The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade was Only an Extension of Longstanding African Practices
The article by Tim Sargent (see below), argues that the transatlantic slave trade was not a European invention imposed on Africa, but an expansion of practices already widespread there. Tim Sargent uses that history to question Church of England guilt-trips and reparations talk that treat the Atlantic trade as uniquely originating in Europe and ignore African agency.
Sargent's core claims:
Slavery was an ancient, widespread African institution long before Portuguese and Spanish ships reached the West African coast. Local rulers and traders supplied captives taken in wars, raids, debt, or crime; Europeans rarely went far inland themselves because of disease and hostility.
Scottish explorer Mungo Park, who travelled the interior in the 1790s, described slavery as pervasive. He estimated free people as perhaps a quarter of the population in the regions he saw; the rest were slaves whose status was often hereditary. Treatment varied. Some people sold themselves for debt. Islamic traders from the north were sometimes feared more than local captors. Slaves became more valuable the farther they were from their home language and kin, because escape was harder, so selling them across an ocean was, from the sellers' point of view, commercially attractive.
Europeans had largely stopped enslaving other Europeans centuries earlier (villeinage faded after the Black Death; Russian serfdom was a late exception). When they encountered an already-functioning African market, they participated.
The Atlantic trade lasted roughly four centuries and was enormous, but internal African slavery plus the longer-running trans-Saharan and East African/Indian Ocean trades may have taken a comparable or larger share of people over a longer period. Britain later became the leading power suppressing the Atlantic trade.
Using church funds for "reparations" programmes while village churches decay is, in his view, a misallocation, especially if some of the money effectively rewards descendants of African slaving elites.
Slavery in Africa long predated European contact. It existed in ancient Egypt and Nubia, in the Sahelian empires, along the East African coast, and in many West and Central African societies. Captives from war, tribute, debt (pawnship), and judicial punishment were common sources. Islam provided both a market and religious justifications for slaving non-Muslims; the trans-Saharan and Red Sea trades operated for centuries before 1500.
When Europeans arrived they mostly bought from African intermediaries rather than conducting large-scale inland raids themselves. Kingdoms such as Dahomey, Asante, and Kongo, and many smaller polities and merchant groups, organised capture and sale and used the proceeds (guns, cloth, metal goods) to strengthen themselves. That does not make Europeans innocent; it means the trade was a two-sided market.
Park's account is a primary source, not modern scholarship, but it is consistent with later work: he described a large enslaved population, inherited status in many cases, and the commercial logic of moving people far from home. His "three-quarters slave" figure was a local impression, not a continent-wide census; historians treat it as evidence of high prevalence in some interior societies, not a precise national statistic.
Scale comparisons are estimates, not exact counts. The transatlantic trade embarked about 12 million people (roughly 10.5 million surviving the Middle Passage). Combined trans-Saharan, Red Sea, and Indian Ocean trades over a much longer period (from the early Islamic centuries into the 19th) are commonly estimated in the several millions to well over 10 million, depending on the source and time span. Internal African slavery continued and in some regions intensified after the Atlantic trade declined, as captives were used for local production rather than export. Duration and total numbers therefore do not make the Atlantic trade uniquely large when the other trades are included.
Britain's later role is also factual: after 1807 it used the Royal Navy's West Africa Squadron at considerable cost to intercept slavers, and it pressured other European and American states. That does not erase earlier British participation; it is part of the same history.
Sargent's main point: that a one-sided "Europe invented African slavery" narrative is historically false, holds.
