1642 to 1807 · Datasetspan
The minor slave traders of the Baltic still carried a hundred thousand
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Set beside Portugal, Britain and France, the merchants of Scandinavia and the Hanse towns of northern Germany were minor participants in the Atlantic slave trade. They still carried more than one hundred thousand people off the coast of Africa. Their share mattered most in the late seventeenth century, and it grew again in the 1790s when Spain opened free ports where enslaved people could be landed without paying duty, creating a market that any flag could serve. More than half the voyages organised in the Baltic sailed from Copenhagen, and most of the captives were bought at the Danish forts on the Gold Coast. The great majority of them spent the rest of their lives on plantations in the Danish West Indies, on St Croix and St Thomas. The word minor is doing real work in that sentence. It ranks a country in a table, and the quantity being ranked is a hundred thousand people who never went home.
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