European overseas exploration led to the rise of international trade and the European colonial empires, with the contact between the Old World (Europe, Asia, and Africa) and the New World (the Americas), as well as Australia, producing the Columbian exchange, a wide transfer of plants, animals, food, human populations (including enslaved people), communicable diseases, and culture between the Eastern and Western Hemispheres. In West Africa and East Africa, local states supplied the appetite of European slave traders, changing the complexion of coastal African states and fundamentally altering the nature of slavery in Africa, causing impacts on societies and economies deep inland.

The transatlantic slave trade involved the transportation by slave traders of enslaved African people, mainly to the Americas. The slave trade regularly used the triangular trade route and its Middle Passage and existed from the 16th to the 19th centuries. The vast majority of those who were transported in the transatlantic slave trade were people from Central and West Africa that had been sold by other West Africans to Western European slave traders while others had been captured directly by the slave traders in coastal raids. 

Europeans gathered and imprisoned the enslaved at forts on the African coast and then brought them to the Americas. Except for the Portuguese, European slave traders generally did not participate in the raids because life expectancy for Europeans in sub-Saharan Africa was less than one year during the period of the slave trade (which was prior to the widespread availability of quinine as a treatment for malaria). The colonial South Atlantic and Caribbean economies were particularly dependent on labor for the production of sugarcane and other commodities. This was viewed as crucial by those Western European states which, in the late 17th and 18th centuries, were vying with one another to create overseas empires.

Current estimates are that about 12 million to 12.8 million Africans were shipped across the Atlantic over a span of 400 years. The number purchased by the traders was considerably higher, as the passage had a high death rate with approximately 1.2 – 2.4 million dying during the voyage and millions more in camps in the Caribbean after arrival in the New World. Millions of people also died as a result of slave raids, wars, and during transport to the coast for sale to European slave traders.

7 lessons that answer the standards as well as the framing and supporting questions

Lessons are developed using all the sources and readings that are in the social studies course frameworks provided by the Louisiana Department of Education.

What does it include?

1. Detailed lesson plans aligned with the standards and frameworks
2. Activities that include all the materials provided in the frameworks
3. Assessments aligned with the new LDOE field test (Assessment will come in an update)
4. Lesson activity workbook/worksheets
5. Slide deck