1642 to 1806 · Africanspan
Copenhagen ran the Baltic's share of the slave trade
›Read the full entryClose
Copenhagen was the organising centre for slave trafficking among the countries around the Baltic and the home port of the Danish West Indies Company. The Danish operation was unusually tidy. Its ships traded almost entirely at one point on the African coast, the fort of Christiansborg on the Gold Coast, and delivered almost entirely to two places in the Caribbean, St Thomas and St Croix. Those islands were small and their own estates could not absorb everyone landed, so they became re-export centres, selling captives onward into the colonies of larger empires. Measured against the British or French traffic the Danish share was slight. Measured against what it sustained it was not, because without it the Danish West Indies had no plantation economy at all. Denmark legislated an end to its slave trade in 1803, ahead of Britain and well ahead of France. Slavery in the islands themselves continued until 1848, which is what the ban was written to permit.
A code like HT-WIB-000044 is a bates number. It marks one page of our stamped scan of the book, so the same page can be found again by anyone working from the same copy. Open one to see every entry drawn from that page.