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Columbus' 1492 voyage launched a new era in world history. Over the course of the next three centuries, Europeans developed a thriving Atlantic trade that dismantled native societies and depended on the labor of millions of African slaves. Thus several aspects of this early modern Atlantic world must be examined in order to understand the poignancy of this era: the European empires in the Americas and the new worlds they created; slavery and the slave trade; and responses of Africa and America to the European encounter between 1500 and 1750.
Viewing the Atlantic World in these arenas not only permits us to examine historical cause-and-effect scenarios, but also allows us to explore important historical forces and processes in relation to modern trading practices. After all, the patterns and characteristics of the early modern Atlantic world left strong imprints on the future as well.
Without question, the most significant and powerful development which drew the Atlantic world together was the voluntary and involuntary migration of millions of Europeans and Africans to the Americas. Africans from nearly all areas of the continent were shipped as slaves, although the majority originated in the interior of what today are the independent nations of Angola and Zaire. Slavery and the slave trade not only profoundly transformed three continents, but today the legacy continues to structure both economic and human interactions across the Atlantic and around the world.
In order to grasp the dimensions of the forces and experiences that created the Atlantic World, we must also understand its foundation in racism and economic inequality, since these issues harshly tainted the success of European expansion and economic supremacy. The economic forces that generated slavery spanned the continents of the southern Atlantic, as did the experience of slaves taken from societies in the interior of Africa. Thus debates concerning slavery on both sides of the Atlantic and the slave trade that economically united them became increasingly heated during this time.
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