lthough slavery had been a feature of human life since at least as early as 2,600 B.C.E. in Egypt, it became an extremely lucrative European trade in the late fifteenth century. It did not take Britain long to cash in on the trade in human beings. Ships left British west coast ports like Liverpool and Bristol laden which firearms, gunpowder, metals, alcohol, cotton goods, beads, knives, mirrors — the sort of things which African chiefs did not have, and which were often of very poor quality. Many of the cheaper goods were made in Birmingham and were known as "Brummagem ware". These goods were exchanged for slaves — people who had been captured in local tribal wars perhaps, or who had been taken prisoner especially for this trade.
The slaves were then packed tightly into the slave ships, so that they could hardly move. Often they were chained down; they were allowed little exercise and they were kept in horrendous conditions in the hold of the ship. By the middle of the eighteenth century British ships were carrying about 50,000 slaves a year. Royal Navy sailors said that they could smell the stench of a ship carrying slaves anything up to 10 miles downwind. The slavers sailed from Africa across the Atlantic. Any slaves who had managed to survive the journey were taken to shore and were sold to plantation owners in the West Indies, the southern colonies of America (Virginia, the Carolinas, Georgia) where they spent the rest of their lives working to produce goods like cotton, tobacco, sugar cane and coffee.
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