In November 1755, more than three hundred Angolan men, women, and children sailed into the Caribbean Sea, crowded aboard the French shipl’Aimable. They were bound for the French sugar colony of Saint-Domingue but never got there. Asl’Aimabletraversed the Lesser Antilles, she ran across “his [British] majesty’s ship”Fowler, armed to the teeth and cruising for prizes. Though official declaration had yet to arrive, theFowlersignaled war’s descent on the Caribbean. At its helm, Admiral Thomas Frankland led a naval squadron that was getting a head start on privateering.L’Aimablewas among the first victims. The African...

In both popular portrayals, like that of Kunta Kinte inRoots, and scholarly studies, the story of the slave trade typically ends (and the story of slavery in America begins) with a vessel reaching the Americas after the Atlantic crossing. Traders sold captives in port, and the journey was over. The enslaved presumably marched to a nearby plantation to begin their struggle to adapt to a new world and to assert their humanity despite the system of chattel slavery. For many survivors of the Middle Passage, this depiction is accurate enough, but hundreds of thousands of other captives found themselves...

By the mid-eighteenth century, networks of intercolonial trade would link the many European colonies of the Americas, facilitating a dispersal trade in the enslaved African people arriving from across the Atlantic. But during the early decades of English colonization in the Americas, such regular intercolonial trade circuits lay in the distant future. Instead, in the foundational decades of slavery in English America (ca. 1619–1700), the dispersal of Africans was more haphazard, often taking place, not on merchant ships, but rather on the vessels of pirates and privateers. Even where pillaging was not involved, dispersals by merchants often violated trade...

Although the first several decades of the intercolonial slave trade saw a significant role for the black (or gray) markets of piracy, privateering, and interloping, most trafficking in African people was not illegal. Trading African slaves was perfectly permissible in the seventeenth-century English empire, as long as one respected royally sanctioned monopolies and mercantilist trade laws. From the mid-seventeenth century onward, the English transatlantic trade grew steadily, delivering captives directly from Africa to some American colonies, especially in the Caribbean. As this trade developed, intercolonial slave trading emerged haltingly alongside it. Early ventures took experimental form: traders often organized shipments...

In 1662, acting deputy governor of Jamaica Charles Lyttelton faced a dilemma. Spanish American colonists kept arriving at his island with silver, hoping to trade the mineral wealth of South America for African people delivered to Jamaica as slaves. Faced with these affluent outsiders, Lyttelton waffled between chasing Spanish silver and upholding the law. On one hand, the English had spent the last century and a half pursuing Spanish American riches; indeed, many English adventurers first sailed to the New World as pirates and privateers, viewing Spanish treasure fleets as the ultimate prize. Now Spanish colonists were sailing to English...

In the eighteenth century, the British slave trade reached its awful apogee, but North American colonies remained on the margins of a British colonial slave system centered in the Caribbean. From 1701 to 1775, British traders delivered just over 1.5 million African people to the Americas as slaves. More than 80 percent of them disembarked from the Atlantic crossing in the Caribbean, whereas only about 16 percent (~250,000) landed on the North American mainland. This discrepancy reflects the primacy of sugar in the British slave system but also overstates it. Far more Africans were indeed put to work on Britainʼs...

In 1724, the heads of the South Sea Company wrote to their agents in Jamaica to commend their new plan for keeping tabs on African people at the island. The company sought a means to discourage theft of the company’s captives awaiting transshipment and to differentiate those Africans the company delivered to Spanish America from the people introduced illegally. Keeping tabs on the company’s deliveries was proving difficult because the outfit resorted to myriad methods of reaching its quota for deliveries of people to Spanish settlements—from direct African ventures, to purchases in the Caribbean for transshipment, to licensing independent...

By the mid-eighteenth century, as European settlers in North America pushed well away from the Atlantic coast to colonize interior regions, they forced enslaved Africans to move with them. In the Chesapeake, the quest for arable land prompted ever more settlers to venture to the piedmont. By the 1760s, many piedmont counties saw Africans and people of African descent accounting for well over half of their populations, and with more than 100,000 enslaved people in the piedmont by 1782, more black Virginians resided in that region than in the tidewater. Many of these backcountry slaves had previously toiled for years...

From 1751 to 1800, European and American merchants forced nearly four million Africans across the Atlantic and into American slavery. Those four million captives account for almost one-third of all people who endured the Middle Passage in its entire 350-year history. Plantation economies grew dramatically as the emerging consumer economy in the Atlantic world spurred demand for luxury commodities, such as sugar, tobacco, and coffee. New colonies emerged and old colonies pushed out frontiers, clearing new land for staple-crop production. Enslaved labor powered this growth, which, in turn, fueled demand for more slaves. Traders crossing the Atlantic found steadily increasing...

In 1806, frustrated by a recent string of defeats, British abolitionists developed a strategy to neutralize two key arguments for the slave trade, changing the debate in a way that forced defenders of the commerce to articulate the value of the intercolonial branch of the trade. In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, momentum for abolishing the slave trade had surged in the British Empire (and in the newly independent United States), but in 1804 and 1805, not to mention several times in preceding decades, abolitionists had tried and failed to push bills for total slave trade abolition through...