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.

---

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

---

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.

---

Other Word Forms

• slave-trader noun
• slave-trading noun

Etymology

Origin of slave trade

First recorded in 1725–35

Example Sentences

When Parliament debated An Act for the Abolition of the Slave Trade in 1807, the Zorg was highlighted as “a primary example of the horrors of the slave trade,” Mr. Kara writes.

From The Wall Street Journal

The Dutch funded their "Golden Age" of empire and culture in the 16th and 17th centuries by shipping about 600,000 Africans as part of the slave trade, mostly to South America and the Caribbean.

From Barron's

The domestic slave trade exploded as the Upper South sold people to cotton and sugar plantations, financed by London banks.

From The Wall Street Journal

But as Atlantic colonization expanded, England—like Portugal, Spain, the Netherlands and France—gradually became more involved in the slave trade.

From The Wall Street Journal

This is Cape Fear Pier, one of the North Carolinian ports used in the transatlantic slave trade.

From Literature