Marked Elmina

SubjectIn outline · lessons being written

The transatlantic slave trade

For more than three and a half centuries, European traders shipped about 12.5 million enslaved Africans across the Atlantic. Around 1.8 million died on the voyage. The trade made fortunes in Europe and the Americas, and those enslaved resisted it at every stage.

Place
Elmina · Ouidah · Liverpool · Jamaica · Salvador da BahiaAfrica, The Americas, Europe
Laid out as
A routeA road, a sea lane or a trade network, followed stop by stop.
Lessons
6 planned, none written yet

The lessons we plan

Titles may change as they are written

  1. Elmina
  2. Ouidah
  3. Liverpool
  4. Jamaica
  5. Salvador da Bahia
  1. ICapture and the forts of the coast
  2. IIThe Middle Passage
  3. IIILiverpool, Bristol and London
  4. IVPlantations in the Caribbean
  5. VResistance on ships and land
  6. VIThe numbers and the names

Still to come

The people and objects these lessons will cover

People

  • Olaudah Equiano
  • Ottobah Cugoano
  • Nanny of the Maroons
  • Phillis Wheatley

Objects

  • The Brookes slave ship plan
  • Manillas
  • Shackles

Where it sits

All of human history, era by era

Early human ancestryOur species and the Old Stone AgeFarming and the New Stone AgeFirst cities and the Bronze AgeThe Iron Age and growing statesThe classical worldAfter the empiresMedieval networks and empiresOceans crossedRevolutions and the first factoriesIndustry, empire and world warThe world since 1945

1500 to 1867. Each era is drawn the same width, so the earliest are squeezed: era II alone is over 300,000 years.

Nearby in time and place

This page is an outline. The summary above is a starting point; each lesson, when it is written, will give its sources, its pictures and where historians disagree. Spotted a mistake?