Istwa Nou

The picture of the slave trade as a European enterprise reaching out to two distant coasts covers about half of it. Roughly 46 percent of all transatlantic slaving voyages were organised within the Americas, fitted out by merchants who lived there, with ventures leaving from nearly every major Atlantic port in the New World. Brazil dominated that half, accounting for more than three quarters of the captives carried off the African coast in voyages arranged on the American side. In what became the United States, more than half the voyages organised both before and after independence sailed from small ports north of the Chesapeake, which is to say from New England and the middle colonies. The trade was a northern business in North America and a colonial business across the hemisphere. Anyone drawing up a list of who profited has to put ship owners in Newport and Salvador beside the merchant houses of Liverpool and Nantes.