Seventeenth-Century Atlantic Slave Trade System

Timeline

1. 1621–1660Elmina Castle, Gold Coast · GhanaThe Dutch West India Company (WIC) captured the Portuguese Elmina Castle in 1637, becoming the largest slave-export hub on the Gold Coast of West Africa. Between 1651 and 1660 the WIC shipped about 5,000 to 8,000 slaves annually; although Holland lost control of Dutch Brazil's Pernambuco in 1654, it still shipped slaves to Dutch Suriname and Caribbean colonies, briefly propelling the Netherlands to dominance in the Atlantic slave trade.
2. 1651–1660England and West African trading stations · Western EuropeEngland issued the Navigation Acts in 1651, restricting Dutch merchant shipping and triggering the First Anglo-Dutch War (1652-1654). After the war, the predecessor of the Royal African Company (Company of Royal Adventurers Trading into Africa, established 1660) accelerated the establishment of West African trading posts; British slave trade volumes rose steadily, gradually making Britain the largest operator in the 18th-century Atlantic slave trade.
3. 1651–1660Atlantic Middle Passage · AtlanticBetween 1651 and 1660 an estimated 150,000 to 180,000 Africans were forcibly crammed into slave ships for the 6-to-12-week Middle Passage across the Atlantic. Holds were extremely crowded, the enslaved could barely move, and en route mortality was about 12-20%. Survivors were auctioned on arrival and put to work in Brazilian sugar plantations and Caribbean sugar and tobacco plantations as the core labor force of the colonial economy.