slave trade

American  

noun

1. the business or process of capturing, transporting, and selling human beings into chattel slavery, especially Black Africans brought to the New World prior to the mid-19th century.

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slave trade British  

noun

1. the business of trading in slaves, esp the transportation of Black Africans to America from the 16th to 19th centuries

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slave trade Cultural  

1. The transportation of slaves from Africa to North and South America between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries. Congress banned the importing of slaves into the United States in 1808.

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Other Word Forms

• slave-trader
  noun
• slave-trading
  noun

Etymology

Origin of slave trade

First recorded in 1725–35

Example Sentences

He also viewed artefacts from the transatlantic slave trade and visited a conservation initiative.

From BBC • May 2, 2026

Sculptor Maddy Inez, granddaughter of Betye Saar, crafts a series of ceramic vessels — each an ode to different plants brought over during the transatlantic slave trade — reframing gardening as an act of resistance.

From Los Angeles Times • May 1, 2026

From then on, the plantation system drove the expansion of slavery and the international slave trade, and eventually survived the demise of both.

From The Wall Street Journal • Apr. 3, 2026

And then if you only want to restrict it to federal immigration law, the Congress passed a law in 1808 banning the international slave trade and still ships are smuggling enslaved people in.

From Slate • Mar. 16, 2026

In Massachusetts and Pennsylvania, for example, opponents of the Constitution objected to the implicit acceptance of slavery’s persistence, represented by the three-fifths clause and the twenty-year extension of the slave trade.

From "Founding Brothers: The Revolutionary Generation" by Joseph J. Ellis