On March 26, the United Nations passed a resolution declaring the transatlantic slave trade the greatest crime against humanity in history. The sentiment behind such a declaration is not difficult to understand; however, sentiment is not scholarship. A resolution dressed in the language of historical judgment demands to be evaluated as history. To rank one slave trade above all others as the supreme crime against humanity requires comparative data across the major slave trades that existed, and this literature does not exist in any form that would support such a conclusion. What the historical record does confirm, abundantly and in uncomfortable detail, is that slavery was a truly global institution, practiced across centuries, continents, religions, and cultures, with brutalities that bear comparison to anything documented in the Atlantic record. The Black Sea region alone, across a period stretching from the early medieval era through the eighteenth century, furnishes sufficient evidence to challenge the resolution on purely empirical grounds.
Declaring any single historical crime the greatest of its kind carries an implicit burden of proof that politicians rarely acknowledge, but historians cannot ignore. Across the centuries between 1400 and 1900, the transatlantic trade accounted for approximately 65.8% of documented African slave exports, with the trans-Saharan trade accounting for a further 19.9%, the Red Sea trade for 8.3%, and the Indian Ocean trade for 6.0%. Narrowing the focus to the nineteenth century alone, the proportions shift, but the plurality of routes remains: the transatlantic share falls to 61.9%, while the other three routes together account for the remaining 38.1% of documented exports. And these figures capture only the African export dimension of a global slave economy. They say nothing about the internal slave trades of Asia and Eastern Europe, the slave markets of the Black Sea, or the centuries of raiding and captive-taking that fed those markets long before any European vessel reached the West African coast.
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