I. A Trade Older Than the One This Site Documents
This archive’s persecution track runs in earnest from the Atlantic slave trade forward. That trade did not invent African enslavement. A trans-Saharan trade in captive people, moving north to markets in North Africa and the Islamic Middle East, had operated since at least the 7th century CE.
II. The Numbers, As Historians Actually Count Them
Historian Paul Lovejoy’s data gives a century-by-century accounting for the window before the Atlantic trade began: roughly 150,000 people trafficked from 650–800 CE, 300,000 from 800–900, 1.74 million from 900–1100, and 1.65 million from 1100–1400 — a combined total near 3.84 million people moved north across the Sahara before a single person had crossed the Atlantic in chains.
III. Two Myths, Refused at Once
This entry refuses the idea that Europe introduced slavery to Africa. It also refuses the opposite move — using this trade to claim the Atlantic system was unremarkable, just more of the same. It was not. What follows in this archive’s ERA I and II is a different order of scale, a different economic logic built on hereditary, racialized, chattel labor, and an unprecedented mortality rate in transit.