Mapping the Transatlantic Slave Trade

Back in 2021, Slate published a very impressive animated map The Atlantic Slave Trade in Two Minutes. The map is an incredibly powerful visualization of the massive scale of the transatlantic slave trade, highlighting the trade routes used and the destinations of slave ships over three centuries.

Slate’s map includes an interactive timeline that allows you to skip to any year in the animation, but it doesn’t allow you to explore the underlying data in any other way. However, the map uses data from Rice University’s Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database, which has its own interactive map covering the same period of the transatlantic slave trade.

Their Slave Voyages map uses animated, colored dots to show slave ships crossing the Atlantic from 1515 to 1866. The dots vary in size to represent the number of enslaved people aboard each ship and are colored according to the country that owned the vessel. Another Map view shows the main routes of the transatlantic slave trade, along with the primary locations of embarkation and disembarkation. These locations are represented by scaled circles indicating how many enslaved people departed from or arrived at each point.

Over the course of the Atlantic slave trade, more than 10 million people were forcibly taken from their homes in Africa and forced into slave labor in the Americas.