Colonialism and slavery — the transatlantic system and its impact

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The forced shipment of enslaved Africans across the Atlantic to the Americas, mainly 1500s–1800s, to work on plantations and in mines.

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The brutal sea crossing from West Africa to the Americas; enslaved people were chained below deck for weeks in overcrowded, disease-ridden conditions. Roughly 1 in 8 died on the voyage.

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Indigenous populations had collapsed from disease and forced labour; European indentured servants were too few and too costly long-term; Africans were seen (falsely, through racist ideas) as more resistant to tropical disease and already had experience with the crops being grown.

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A system where enslaved people are treated as property that can be bought, sold and inherited, with no legal personhood — the form of slavery used in the Americas.

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The huge profitability of sugar, tobacco and later cotton — plantation crops needed constant, cheap, large-scale labour, and enslaved labour cost owners far less than paying wages.

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European governments passed laws (like Britain's Navigation Acts and slave codes in every colony) that protected the trade, defined enslaved people as property, and gave planters political power in colonial assemblies.

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Emerging racist theories claimed Africans were biologically or spiritually inferior, and some used a twisted reading of Christianity to argue slavery could 'civilize' or 'save' enslaved people — ideas invented largely to justify an already-profitable system.

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Portugal started the trade earliest (1500s, mainly to Brazil) and shipped the most people overall (~5 million to Brazil); Britain dominated later (1600s–1807), especially to the Caribbean and North America, and became the single largest carrier in the trade's peak century.

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The three-legged trade route: European goods to Africa, enslaved Africans to the Americas, plantation goods (sugar, tobacco, cotton) back to Europe.

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Enslaved people worked 12–18 hour days in extreme heat, faced whipping and mutilation as discipline, lived in cramped huts, and had short life expectancies — especially on Caribbean sugar plantations, among the deadliest workplaces in history.

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Enslaved women faced forced field labour PLUS domestic work PLUS constant sexual violence from owners, and their children were automatically born enslaved — meaning women's bodies were also directly exploited for the reproduction of the enslaved workforce.

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Indigenous peoples were displaced from land now worked by enslaved Africans, and over generations complex multiracial societies emerged (mixing African, Indigenous and European people), while Indigenous communities themselves continued to suffer from disease and land loss.