The Setting for New World Slavery: An Overview

Between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries, the peoples of Africa, America, and Europe were linked to form new societies in what historian Robin Blackburn calls the “American crucible.”² During that time, while native American populations were displaced, assimilated, or exterminated, millions of European and African peoples crossed the Atlantic, the majority of the latter without consent as African slaves.³ Not until the middle of the nineteenth century did white European numbers dominate the Atlantic crossing. By then, Africans had made an indelible contribution to the epic reshaping of the Americas. The scale of the slave trade is striking: between 1500