Essay On The Transatlantic Slave Trade

History is host to a seemingly countless number of atrocities. Our knowledge of these events is limited to the records left behind for historians to study. One of history’s greatest recorded atrocities is the transatlantic slave trade that occurred from the fifteenth century to the eighteenth century. The incredible amount of records that exist about the transatlantic slave trade provides great insight into its participants, functionality, and eventual end.
In the first half of the transatlantic slave trade, the main participants were the Portuguese merchants. Portugal was the primary European country to take part in African slave trading. The Portuguese purchased slaves for labor on island plantations, and later for plantations in Brazil and the Caribbean. Portuguese traders established business relations with African leaders, who agreed to sell slaves taken from the numerous African wars. When Portuguese, and other European nations, found that peaceful business relations alone failed to generate enough …show more content…
Opinion in Europe was also changing. Moral, spiritual and humanitarian arguments found more and more support. an active campaign to attain abolishment began in Britain. The Slave Trade Act that went into effect in 1807 abolished the transatlantic slave trade throughout the British Empire. Although the transatlantic slave trade was abolished throughout British Empire, slavery itself continued to exist throughout the British Empire during the first half of the nineteenth century. It continued to remain legal throughout the British Empire until the Slavery Abolition Act of 1833. The abolishment of the slave trade, though unsuccessful in ending the institution of slavery itself, established abolishment as one of the most important reform movements of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in