The beginning of the Atlantic Slave Trade - a request for suggestions

[el_bryanto]

Does anybody have any suggestions on something one might read if one was interested in the Atlantic slave trade - specifically the origins of it.

Bryant

[frogmarch]

1. I don't know the origins, but

St. Helena island in the south Atlantic has been in the news fairly recently for the discovery of many slave graves. St. Helena is the only remaining British colony. It was to St. Helena that Napoleon Bonaparte was exiled, and where he died.

Ancestors of mine were planters (plantation owners) on St. Helena in the 1600s and had slaves. In later years, when Britain outlawed slavery, slaves removed from slave ships in the south Atlantic were taken to St. Helena and held in encampments. If a “rescued” slave could say where his or her home was, he or she might eventually be taken home, but most of them lived out their lives on St. Helena.

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2012/mar/08/slave-mass-graves-st-helena-island

[frogmarch]

2. More:

http://hitchcock.itc.virginia.edu/Slavery/details.php?categorynum=6&categoryName=Slave&theRecord=21&recordCount=73

Excerpt:

The enslavement of Africans and South Asians (e.g., Goans, Malaysians) had been established on St. Helena by the 1670s, if not earlier. In 1818 children born of slave women on or after Christmas day were nominally freed, and in 1831 or 1832, several years before general emancipation in the British empire, all 614 of the island’s slaves were emancipated (E.L. Jackson, St. Helena: The historic island [New York, 1905], pp. 68, 72, 260; Philip Gosse, St. Helena, 1502-1938 [London, 1938], pp. 79, 191-92, 300). For a comprehensive account of St. Helena and its role in the trans-Atlantic slave trade, see Andrew Pearson, et al., Infernal Traffic: Excavation of a Liberated African Graveyard in Rupert's Valley, St. Helena (CBA Research Report 169, Council for British Archaeology (York, England), 2011.