The European countries involved in the Transatlantic
Slave Trade spanned the whole range of European powers who sought
imperial or trading expansion in the Atlantic, beginning with
the Spanish and Portuguese, later the Dutch, and finally the
French and the British. But even smaller countries not normally
associated with slave trading were affected such as the Danes
and Germans. New forms of economic and social power emerged
and commercial and maritime companies (often with royal or governmental
backing) secured prosperity through slave trading and slave-based
activities in Africa and the Americas. British companies prospered
on the back of slavery, investing their profits not simply in
the urban and trading fabric of the country, but by spreading
their profits across the face of Britain, from farms to schools,
from stately homes to grand London residences. Sugar was a source
of great prosperity, and all made possible by Africans imported
as slaves. There are now details of some 27,000 slave voyages,
12,000 of which were British - and half of those began in Liverpool.
First London, then Bristol and finally Liverpool dominated the
British slave trade. But many other ports, from Lancaster to
Lyme Regis were involved in the Transatlantic Slave Trade. From
the middle of the 17th century the tastes and habits of the
whole western world, as well as the society itself, were changed
through people being able to buy the products that the slaves
produced. Europeans consumed vast quantities of tobacco from
Virginia, and more and more sugar from the Caribbean for example.
The Transatlantic Slave Trade also saw Africans arriving and
settling in Europe in growing numbers by the mid-18th century
and the Transatlantic Slave Trade was also secured by a complex
set of racial attitudes which elevated white mankind above all
others. One of the most persistent, insidious and complex consequences
of the Transatlantic Slave Trade was to racialise humankind
in ways that we still see in the modern world.
