The Transatlantic Slave Trade and the Development of Europe

forthcoming

Abstract From the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries, slave traders of mostly European origin violently transported more than 12.5 million African men, women, and children to the Americas. This was the largest forced transoceanic migration in human history. Scholars have focussed on the effects of this migration on African and American history, while treating the slave trade’s effects on European societies as marginal. This supposition of marginality stems from two biases in existing research: a focus on the companies and individuals who directly outfitted slaving voyages instead of on the far larger group of people who invested in these voyages, and an over-emphasis on slave trade profits, leaving out many other relevant indicators of the economic, political, and cultural significance of slave traders. The trans-Atlantic slave trade and the development of Europe project (TASTADE) will correct this imbalance by identifying thousands of men and women who financed the slave trade and scrutinizing their embeddedness in their local, regional, national, and transnational contexts, to answer the following research question: How did the investors in the trans-Atlantic slave trade based inside and outside Europe shape the economies, politics, and cultures of Europe? TASTADE will transform existing scholarship by delivering a ground-breaking assessment of the national and trans-national networks that facilitated this trade and by linking these networks to key aspects of European development. In realising this overarching objective, TASTADE will reshape our understanding of the history of capitalism, colonial and commercial politics, and European culture. Our unique pan-European perspective relies on the distinctive synergy of approaches provided by the members of the core research team, who will inscribe the history of the trans-Atlantic slave trade fully into the story of European development and help European society confront, disclose, and memorialise the sl