand from Rome and Carthage after the Punic Wars . The population of entire cities was affected by slavery in the Roman Empire (around 209 BC in Taranto , 167 BC in Epeiros ). Prisoners of war were usually still sold on the battlefield. Slave traders were part of the train of a Roman army. There were about three times as many male slaves as female slaves in the Roman Empire.
The Greeks obtained their slaves mainly from Thrace , Asia Minor (here mainly from Phrygia and Caria ), Syria and Armenia , the Romans later mainly from Greece, other regions of the Balkans and Gaul . In contrast, ancient Egypt imported black slaves from what is now Sudan ( Nubia ). The Ptolemies had forbidden the export of slaves.
In general, it was common practice among both the Romans and, before that, the Greeks to avoid enslaved ex-citizens. In Athens , for example, debt-bonded citizens were sold to other cities. The Twelve Tables law prescribed the Romans to sell such persons to an area on the other side of the Tiber . Centers of the ancient slave trade were Delos and Ephesus . The increasing Roman demand for oriental slaves who were well versed in agriculture and the wars and anarchy in Syria led to the fact that since the end of the empire of Pergamon hardly any “civilized” Greeks, but Syrians, Bithynes , Cappadocians and others fell into slavery; the slave trade was now carried out by Roman publicani by sea with Delos as the main trading point, which developed into the main slave market of the old world. According to Strabo , tens of thousands of slaves could be taken in and sent to Delos every day.
The slave trade itself was precisely regulated. In Plato , for example, there are rules handed down as to when a slave purchase could be reversed. Roman slave traders had to declare illnesses and possible misconduct of a slave for sale. Purchase contracts have also been handed down from Egypt. Whether the prices for slaves were high or low is debatable in research. In any case, the prices for slaves varied considerably depending on the region, time and qualification. For some times and places, research has tried to reconstruct market prices using various sources, but this is always associated with very great inaccuracies.
Within the African continent, too, there was a very early slave trade ( intra-African slave trade ), in which Africans enslaved. Because of the difficult source situation, it is still comparatively little researched. There is evidence of slavery as a result of indebtedness and imprisonment of another tribe.
In ancient times, slave trade was an economic factor that should not be underestimated, but also should not be overestimated. Especially the agriculture , the crafts and the prostitution industry were dependent on a constant supply of manpower.
In the early Middle Ages, during the Christianization, the trade in European slaves took off. At first it was mainly the Franks who often sold people from the previously non-Christianized areas with which they were at war into slavery. This particularly affected the Saxon tribal areas, from which slaves were mostly sold to Byzantium and Al-Andalus . Since a decree of Pope Gelasius (492) the trade in pagan slaves was also allowed to the Jews. To what extent these actually had a share in the European slave trade in the early Middle Ages remains questionable.
With the increasing Christianization of the Saxon areas, the main regions of origin of slaves shifted further east and north, because Christians were in principle not allowed to enslave other Christians since the time of Charlemagne . After the slave trade with the Saxons had come to an end for this reason, the Slavic tribes came more and more into their sights. From Heinrich I until the 12th century, there were regular slave hunts among the Elbe Slavs , which were primarily aimed at the great profit that could be made with the slave trade. Under the Bohemian Premyslid rulers, slaves were hunted in Moravia and Lesser Poland since the 10th century . Prague was one of the most important transshipment points for slaves. The term slave, derived from Slav , probably comes from this context .
In the high Middle Ages, the slave trade shifted from Central Europe southwards towards the Mediterranean, while slavery and slave trade hardly played a role north of the Alps .
Merchants from the rising Italian maritime republics , especially Genoa and Venice, were increasingly involved in this “new” trade . Via their trading posts in the eastern Mediterranean (including Thessaloniki , Chios , Famagusta in Cyprus , Candia in Crete ) and in the Black Sea (especially Caffa , but also Trebizond and others), which the Venetians received since the beginning of the 13th century (1204 control over Byzantium), they transported slaves mainly of Tatar and Caucasian origin to south-western Europe and the Egypt of the Mamluks . Provencal and Catalan traders, especially the Catalan Company , were also involved in this trade from east to west, and later Ottoman merchants as well. The fante , who came to Italy as children “for education” from the Balkans across the Adriatic Sea, represent a special case . Their status was probably very similar to that of a slave, but at least in theory they were freed after a few years.
Slaves were brought from black Africa to the Middle East through the Sahara ( trans- Saharan trade ), then partly across the Mediterranean Sea, the Red Sea and the Indian Ocean . This practice was already firmly anchored in the early Middle Ages and was continued after the emergence of Islam . This route of the slave trade was largely in the hands of oriental merchants. These slaves - like the slaves from the Black Sea region - found sales in the Middle Ages, especially in Egypt, where the great need for slaves for the Egyptian army had to be met, as well as as labor for the larger islands of the Mediterranean managed by Europeans (essentially Sicily and the Balearic Islands , as well as Crete , Cyprus and Rhodes ). The number of victims of this trade is unknown and is inaccurately estimated at at least 6 million people. The anthropologist Tidiane N'Diaye estimates the total number of people deported from Africa by Arab-Muslim slave traders at the extraordinarily high number of 17 million, relying on sources in his book that other scholars consider dubious.
The slave trade continued through the entire Middle Ages, despite sometimes controversial theoretical debates about the legitimacy of the enslavement of certain population groups (e.g. Orthodox Christians ). Nevertheless, Pope Nicholas V legitimized the slave trade again in his bull Divino amore communiti in 1452 , and the right to keep slaves was not fundamentally questioned in the Islamicized areas of the Middle East either.
With the beginning of modern times, the developing technical possibilities of seafaring led to the development of ever more distant regions, also far outside the Mediterranean. With the discovery of America in particular, the slave trade took on a new quality: At first, the Spanish and Portuguese colonial masters in America obliged the indigenous indigenous population to do forced labor in their plantations and mines . However, many Indians thought the hard work as well as the Europeans entrained infectious diseases was not, so you (including the suggestion of Bartolome de las Casas , who thus wanted to protect the Indians and this decision later regretted) came up with the idea of black African introduce slaves. These were considered to be more resilient. The demand for slaves for agriculture increased, which from around 1512 onwards were mainly shipped from Africa and to a previously unknown extent.
For a long time, the Atlantic slave trade was described with the model of the triangular trade, which was considered to be secure : According to this, the European slave traders on the African coast exchanged manufactured goods (tools, weapons and textiles) for slaves who were transported to America and sold there to work for sugar cane -, cotton -, coffee -, cocoa - and tobacco plantations as well as working in mines. The slave traders are said to have then sold the products of these plantations and mines and sold them in Europe at a profit . This model is criticized by researchers today as inherently racist because it assigns the role of Africans exclusively as victims. It is also considered to be too schematic because it ignores the intra-African slave trade and direct trade contacts between America and Africa. The idea that a slave, who could be bought in Africa for barter items worth five guilders , earned ten times as much in sugar in America, which in turn could be sold for many times as much in Europe, persists, but only corresponds partly the reality.
An investigation based on relevant sources of the voyages of 195 Dutch slave ships in the 18th century showed that only 69 of them had loaded colonial goods on their return voyage from America. 65 sailed home with only the necessary ballast (sand, water), 52 others had only a small amount of cargo on board. The reason for this rather unexpected result is also to be found in the special construction of the slave ships, which compared to conventional merchant ships had a significantly lower loading capacity and could therefore transport far fewer goods. In contrast to an ordinary merchant ship of comparable size, however, the average number of crews on a slave ship with 30 to 40 men was about twice as high, as more crew was required for the processing of the purchase and the guarding of the slaves. This shows that trafficking in people must have been extremely profitable.
Sometimes the Europeans went on slave hunting themselves; however, most of the slaves were sold by local rulers and traders on the African coast. Since war was the main source of prisoners to be sold as slaves to the Europeans, the slave trade also led to more conflict in Africa. In some cases, wars were deliberately stoked to get more slaves. After the crossing with specially converted slave ships , those slaves who had survived this " Middle Passage " of the triangular trade mentioned above came to the plantations and mines of America, especially West India . The Dutch island of Curaçao off the coast of Venezuela became the world's most important slave market.
Based on quantitative studies that the American historian Philip Curtin carried out as early as the 1960s and which were later continuously expanded by other scientists and finally culminated in a database in 1998 in which about 27,000 transatlantic slave transports are recorded, experts today assume that that between 1519 and 1867 about 11.06 million Africans were deported to America as part of the Atlantic slave trade, 3.9 million of them to Brazil . This means that older estimates, which assumed 15 million displaced persons, “are at the upper limit of the realistic.” This says nothing about the number of slaves who died as a result of the slave catch, during the intra-African transports and the waiting time in the slave forts on the African west coast perished. The approximate number of people who died in transit across the Atlantic is estimated at up to 1.5 million people. Research projects are ongoing at various universities, especially in the Netherlands and the USA, which are intended to provide more clarity in this regard.
Price of slaves
It is one of the widespread myths that the Europeans duped Africans with third-class goods and cheap trinkets and thus induced their compatriots to sell them. In addition to racist prejudices, the main reason for this is probably the Europeans' often irrational preferences of Africans for very specific goods, such as cowrie shells , which are a widely used currency in Africa. However, recent research has shown that the Africans were not only able to assess the value of the goods offered by the Europeans, but that they also largely determined the range of goods with which the Europeans had to buy the slaves. The European slave traders were generally forced to offer the Africans goods that they had previously obtained from various countries. No slave trader could allow himself to offer only the goods of his home country.
Accordingly, the prices for slaves were low at most in the early phase of the late medieval and early modern slave trade. Reports that the Portuguese received 25 to 30 slaves for an old horse in 1446 on the Senegal River , 12 slaves for a horse in 1460 on the Gambia River and 22 slaves for a dog on the Congo River only allow for the respective period and the relevant period Region inferences about the price of a slave.
Basically, slave prices remained relatively low from the initial phase of the transatlantic slave trade until well into the 17th century. After 1670 there was a continuous increase in prices, for which research is mainly blamed on the rapidly increasing demand in the New World . For example, between 1676 and 1680 an African from the slave coast paid an average of 17.8 pounds there. The average price was £ 34.4 between 1736 and 1740, after which it increased to £ 67.5 between 1786 and 1790. It reached its peak value - due to the "supply bottlenecks" associated with the Revolutionary Wars - in the years between 1806 and 1810 at 85.2 pounds.
The enslaved Africans were usually charged per piece. One “piece” was between 30 and 35 years old, 5 feet 11 inches tall (that's about 180 cm), and had no physical defect. There was a discount for one adolescent. However, the Spaniards once negotiated a contract with the Portuguese for the delivery of 10,000 tons of slaves. In this case, three slaves corresponded to a ton.
The Elector of Brandenburg has been involved in the African slave trade since 1683. It is estimated that the Brandenburg-African Company based in Emden sold around 17,000 Africans to the Caribbean (St. Thomas, Danish colony) in the course of its 17-year existence. Since the transatlantic slave trade was already firmly in Dutch and Portuguese hands at that time, the company never got out of the red. In addition, Brandenburg did not have its own base in the Caribbean, but was dependent on a contract with Denmark. The Fort Groß Friedrichsburg base serving the slave trade was then sold to the Dutch West India Company .
“The interest in overseas trade in general and in the slave trade in particular was very low in the population of both Brandenburg and Prussia. This little interest is already reflected in the fact that both the capital and the investors in BAC and its successor company came primarily from the Netherlands and from Brandenburg itself only the Elector, the Elector Prince and a few courtiers who actually had nothing else in mind , than for the elector's sake, had invested in overseas trade. "
Denmark was also involved in the slave trade between 1671 and 1802. Forts such as Christiansborg (Accra) were built on the Gold Coast in what is now Ghana , in which slaves were held captive and then mostly shipped to the Danish Virgin Islands. An estimated 100,000 Africans were sold to the Caribbean in this way. The German merchant dynasty of the Schimmelmanns , above all Heinrich Carl von Schimmelmann , the director of the Danish slave trade, who owned several of his own slave ships as well as four of his own plantations with 1,000 slaves and was thus at times the largest slave trader in Europe, also had a significant share in the Danish slave trade .
England / Great Britain
England or later Great Britain had the world's largest fleet of slave ships. The English port city of Liverpool was known as the “capital of the slave trade” with the largest slave market in the world. Large profits from the slave trade contributed to growth and prosperity here after the Liverpool Merchant sailed to Africa as the first known slave ship on October 3, 1699 and returned to her home port on September 18, 1700 with a "cargo" of 220 Africans. By the late 18th century, Liverpool's share of the Atlantic slave trade was 40%. In the most profitable year of 1799, Liverpool slave ships carried over 45,000 people from Africa. Bristol and London also did their best, but Liverpool dominated four-fifths of the English slave market.
The leading colonial power France participated in the transatlantic slave trade from 1713 to 1792/3 and was responsible for the transport of an estimated 1.1 to 1.2 million enslaved Africans to America . The main home port of the French slave traders was Nantes with 1,446 shiploads of slaves, followed by Bordeaux with 461, La Rochelle with 408, Le Havre with 345, and other ports. The mortality rate during the transports developed from 18 percent in the period 1713–1722 to a rate of 12 percent between 1763 and 1777. Investments in the slave trade were popular, for example Voltaire invested large parts of his funds in it. In Martinique , slavery was not completely abandoned until 1848 on the initiative of Victor Schoelcher ; until then, Joséphine de Beauharnais had been able to obtain permission from her then husband, Napoléon Bonaparte , because her family ran a large sugar cane plantation there .
In the period from 1674 to 1740, 383 slave ships were in service for the Dutch West India Company . The so-called "triangular voyage" began in one of the Dutch ports with the first stop on the west coast of Africa, in what is now Ghana. Mainly the Dutch fortresses, Fort Elmina and Fort Accra were landing places here. On the return voyage, the WIC ships took staple products such as sugar with them to the Netherlands, and then sailed again to West Africa, America and back.
In the early 15th century, the Portuguese Prince Henry the Navigator was looking for a sea route to India in order to profit from the spice trade. The expeditions to explore the West African coast were lengthy and expensive. Looting coastal villages could not cover the costs. After all, the Portuguese abducted locals to extort ransom, as had been done earlier with the neighboring Moors. Since the release of hostages did not work with distant countries, the prisoners were later sold as slaves. A fifth of the respective sales proceeds belonged to Prince Heinrich.
As Grand Master of the Order of Christ , Henry the Navigator had good contacts with Pope Nicholas V. With the bulls Dum diversas (1452) and Romanus Pontifex (1455) it was allowed to enslave pagans and take their property. Thus the Christian Portuguese had a moral justification for their business.
Initially, Senegal was of great importance for the slave trade. The Portuguese later established intensive trade relations with the rich there on the Gold Coast . The Fort São Jorge da Mina was built in Elmina in 1482 , which became an important trade and military base, where slaves were also traded.
After that, the Portuguese slave trade concentrated on its own colonies of Angola and Mozambique . In the period from 1710 to 1830 alone, around 1.2 million Africans were abducted via the port of Luanda . Even after the official abolition of slavery in the colonies, the colonial power Portugal showed itself to be very inventive in the introduction of employment contracts that included forms of forced labor and other hidden slavery.
The slavery in the United States is the continuation and development of slavery that are already in the 13 colonies from which the United States , was emerged 1776th The colonization of America from the 16th to 19th centuries went hand in hand with a mass enslavement of Africans who were used as cheap labor in all parts of the sparsely populated double continent. On the North American mainland, slavery took on forms that were unique on the double continent, and after the founding of the USA it stood between an economy that was built on the work of slaves and the political program of a young nation whose self-image was prominent was based on the idea of freedom .
There were more than 460,000 slaves in the United States at the time of the Declaration of Independence . The northern states , in whose economic life slaves had never played a major role, soon began to abolish slavery - a process that proved tedious and in some cases was not completed until 1865. In the southern states, where slavery was inextricably linked to the expanding economy, the number of slaves rose to more than four million by 1865.
Slavery did not emerge on the North American mainland with the arrival of the European colonial masters; it was already common in some Indian cultures. With the establishment of the colonies in the 17th century, however, it achieved general distribution for the first time. Slavery rose steeply with the emergence of the plantation economy , which arose in Virginia in the 17th century and spread south and west over the next two centuries. Since the sparsely populated colonies could not meet the growing need for cheap labor from their own resources, slaves of African descent were first imported from the Caribbean, but then in increasing numbers via the so-called " Middle Passage " directly from West Africa, especially from Angola . In the first half of the 19th century, the plantation economy in Virginia and North Carolina fell apart, but expanded further and further into the American west. As a result of this relocation, hundreds of thousands of African-American slaves were deported from the Upper South to the Deep South , particularly to Alabama , Mississippi and Louisiana . This forced mass migration was hardly less traumatic for those affected than it was for their ancestors when they were abducted across the Atlantic.
Slavery, often euphemistically referred to as The Peculiar Institution in the United States , came to an end with the military defeat of the Confederation in the Civil War (1865) and the 13th Amendment to the Constitution . The politics, society and culture of the United States have shaped them practically to the present day.
Spain and, after its independence, Brazil were also involved in the Atlantic slave trade. In the Indian Ocean, Arab traders imported slaves from East Africa. In Southeast Asia, primarily Chinese and Malay traders, and from the 17th century also Dutch traders, operated the transport of slaves between the regions. Here the slaves came from conflicts between the various small empires and tribes.
The Spaniard Pedro Blanco was known as the "largest slave trader in the world".
Wherever there was slave trade, there was resistance from those affected. As early as 1578, Francis Drake mentioned in his travelogue slaves who had escaped their Spanish and Portuguese owners and had formed Maroon communities. These communities sometimes existed for several centuries and set up self-sufficient economies or lived on goods they captured in their guerrilla wars against the slave owners. Sometimes they also joined forces with resistant indigenous people. In Jamaica, after several decades of successful war against the English army, in 1738 the runaway slaves achieved official recognition of their autonomous Maroon societies, which still exist today.
The piracy was an option of slave resistance. Some pirates hijacked slave ships and hired the freed Africans for their own crews. In 1724 the English Ministry of Commerce received a letter whose author complained that the slave trade had lost "almost 100 sailing ships" to the pirates in the course of two years. However, some pirates continued to sell captured slaves.
Abolition of the slave trade
The abolitionist movements that emerged in Europe in the 18th century initially concentrated their efforts on the abolition of the slave trade and not on slavery as a whole. The idea behind this was that, firstly, a ban on trade would be easier to implement politically than a ban on the entire institution of slavery, and secondly, without a constant supply of slavery, the material would run out by itself.
In 1792 Denmark became the first slave-trading nation to ban the slave trade across the Atlantic with effect from January 1, 1803. In 1807 Great Britain banned the slave trade with the Slave Trade Act and from then on also actively fought the slave trade in other European countries. In 1808, the abolitionists achieved a ban on the slave trade in the USA, which the government, particularly in the south, only inadequately enforced, but at least slowed the trade. At the Congress of Vienna in 1815, Great Britain implemented a general ban on the African slave trade between the major European powers, although no deadlines were set for the implementation of the resolution. Little by little, first the slave trade and then slavery were banned by all participating countries, so that the Atlantic slave trade came to a standstill. One reason for the increasing approval of the abolition of slavery and the slave trade was certainly also the changed production conditions as a result of the industrial revolution . With the quintuple contract in London on December 20, 1841, a reciprocal right to stop and search for ships flying the flag of opposing countries was agreed. It served the purpose of suppressing the slave trade and allowed the confiscation of slave ships in a certain area of the sea around Africa. As the last state involved in the Atlantic slave trade, Brazil abolished slavery on May 13, 1888.
Efforts to abolish the slave trade were subsequently extended to trade along the East African coast and across the Indian Ocean. The public discussion about the slave trade there played an important role in the colonial expansion of Europeans in Africa in the second half of the 19th century: This was justified time and again with the need to intervene to abolish the slave trade. In the course of the colonization of Africa, the European colonial rulers gradually pushed back the oriental and intra-African slave trade (cf. slavery agreement ). Both trade flows continued to exist in secret for a while; in Saudi Arabia , slavery was not officially banned until 1968. After the end of the international slave trade, the European colonial powers strove more or less successfully to abolish slavery in African societies. The slave trade at sea is prohibited by the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea . Any slave encountered on board a ship is ipso facto free.
Today's slavery in Sudan, as well as child trafficking in West Africa , where 200,000 children live in slavery according to UNICEF , show that slavery still exists today. According to the 2010 report by the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) , the number of slaves is rising again; accordingly there are around 140,000 slaves in Europe and several million worldwide. People are often lured out of their homeland on the pretext of being able to find work in rich countries and then encouraged to do prostitution and forced labor after they leave. However, the use of the term "slavery" is often ambiguous; a distinction is seldom made between slavery and forms of bondage similar to slavery.
The International Day to Commemorate the Slave Trade and its Abolition has been commemorating slavery and its abolition in many countries on 23 August each year since 1998 .
- Roots (TV series) . Director: David Wolper , 1977 USA
- Ashanti (film) . Directed by Richard Fleischer , 1979 USA
- Mission . Director: Roland Joffé , 1986 Great Britain
- Cobra Verde . Director: Werner Herzog , 1987 Germany.
- Amistad - The slave ship . Director: Steven Spielberg , 1997 USA.
- 12 years a slave . Director: Steve McQueen , USA 2013
in order of appearance
- Thomas Fowell Buxton, 1st Baronet : The African slave trade and its remedies. FA Brockhaus, Leipzig 1841, ( Google Books ).
- Philip D. Curtin: The Atlantic Slave Trade. A census. University of Wisconsin Press, Madison WI 1975, ISBN 0-299-05404-7 .
- Wolfgang Wimmer: The slaves. A social history with the present (= Rororo 7169 rororo non-fiction book ). Rowohlt, Reinbek near Hamburg 1979, ISBN 3-499-17169-4 .
- Jacques Heers : Esclaves et domestiques au Moyen Âge dans le monde méditerranéen. Hachette, Paris 1996, ISBN 2-01-279335-5 .
- HD Baker: Degrees of freedom. Slavery in mid-first millennium BC Babylonia. In: World Archeology. Volume 33, No. 1, 2001, , pp. 18-26.
- Christian Delacampagne : The History of Slavery. Artemis & Winkler, Düsseldorf 2004, ISBN 3-538-07183-7 .
- Michael Zeuske : Black Caribbean. Slaves, slavery culture and emancipation. Rotpunktverlag, Zurich 2004, ISBN 3-85869-272-7 .
- Hans Fässler: Journey in Black and White. Swiss on-site appointments in matters of slavery. Rotpunktverlag, Zurich 2005, ISBN 3-85869-303-0 .
- Michael Zeuske: Slaves and slavery in the worlds of the Atlantic. 1400-1940. Outlines, beginnings, actors, fields of comparison and bibliographies. LIT, Berlin 2006, ISBN 3-8258-7840-6 ( slavery and post-emancipation 1).
- Jochen Meissner, Ulrich Mücke , Klaus Weber : Black America. A history of slavery. Beck, Munich 2008, ISBN 978-3-406-56225-9 .
- Egon Flaig : World History of Slavery. Beck, Munich 2009, ISBN 978-3-406-58450-3 .
- James Walvin: The Zong. A Massacre, the Law and the End of Slavery . Yale University Press, New Haven / London 2011, ISBN 978-0-300-12555-9 .
- Michael Zeuske: Slave Traders, Negreros and Atlantic Creoles. A world history of the slave trade in the Atlantic area. De Gruyter Oldenbourg, Berlin 2015, ISBN 978-3-11-042672-4 .
- Michael Zeuske: slavery. A human history from the Stone Age to today . Reclam, Stuttgart 2018, ISBN 978-3-15-011155-0 .
- Literature on the slave trade in the catalog of the German National Library
- Unesco maps: Paths of the slave ships (with dates )
- “Reise in Schwarz-Weiss” - about Swiss relations with slavery and the slave trade
- Combating trafficking in human beings - Council of Europe dossier ( Memento of March 5, 2010 in the Internet Archive )
- Michael Rostoftzeff: Social and economic history of the Hellenistic world. Volume 2, Darmstadt 1998, p. 1012 ff.
- Joyce Salisbury: Encyclopedia of Women in the Ancient World. ABC-CLIO, Santa Barbara 2001, p. 308
- Michael Rostovtzeff: Social and economic history of the Hellenistic world. Volume 2, Darmstadt 1998, pp. 624-629.
- Strabo, Geographica XIV 5.2.
- On medieval Jewish traders cf. for example: Daniel Niemetz: Used and Persecuted - Jews in the Middle Ages. A historical overview. Mitteldeutscher Rundfunk, 2019.
- See Michael Toch : ? יהודי אירופה בימי הבניים המוקדמים: סוחרי עבדים [ The European Jews of the Early Middle Ages: slave traders? ] In: Zion. Volume 64, 1999, pp. 39-63; see. the abstract in English at http://med-slavery.uni-trier.de/minev/MedSlavery/Members/bibuser/Bibliography/incollectionreference.2006-09-15.0617541781 . Toch believes that most of the available sources are inconclusive to answer this question. The view that Jews were the main actors in the slave trade, especially in the early Middle Ages, is found among others by Charles Verlinden , but is disputed by Toch and at least doubted by others. - On the criticism of Toch, cf. Friedrich Lotter: Are Christian sources largely useless for researching the history of the Jews in the early Middle Ages? In: Historical magazine. Volume 278, No. 2, 2004, pp. 311–327 (p. 326: “As a conclusion to Toch's argument, the only thing left is the statement that his method, which was initially developed from serious approaches, was expanded into a system with which everything is at will can either be proven or refuted. ”In addition, p. 325:“ In conclusion, the only thing left is the statement that the number of this evidence that can be expanded is far too large to be rejected across the board as unreliable and unreliable can. ")
- Johannes Fried: The way into history. The origins of Germany up to 1024. Ullstein, Berlin 1998, ISBN 3-548-26517-0 , p. 579 u. 935.
- Dušan Třeštík: Počátky Přemyslovců. Vstup Čechů do dějin (530-935). Nakladatelství Lidové noviny, Prague 1997, ISBN 80-7106-138-7 , p. 350.
- Kate Fleet: European and Islamic Trade in the Early Ottoman State. The Merchants of Genoa and Turkey. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 1999, pp. 37-59.
- Deutschlandradio review: Thirteen centuries of slave trade , March 29, 2010 In contrast to the transatlantic slave trade, there were no significant migration effects after N'Diaye, as many of the slaves were castrated. Since the mutilation is forbidden in Islam, the slave traders had the operations carried out by non-Muslim specialists in Abyssinia and Upper Egypt. According to N'Diaye estimates, only one in three to four Africans survived the slave transports, see Tidiane N'Diaye: The Veiled Genocide. The history of the Muslim slave trade in Africa. Reinbek 2010 - The genocide that has been kept secret until today: The Arab-Islamic slave trade was worse than the transatlantic slave trade of the Europeans .
- Roland Bernhard and Jutta Wimmler: “Dreieckshandel”, Glasperlen und Gender. Mythical narratives on the transatlantic slave trade in current German and Austrian school books. In: History in Science and Education 70, Volume 3/4 (1990), pp. 149-164.
- J. Meissner, U. Mücke, K. Weber: Black America. A history of slavery. Munich 2008, pp. 84, 88.
- J. Meissner, U. Mücke, K. Weber: Black America. A history of slavery. Munich 2008, p. 47. On the extent of the Atlantic slave trade according to regions of origin and destinations, cf. there Tables 1 and 2, pp. 48 and 86f.
- J. Meissner, U. Mücke, K. Weber: Black America. A history of slavery. Munich 2008, pp. 64 and 84.
- J. Meissner, U. Mücke, K. Weber: Black America. A history of slavery. Munich 2008, p. 66.
- Brandenburg enters the slave trade ; Timeline ( memento from June 26, 2009 in the Internet Archive )
- Malte Stamm: The Colonial Experiment. The slave trade in Brandenburg-Prussia in the transatlantic region 1680–1718. University and State Library of Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf, Düsseldorf 2011; also: Dissertation, Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf, 2011, p. 382.
- Erik Gøbel: Danish Shipping along the Triangular Route, 1671-1802. In: Scandinavian Journal of History. 2011, Vol. 36, No. 2.
- Christian Degn: The Schimmelmanns in the Atlantic triangular trade. Profit and conscience. Wacholz, Neumünster 1974, p. 59 ff.
- Robert Stein: Measuring the French Slave Trade, 1713–1792 / 3. In: Journal of African History. 1978, Vol. XIX, No. 4, pp. 515-521.
- Ronald Daus: The Invention of Colonialism . Hammer, Wuppertal 1983, ISBN 3-87294-202-6 (jointly published with GEPA ).
- "José Carlos Curto, historian, University of Toronto in a conversation with the Portuguese daily Público on September 24, 2015"
- Hugh Thomas: The Slave Trade: The Story of the Atlantic Slave Trade: 1440-1870. Simon & Schuster, New York 1997, ISBN 0-684-81063-8 , p. 803.
- Sir Francis Drake's Famous Voyage Round the World. In: Voyages and Travels: Ancient and Modern. Volume XXXIII. (= The Harvard Classics. ) PF Collier & Son, New York 1909-14; Bartleby.com, 2001, p. 210.
- Peter Linebaugh, Marcus Rediker: The many-headed hydra. The hidden history of the revolutionary Atlantic. Hamburg 2008, p. 173.
- Mavis Christine Campbell: The Maroons of Jamaica, 1655–1796: A History of Resistance, Collaboration & Betrayal. Bergin & Garvey, Granby (MA) 1988, ISBN 0-89789-148-1 .
- Peter Linebaugh, Marcus Rediker: The many-headed hydra. The hidden history of the revolutionary Atlantic. Hamburg 2008, p. 179 ff.
- Quoting from Peter Linebaugh, Marcus Rediker: The many-headed hydra. The hidden history of the revolutionary Atlantic. Hamburg 2008, p. 185.
- According to an estimate by historian John Hope Franklin , around 250,000 other slaves were transported after the ban; see. Howard Zinn: A People's History of the United States. Harper Perennial, 2005, ISBN 0-06-083865-5 , p. 172.
- United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea, Article 99 ( German translation )
- The slaves live among us. In: Tages-Anzeiger . of June 29, 2010. Refugees are also often affected by slavery-like circumstances; in Libya, for example, workers are sold under slave-like conditions. According to a CNN report, "Two big, strong boys for agriculture" cost $ 800 at a slave auction in Libya in August 2017 ( American television station CNN in mid-November 2017 )