1501 to 1867 · Africanspan
Twenty ports handled ninety three percent of the slave trade
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Of nearly thirty five thousand documented slaving voyages, twenty ports organised ninety three percent. The database records departures from a hundred and eighty eight places around the Atlantic basin, and the concentration in so few of them is the striking result. Rio de Janeiro and Salvador da Bahia stood at the top of the list. The ranking moved over time, with Lisbon and London prominent early and Rio and Havana taking the lead in the nineteenth century as the business shifted to the American side of the ocean. Between them the top twenty carried off more than 8.3 million people. Concentration on that scale means the trade depended on a small number of places where capital, insurance, shipwrights, credit and captains were all available at once. It also explains why abolition worked once it came. A traffic running through twenty harbours can be strangled by naval patrols and law in a way a dispersed one could not.
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