Reading time: 0 minutes
For three centuries, the Atlantic was the heart of a monstrous economic system: the slave trade, the backbone of modern Atlantic development.
European ships loaded with manufactured goods joined the African coast to load captured human beings. They then crossed the ocean in atrocious conditions to supply American plantations, before returning to Europe with sugar, coffee, tobacco, cotton, rum and other wealth extracted from forced labour.
At the centre of this implacable mechanism are human dramas of unsurpassed magnitude: overcrowded holds, daily violence, mass mortality and revolts crushed with extreme brutality. This systemic violence is a lasting structure of social economies and hierarchies.
This episode questions the contemporary legacy of the Black Atlantic and the persistence of structural injustices resulting from trafficking and slavery, beyond legal abolitions, in African, American and European societies.
