Slavery Routes

The history of slavery did not begin in the cotton fields. It has been going on since the dawn of humanity. By the 7th Century AD, Africa had already become a slave trading hub. Barbarian invaders brought on the collapse of the Western Roman Empire in 476 AD. Less than two centuries later, the Arabs founded an immense empire on its ruins, stretching from the banks of the Indus River to the southern Sahara. Now a new era of systematic slave hunting began, from the Middle East to Africa. At the heart of this network, two major merchant cities stood out. In the North, at the crossroads of the Arabian Peninsula and Africa, Cairo - the most important Muslim city and Africa’s main commercial hub. In the South, Timbuktu, the stronghold of the great West African empires, and point of departure of the trans-Saharan caravans.

At the end of the Middle Ages, European powers realized that the African continent harbored a seemingly inexhaustible wealth of resources. The Portuguese were among the first to set out to conquer the continent. They went in search of gold, but they came back with hundreds of thousands of captives to sell as slaves in Europe. From the coasts of Africa, the Conquistadores sailed on to Brazil, where they established a trading center. There, the Portuguese set up the first colonies that were populated exclusively by slaves. On the island of São Tomé, off of Gabon, they found their most lucrative commodity: sugar cane, and the sugar plantation became the blueprint for the profitable exploitation of the New World.

In the 17th century, the Atlantic became the battleground of a war for sugar. European kingdoms sought ever-greater riches. To satisfy their greed, they opened new slavery routes from Africa to the islands of the New World in the Caribbean. With the complicity of banks and insurance companies, they industrialized the slave trade, pushing the number of deportations to unprecedented levels. Almost seven million Africans were trapped in captivity, in an endless spiral of violence. Up until the abolition of slavery, humans were trafficked across immense territories. The slave trade drew its own frontiers and created its own laws in a world marked by violence and the thirst for power and profit.

Africa was long at the center of the slave trade. In the 18th century, the abolitionist movement began gathering momentum in London, Paris and Washington. After the slave rebellion in the French colony of Saint Domingue (modern-day Haiti), and in the face of growing public outrage, Europe’s major powers abolished the trans-Atlantic slave trade in 1807. But Europe was in the midst of the Industrial Revolution, and couldn’t afford to give up its slave workforce. To satisfy its need for raw materials, it relocated the frontiers of slavery and turned a blind eye to new forms of human exploitation in Brazil, the United States and Africa. When the slave trade was abolished in 1807, there were more Africans in captivity than ever before. Within 50 years, nearly 2.5 million men, women and children were deported. The ban was far from the end of slavery.