Slave Trade, Atlantic

The Atlantic slave trade was the forced transportation of enslaved Africans to the Americas from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century, the largest forced migration in history. About 12.5 million people were embarked, of whom some 10.7 million survived the Middle Passage, carried in slave ships on the triangular trade between Europe, West Africa, and the plantation colonies. Britain abolished its trade in 1807 and slavery in its colonies in 1833; the United States ended legal importation in 1808. The trade left a vast documentary and archaeological record.