From the sixteenth to the nineteenth century European traders forcibly transported an estimated 12.5 million enslaved Africans across the Atlantic, of whom about 10.7 million survived the Middle Passage to reach the Americas. The trade fed plantation economies producing sugar, tobacco, coffee and cotton, and was financed and provisioned through a network of Atlantic ports. Its profits flowed into shipping, insurance, banking and construction in the cities that organised it.
It built the wealth and coerced-labour systems of Atlantic port and plantation cities — from Liverpool, Bristol and Nantes to Salvador, Charleston and Kingston — shaping their docks, warehouses, fortunes and enduring spatial and racial divisions.