1500-00-00: (The Atlantic Slave Trade, the Forced Transportation of Roughly Twelve Million Africans Across the Atlantic Over Four Centuries, With Approximate…

1500-00-00: (The Atlantic Slave Trade, the Forced Transportation of Roughly Twelve Million Africans Across the Atlantic Over Four Centuries, With Approximately Fifteen Percent Sent to the French Caribbean and Mostly to Saint-Domingue, Building the Wealth That Made Haiti the Richest Colony in the World): The Atlantic slave trade was the largest forced migration in human history, transporting roughly twelve million African people from the continent to European colonies in the Americas between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries. A parallel Muslim-run slave trade operated simultaneously in the Indian Ocean. The Portuguese dominated the early trade, sending enslaved Africans primarily to Brazil. From 1650 to 1800, at the trade’s peak, Britain, France, Spain, Denmark, Prussia, Sweden, the Netherlands, and the United States all participated. Most enslaved people were taken from West Africa and the Congo-Angola region and sold to sugarcane plantation owners in Brazil and the Caribbean. Approximately fifteen percent of all Africans enslaved in the Americas went to the French Caribbean, the vast majority to Saint-Domingue, where the Planter’s Policy of working people to death and replacing them through continued importation created both the colony’s extraordinary wealth and the conditions for revolution. Britain and the United States abolished the trade in 1807 and 1808 respectively; Brazil followed in 1850. But the institution of slavery itself continued in the Americas long after the trade was officially ended. Most of the enslaved were procured through African intermediaries, a fact that complicates the narrative without diminishing European culpability for creating and sustaining the demand that drove the entire system.