How the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Continues to Impact Modern Life

The history of slavery, its victims, and its impact might appear to be unconnected to the present. We tend to relegate slavery to a long-ago past and consider it an unfortunate episode set in motion by people living at a time distant from our own. It is hard to accept a trade in human beings. It is hard to come to terms with the dungeons on the West African coast, or the slave quarters in Louisiana, or the history of slave ownership on the part of Ivy League universities and Fortune 500 companies. Slavery shapes the ways we assess incarceration and liberty, immigration and citizenship, value and insurance, and travel and home. Slavery normalized what, in hindsight, we can agree were universally abhorrent practices. The story of slavery is powerfully at odds with logic, justice, and democracy, but lurking just beneath the surface of the institutions and experiences that shape contemporary life are the legacies of violence, racism, and dispossession of the “peculiar institution.” There, we find the origins of colonialism, extractive long-distance trade, and capitalism.

For historians of slavery, the origins of the modern world and the origins of the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade are one and the same thing. They are so deeply interwoven that, beginning in the sixteenth century, one could not exist without the other. They gave rise to the core concepts associated with “modernity” and with the ideas of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment: capitalism, democracy, and the belief that all individuals possess natural and human rights. Ironically, each of these concepts emerged during the ascendency of the slave trade. However, the late sociologist and theorist Cedric Robinson, borrowing from debates about the relationship between apartheid, race, and class in South Africa, introduced the concept of “racial capitalism” in 1983 as a critique of scholarship that suggested slavery was no more than a primitive economic stage in the unfolding of capitalism. Robinson argued that the development of capitalism required slavery. He didn’t view racism as a regrettable side effect of class but rather explained that capitalism arose from the alienation of workers, the logistics of long-distance trade, and the extractive project of colonialism. These were the outgrowths of historic racial, ethnic, and economic antagonisms among Europeans, which led to the development and embrace of hereditary racial slavery.

Today we live in the aftermath of slavery—and thus in its wake. In her book In the Wake: On Blackness and Being, the theorist and philosopher Christina Sharpe encourages us to consider the multiple meanings of the word “wake,” because it evokes many aspects of the aftermath of slavery. A wake is the path left behind a ship; the aftermath of a ship’s passing. In the case of a vessel transporting African captives across the Atlantic, the wake would include captives thrown overboard, and sharks that fed on them. The migratory patterns of sharks were transformed by the slave trade, as bodies lured sharks from the coast of Africa to the other side of the Atlantic. The word also moves us to contemplate the effects on the lives of the families left behind, as Sharpe reminds us that a wake is a gathering that marks the death of a loved one, where mourners share memories of the departed. Black people in the Diaspora have always mourned the histories that can’t be accessed, the violence in communities from Montreal to Montenegro generations after the end of the slave trade, and myriad other conditions and situations that arise when one tries to navigate the grief associated with slavery. The word wake also signifies a return to consciousness, opening one’s eyes in the morning, seeing all that is around us—bearing witness. As a historian of the early modern Black Atlantic, wake enables me to understand the impact of slavery on so many aspects of our current world.

From the beginning, the history of slavery in the Americas was mired in efforts to minimize its impact. Even before the end of the slave trade and of slavery, a robust and profoundly destructive, layered narrative about African culpability in the trade developed in Europe and the United States. Before we can begin to assess slavery’s impact on the modern world, we need to understand the barriers that have stood in the way of scholars’ efforts to write that history. Telling the history of slavery is not neutral. Unearthing it is an act of scholarship and intention that exposes the mistaken assumption that archives are straightforward repositories of factual information. Europeans struggled to make sense of their encounters on the African continent and, in the process, produced narratives and archives that excluded Africans from knowledge and civilization. Europeans viewed African systems of thought, computation, storytelling, record keeping, and religion as inferior, and Europe came to know itself in contrast to the fictions it told about Africa’s lack of history, social structures, civility, and polities. In this context, the history of slavery and the slave trade was fostered by those who sought to justify or minimize the horror of the institutions: Under the veneer of “scholarship” or “education,” they situated slavery as benevolent, paternal, and civilizing. As the historian and author Hasan Kwame Jeffries has shown, in the immediate aftermath of the American Civil War, scholars revised the story of bondage to erase its impact on the lives of Black and white Southerners. Rather than present the war as one that was fought over slavery, the scholars crafted a story that the American Civil War was a conflict over states’ rights—provoked by the federal government’s intrusion into the “Southern way of life.” These same scholars did not admit that the Union won because Black people fled slavery and joined the Union Army. Instead, the official line was that Black people worked on bucolic cotton plantations, and that they were well fed, musical, and surrounded by family. Missing from a bloodless story is the recounting of the internal slave trade that sent a million people from the upper to the lower South, the brutal slave patrols, the starvation, the whips and chains.

These conditions and behaviors were not confined to North America. They occurred throughout the Americas, across the Atlantic and ultimately informed Europe’s nineteenth century colonial occupation of Africa. This rewriting of the past would come to justify the “urgent” call of European powers to bring a halt to the alleged savagery of African slave traders, thereby providing moral cover for their next stage of extracting wealth from the continent. They shifted the blame for four hundred years of extraction onto those who were the trade’s victims. These justifications deflected responsibility for slavery onto African tribal incivilities, anointed the United Kingdom and the United States as global abolitionists, and authorized colonial transferring of territories in the name of halting the alleged atrocities committed by African or Arab slave traders. Europe became depicted as the driving force behind the abolition of the trade, which was driven not by Europe’s rapacious economic growth, but by the alleged despotism of African leaders.

The shift from slavery to colonialism was accompanied by a re-narrating of the histories of Africa. These stories, built on German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel’s claim that Africa and Africans had no history at all defined much of the scholarship on the trade. Few European or American universities recognized African history as a discipline until the pressure of anti-colonial and civil rights activism pushed for educational reforms. The first African Studies Association was founded in 1958, but Hegel’s nineteenth-century claim held sway well into the twentieth century, despite the efforts of Black scholars like George Washington Williams and W.E.B. Du Bois, who were among those researching and writing histories of African peoples and civilizations.

This rewriting of the past had a tangible effect. The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade enabled an epic transformation of European economies and territorial possession. It established trading companies, financed shipping magnates, shaped supply networks, fed desires for sweetness and caffeine, contributed to intra-European wars of territory and trade, and provided elite Europeans with the luxury goods and services that made their households both beautiful and horrific. It also introduced and then solidified race as a marker of human difference. As a result, men, women, and children were violently wrenched into the Atlantic. Their labor produced wealth for their enslavers. But Black people in the Diaspora shaped cultural and political responses that rejected the founding premises of early modern capitalism—the violence and violations at the heart of an economy fully capable of reducing people to property.

The Black Atlantic has generated powerful refusals. When enslaved people planned revolts, ran away, or established new communities on the outer edges of Europe’s colonies, they were articulating a very specific notion of freedom and belonging. When they maintained their languages and cosmologies, they were illustrating the depths of their cultures in the face of accusations that they had none. When they loved one another and cared for their own children and those whose birth parents were taken from them, they asserted the reality of their kinship ties in the face of the legally defined right to buy and sell people as though they had no family, no feelings, and no connections.

The system of slavery was built on the claim that Africans would provide docile and controllable labor in the Americas, and that they wouldn’t rebel or complicate labor arrangements with demands for family or freedom. And yet, in every instance when enslaved men and women articulated the complexity of their lives and communities—through cultural practices, through collective efforts at refusal, through the labors of their heart—the falsehood of the slave owners’ claims that Black people were reducible to brute laborers was made evident.

One can examine the hundreds of slave revolts, beginning in 1526 and lasting through to slavery’s final days, to see the impact of Black peoples’ demands for freedom. Thomas Jefferson believed that the animus between Black and white people in North America was so extensive that free Black people could never be allowed to stay in the United States. Rather, he supported efforts to transport free Black Americans “back” to Africa, whether they wished to go or not. In Notes on the State of Virginia, he wrote:

Why not retain and incorporate the blacks into the state, and thus save the expense of supplying, by importation of white settlers, the vacancies they will leave? Deep rooted prejudices entertained by the whites; ten thousand recollections, by the blacks, of the injuries they have sustained; new provocations; the real distinctions which nature has made; and many other circumstances, will divide us into parties, and produce convulsions which will probably never end but in the extermination of the one or the other race.

But Black Americans, both enslaved and free, were actively articulating the terms of citizenship in ways that would come to define the very concept. Through their revolts and rebellions, through their demands to preserve and protect their families and their children’s future, they defined a freedom unrestricted by race, creed, or sex. They refused the notion that simply by virtue of the color of their skin they were excluded from the categories that defined Western modernity—they claimed the rights of citizenship, the rights of representative government, the right to have and maintain autonomous families, the rights to worship, to congregate, and to move freely from one place to another. Whether as theoreticians or practitioners or protesters, the men and women delivered to the Americas through the slave trade produced a way of understanding the world that continues to shape our lives.

Black communities outside the African continent were shaped by the slave trade and by their refusal to be destroyed by it. Diasporic peoples are at modernity’s core, beginning with their ideologies of freedom: Frederick Douglass, Harriet Jacobs, Toussaint Louverture, and Phillis Wheatley all embraced Enlightenment ideals of citizenship and natural rights and were in full disagreement with the racial slavery endorsed and practiced by men like Thomas Jefferson and Robespierre, even as they wrote extensively on the virtues of modernity and Enlightenment.

To measure the impact that slavery has had upon modern life, historians turn tragedy into evidence: We count the number of bodies thrown overboard from a slave ship; the number of bodies hanging from trees in Indiana; and the 5.4 million dead as a result of wars in Congo since 1998 over access to minerals needed to manufacture cell phones and video games. We analyze the death rates of Indigenous communities exacerbated by European arrivals, death rates in the Middle Passage, and population counts of enslaved laborers in the American South or the Caribbean. We do so because, in part, we know that to be modern is to have a rational relationship to information that we are able and willing to quantify accurately and honestly. But quantifiable data can only be part of the path to knowledge, to comprehending the impact of what we study. When we aggregate, we lose the specificity of each life lost to war or disease or the ravages of a changed climate. We lose the understanding of the pain of addiction, despair, and loneliness.

The story of how the capture and sale of human beings became embedded in the production of other merchandise is a terrible one. The story of how those human beings were made to work without end to enrich those who stole their labor is another terrible tale at the heart of our modern world. Slavery and the slave trade deserve to be mourned. The stories deserve our grief. They deserve a wake. They also must be understood as the source of current disparities in financial standing, incarceration rates, health, and life expectancy.

The damages that are at the heart of our modern world exceed those that I’ve charted here, of course, but my presumption is that the only way to understand today’s realities is to understand the history of race and racism that began with the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade. The historian Walter Johnson writes that if you don’t start with the history of slavery, many of our contemporary problems simply don’t make sense. Thinking about history by starting with slavery does not congratulate those of us who are looking back on that history for how well we’ve done, how far we’ve come, how hard we’ve tried. Indeed, it’s a pretty sad place, and it means starting with a methodology that is steeped in melancholy. A melancholy born in the realization that human suffering has always been at the heart of economic growth.

I spent some time imagining that my work as a scholar was objective and disinterested, but I have increasingly come to know that this claim was an effort to mask the sadness and anger I feel when I confront the history of slavery and its wake. Once I accepted that sadness, I became interested in using it to draw attention to the fact that the never-ending echo of the Atlantic graveyard must be silenced, we lose the possibilities for reframing liberation. The men and women who were the victims of the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade were caught in circumstances outside of their control, yet they responded by developing a set of critical strategies: theories of power and plans for rebellion and opposition. This tradition of Black radical response transformed Black life in the aftermath of slavery. The Black radical response set in motion powerful counter-narratives through which communities were formed, intellect was shaped, opposition was mobilized, music was made, style was deployed, love was experienced, and children were born. All this might be a compass with which we find a better, more just and humane future.

However, global political engagements are still organized around the vestiges of European colonialism, whereby the raw materials of empire are taken, by force or by sleight of hand, from the Global South in service to the economic and military demands of the Global North. While there are moments of collective refusal, such as the organization by non-Western nations of alliances like CARICOM (Caribbean Community and Common Market), there is also a long history of denying the autonomy and sovereignty of the people and polities of Africa and Latin America. The connection between long histories of slavery and dispossession on the one hand, and current global economic, social, and political inequities on the other continues to pose challenges in how we might bring about new ways of understanding modern life.

We need to grapple with the ways that the foundations of modern economies are built on the disenfranchisement of the majority. When we move forward in time, out of the period of hereditary racial slavery in the Atlantic world, we still see structures of racial inequality, which have persisted into the twenty-first century. The wealth gap between white and Black families in the United States has continued and grown over the past four decades. In 2022, the average wealth of white families was seven times higher than the average wealth of Black families. Worse still, median white wealth (wealth for the family in the exact middle of the overall distribution—wealthier than half of all families and less wealthy than half) was twelve times higher than median Black wealth. More than one in four Black households have zero or negative net worth, compared to fewer than one in ten white families, which explains the large differences in the racial wealth gap.

There is a set of normalized conditions whereby the individual freedom and capacity for economic success of some inevitably hinge on the dispossession of others. Unpacking the history of the slave trade is not about casting blame or offering absolution. Rather, it is an opportunity to closely examine two things: the structures of normalcy that have followed the economic and social development of the Atlantic world, and the ways in which new structures and assumptions are normalized in the here and now. We are confronted with questions about the ethical response to wealth. If we have inherited a set of structures that legitimize the accumulation of wealth through the violent dispossessions of slavery and colonialism, we must ask whether it is possible to align our desire for material comforts with our desire for social justice. As we confront the massive rise of wealth in the hands of the few, we can reimagine its limits.

We live in a moment when a desire for easy access to consumer goods and material comfort quite frequently comes at the cost of living wages, environmental justice, and peace. Much of the growth of the technology industry is rooted, for example, in the extraction of the mineral coltan from Democratic Republic of Congo. This extractive process is embedded in the colonial relationships that have defined the region since the onset of the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade and have left it mired in warfare with no end in sight. All in the service of cell phones and laptop computers, of producing goods cheaply, of the belief that the rewards for developing new methods to move faster and more efficiently through our world justify the refusal to fully calculate their costs. All too often, the blame for political and economic chaos is laid at the doorstep of its victims. The long histories that shape the present fade and, indeed, become impossible to see. What is it impossible for us to see? Or to imagine? We live in slavery’s wake. The struggle to envision a different set of values and comforts—of freedoms and responsibilities—is crucial.

In Slavery's Wake, edited by Paul Gardullo, Johanna Obenda, and Anthony Bogues, is available from Smithsonian Books. Visit Smithsonian Books’ website to learn more about its publications and a full list of titles. 

Excerpt from "The Many Impacts of the Transatlantic Slave Trade" by Jennifer L. Morgan, condensed for print from In Slavery's Wake © 2024 by Smithsonian Institution