Atlantic slave trade

The Atlantic slave trade or transatlantic slave trade involved transportation by slave traders of enslaved African people, mainly to the Americas. The slave trade regularly used the triangular trade route and its Middle Passage and existed from the 16th to the 19th centuries. The vast majority of those who were enslaved and transported in the transatlantic slave trade were people from Central and West Africa, who had been sold by other West Africans to Western European slave traders (with a small number being captured directly by the slave traders in coastal raids), who brought them to the Americas. The South Atlantic and Caribbean economies were particularly dependent on the supply of slave labor for the production of commodity crops, making goods and clothing to sell in Europe. This was crucial to those Western European countries which, in the late 17th and 18th centuries, were vying with each other to create overseas empires.