The slave trade in Africa and the Middle East (1500-1900)

Maritime/technological advances (ships, navigation); growth of plantation agriculture; existing practice of slavery in African societies (plus warfare between African states).

A licence granted by the Spanish crown allowing merchants to supply enslaved Africans to Spanish colonies — it formalised Atlantic slave-trade demand into an organised system.

Because of the existing Arabia–Swahili coast trade, the expansion of the Sultanate of Oman into East Africa, and rising demand once the Atlantic trade began to be banned.

Sultan of Oman (1804–1856) who moved his capital to Zanzibar in 1840 and built a clove-plantation economy on enslaved labour, making him the key individual behind the East African trade's growth.

A process where firearms bought with captives enabled more warfare, which produced more captives, which bought more firearms — reinforcing both warfare and the slave trade.

Atlantic: European colonial powers (for American plantations). East African: Arabian/Gulf markets and Omani Zanzibar's plantations.

Sugar, tobacco and cotton plantations in Brazil, the Caribbean and British America needed large, cheap, controllable labour forces, which European settlers filled with enslaved Africans.

Rulers who controlled the supply of captives grew wealthy and powerful by trading them for firearms, cloth, and manufactured goods.

Demographic damage from losing millions of young people (mostly men); increased militarisation as raiding became normal; new elites formed around control of the trade.

Because the syllabus bullet explicitly asks for social/economic impact in Africa and the Middle East AND the role and significance of individuals — both must be covered for full marks.

Chartered companies such as the Royal African Company, which organised shipping, financing and coastal trading posts.

Organise by theme (economic, political, existing structures), use balanced evidence from both the Atlantic and East African systems, and end with a reasoned judgement on which factor mattered most.

Industrialisation and economic change, the abolitionist movement, and the rise of legitimate commerce (e.g. palm oil).

An evangelical Christian MP who led decades of parliamentary campaigning in Britain against the slave trade.

Founded in 1787, it organised petitions, meetings and pamphlets that shifted British public opinion against the slave trade.

Trade in goods such as palm oil, cocoa and groundnuts that replaced the slave trade as a source of income for African merchants.

Humanitarian pressure from missionaries, colonial expansion closing the markets, and the decline of slavery in the Ottoman Empire.

An explorer-missionary who publicised the brutality of the East African slave trade in Britain through writings and lectures in the 1860s-70s, building humanitarian pressure.

Under British pressure on Sultan Barghash, the major East African slave market at Zanzibar was closed.

Made it illegal for British ships to carry enslaved people and led the Royal Navy to patrol West African waters to intercept slave ships; it did not free existing enslaved people.

Abolished slavery across most of the British Empire, though freed people were forced into 'apprenticeships' for several more years and enslavers (not the enslaved) were compensated.

Part of the Berlin Conference, where European powers committed to suppressing the African slave trade - used partly to justify colonial conquest of Africa.

The Atlantic trade was largely suppressed by the 1830s-40s from internal British economic and moral change; the East African trade persisted into the 1890s, ended mainly by external colonial force.

It only banned the trade (transporting people), it did not free those already enslaved - that came with the 1833 Act, and even then via a delayed 'apprenticeship' system.