Well over 90 percent of enslaved Africans were sent to the Caribbean and South America. Only about 6 percent of African captives were sent directly to British North America.
North Korea, Eritrea and Burundi are estimated to have the world's highest rates of modern-day slavery, with India, China and Pakistan home to the largest number of victims.
The destinations of slaves taken to the Americas were equally diverse. Slavers carried most of the Africans caught up in the trade to Brazil (approximately five million), with another 2.25 million sent to the British Caribbean, and about 1.75 million to the French Caribbean. Most of the rest landed in Spanish America.
Some 5 million enslaved Africans were taken to the Caribbean, almost half of whom were brought to the British Caribbean (2.3 million). As planters became more reliant on enslaved workers, the populations of the Caribbean colonies changed, so that people born in Africa, or their descendants, came to form the majority.
In the 1850s, Duncan owned more than 1,000 slaves, making him the largest resident slave holder in Mississippi. By 1860, Duncan's ownership of 858 slaves in Issaquena County made him second nationally to the estate of Joshua John Ward of South Carolina, which enslaved 1,130.
In the lower South the majority of slaves lived and worked on cotton plantations. Most of these plantations had fifty or fewer slaves, although the largest plantations have several hundred. Cotton was by far the leading cash crop, but slaves also raised rice, corn, sugarcane, and tobacco.
By the middle of the 18th century, British Jamaica and French Saint-Domingue (now Haiti) had become the largest slave societies of the region, rivaling Brazil as a destination for enslaved Africans. The death rates for Black slaves in these islands were higher than birth rates.
In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, more than 300,000 white people were shipped to America as slaves.
The French colonial empire practiced slavery in its colonies. In the mid-16th century, enslaved people were trafficked from Africa to the Caribbean by European mercantilists.
The city of New Orleans was the largest slave market in the United States, ultimately serving as the site for the purchase and sale of more than 135,000 people. In 1808, Congress exercised its constitutional prerogative to end the legal importation of enslaved people from outside the United States.
Nearly 40 million of people around the world are enslaved today, and the largest number live in India. There, in the northern state of Uttar Pradesh, rock quarry miners fought landowners who had held their families in bondage for generations. They liberated themselves in July 2000 and began running their own quarries.
Before the mid-1800s, Spanish Florida and Mexico were the favored destinations for many escaping bondage. It was not until the northern states and Canada adopted emancipation laws that they became safer destinations for freedom seekers.
Slavery was abolished as a legally recognized institution, including in a 1909 law fully enacted in 1910, although the practice continued until at least 1949. Illegal acts of forced labor and sexual slavery in China continue to occur in the 21st century, but those found guilty of such crimes are punished harshly.
The number of slaves in Egypt has been estimated to be at least 30,000 slaves in Egypt at any time in the 19th-century.
Slavery in Korea has been documented from the Three Kingdoms period (BC 57–AD 668). At that time, slaves were either former prisoners of war between tribes and states, or criminals, who were public slaves of the state government.
According to Robert Davis, between 1 million and 1.25 million Europeans were captured by Barbary pirates and sold as slaves in North Africa and Ottoman Empire between the 15th and 19th centuries.
However, many consider a significant starting point to slavery in America to be 1619, when the privateer The White Lion brought 20 enslaved African ashore in the British colony of Jamestown, Virginia. The crew had seized the Africans from the Portuguese slave ship Sao Jao Bautista.
Evidence of slavery predates written records; the practice has existed in many cultures. and can be traced back 11,000 years ago due to the conditions created by the invention of agriculture during the Neolithic Revolution. Economic surpluses and high population densities were conditions that made mass slavery viable.
In February 1794, the French republic outlawed slavery in its colonies. Revolutionaries in Saint-Domingue secured not only their own freedom, but that of their French colonial counterparts, too. After Napoleon Bonaparte wrested control of revolutionary France, he sought to reconstruct a French Empire.
Some 40 per cent of enslaved Africans were shipped to the Caribbean Islands, which, in the seventeenth century, surpassed Portuguese Brazil as the principal market for enslaved labour.
Once they arrived in the Caribbean islands, the Africans were prepared for sale. They were washed and their skin was oiled. Finally they were sold to local buyers. Often parents were separated from children, and husbands from wives.
Whipping, a common form of slave punishment, demanded the removal of clothing. For the female slave, this generally meant disrobing down to the waist. Although her state of half dress allowed the woman some modesty, it also exposed her naked breasts to all eyes.
The most common of 603 names of female Slaves were Bet, Mary, Jane, Hanna, Betty, Sarah, Phillis, Nan, Peg, and Sary. Private names used in the quarters included Abah, Bilah, Comba, Dibb, Juba, Kauchee, Mima, and Sena.
John Brown, Abolitionist: The Man Who Killed Slavery, Sparked the Civil War, and Seeded Civil Rights: Reynolds, David S.: 9780375726156: Amazon.com: Books.