This essay was originally published in 2018
The slave trade within the Americas, after the initial disembarkation of African captives in the New World, has received scant attention from historians, especially before the abolition of the transatlantic traffic. The article below examines such intra-American trafficking as an introduction to the launching of the The Intra-American Slave Trade Database, which aims to document evidence of slave voyages throughout the New World. This article does not provide statistics on this internal slave trade. Instead, we consolidate qualitative knowledge about these intercolonial slave routes. As the article focuses on the era prior to British and U.S. abolition of the transatlantic trade (1807-1808), we leave out the nineteenth-century domestic slave trades in the United States and Brazil to focus on survivors of the Atlantic crossing who endured subsequent forced movement within the Americas.
Gregory E. O'Malley and Alex Borucki, "Patterns in the intercolonial slave trade across the Americas before the nineteenth century," Tempo, 23 (May/Aug 2017): 315–38.