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

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

Member states are set to vote on a resolution - led by Ghana - to recognise the transatlantic slave trade as "the gravest crime against humanity".

From BBC • Mar. 25, 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

Ivory Coast has done little to preserve the memory of the transatlantic slave trade.

From Barron's • Feb. 20, 2026

These events prompted a slavery debate in Congress—and may have influenced one piece of the Compromise of 1850, which ended the slave trade in the District of Columbia.

From "In the Shadow of Liberty" by Kenneth C. Davis