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Between the early 1500s and the 1860s, about 12.5 million captive Africans were forced onto ships bound for the Americas. About 10.7 million survived the crossing; some 1.8 million people died on the way.

SlaveVoyages database

History

The story behind the card

SlaveVoyages is a free online database compiled by historians over several decades. It gathers the records of some 35,000 slaving voyages made between the early 1500s and the 1860s and uses them to estimate the size of the whole trade. The crossing from Africa to the Americas is known as the Middle Passage, because it was the middle leg of a triangular trade: ships sailed from Europe to Africa with goods, carried captives across the Atlantic, and returned with sugar, tobacco and cotton. Brazil received the largest share, about 40 per cent of all captives. Ships under the Portuguese or Brazilian flag carried the most people, about 5.8 million, followed by British ships with about 3.3 million and French ships with about 1.4 million.

Türkçe oku
1500'lerin başından 1860'lara kadar yaklaşık 12,5 milyon Afrikalı tutsak, Amerika kıtasına giden gemilere zorla bindirildi. Bunlardan yaklaşık 10,7 milyonu yolculuktan sağ çıktı; 1,8 milyon kadar insan yolda hayatını kaybetti.
SlaveVoyages veri tabanı

SlaveVoyages, tarihçilerin onlarca yıllık emeğiyle oluşturulan ve internette herkesin ücretsiz kullanabildiği bir veri tabanıdır. 1500'lerin başından 1860'lara kadar yapılmış 35.000 kadar köle seferinin kayıtlarını bir araya getirir ve bu kayıtlardan yola çıkarak ticaretin toplam boyutunu tahmin eder. Afrika'dan Amerika'ya uzanan okyanus yolculuğuna İngilizcede “Middle Passage”, yani “orta geçit” denir. Bu ad, yolculuğun üçgen ticaretin ortadaki ayağı olmasından gelir: Gemiler Avrupa'dan mal yükleyip Afrika'ya gider, oradan tutsakları okyanusun öbür yakasına taşır, dönüşte de şeker, tütün ve pamuk getirirdi. Tutsakların en büyük kısmı, yaklaşık yüzde 40'ı Brezilya'ya götürüldü. En çok insanı, yaklaşık 5,8 milyon kişiyi, Portekiz ve Brezilya bayraklı gemiler taşıdı. Onları 3,3 milyonla İngiliz, 1,4 milyonla Fransız gemileri izledi.

Sources and further reading

Background reading: Atlantic slave trade
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The Great Pyramid of Giza was built for the pharaoh Khufu around 2600 BC. When the Greek historian Herodotus wrote about it, around 450 BC, it was already more than 2,000 years old.

The pyramid was the tomb of Khufu, whom the Greeks called Cheops, a king of Egypt's Fourth Dynasty. Herodotus, who visited Egypt around 450 BC, was told that 100,000 men had worked on it in three-month shifts: ten years to build the causeway for hauling the stone, and twenty for the pyramid itself. He even reports an inscription recording what was spent on radishes, onions and garlic for the workers. Modern digs tell a different story. Workers' settlements at Giza, and a workers' cemetery found there in 1990, point to thousands of conscripted labourers rather than slaves. In 2013, at Wadi al-Jarf on the Red Sea coast, archaeologists found the Diary of Merer, the logbook of an inspector whose crew of about 40 men shipped limestone from the Tura quarries to Giza. It is the oldest known papyrus with writing on it.

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On the mainland, the last woolly mammoths died out around 10,000 years ago, as the Ice Age ended and the cold grasslands they lived on shrank. Two island populations held on much longer: one on St Paul Island in Alaska until about 5,600 years ago, and one on Wrangel Island until about 4,000 years ago, around 2000 BC. Rising seas had cut Wrangel off from Siberia, leaving some 300 to 1,000 animals alone there for thousands of years. These dates come from radiocarbon dating of bones and tusks, which measures how much of a slowly decaying form of carbon is left in them. Genetic studies show that the population was inbred but stayed stable for thousands of years, so its end seems to have come suddenly. What finally killed the last mammoths is still unknown.

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Oxford has no founding date. There is evidence of teaching there in some form by 1096, and it grew quickly after 1167, when Henry II barred English students from the University of Paris. In 1209, after clashes with the townspeople, some scholars left for Cambridge and started the university there. The popular claim that Oxford is older than the Aztecs usually uses 1325, the year the Mexica people founded Tenochtitlan on an island in Lake Texcoco, where Mexico City stands today. But the Mexica became an imperial power only in 1428, when, together with Texcoco and Tlacopan, they defeated Azcapotzalco, the city that had dominated the valley. The empire lasted less than a century: Hernán Cortés and his Indigenous allies took Tenochtitlan in 1521.

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Around 1259 BC, Ramesses II of Egypt and the Hittite king Hattusili III made peace after generations of rivalry over Syria. Egypt carved its copy on temple walls, the Hittites kept theirs on clay tablets, and both survive.

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