The Atlantic trade reached its greatest volume in the second half of the eighteenth century and continued illegally for decades after abolition. Britain and the United States outlawed the traffic in 1807-08 and the Royal Navy's West Africa Squadron intercepted vessels thereafter, but Brazilian and Cuban demand kept the trade running until Brazil suppressed it in 1850-51 and the last documented crossing reached Cuba in 1866-67. Slavery itself outlasted the trade: emancipation came in the British colonies in 1833-38, the French in 1848, the United States in 1865, Cuba in 1886 and Brazil in 1888. The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database gives 12.52 million embarked and 10.7 million disembarked over the whole trade, with roughly 7.7 million of those embarkations falling after 1750. The gap between the two totals is the mortality of the Middle Passage.
Portuguese, British, French, Spanish, Dutch, Brazilian, Cuban and North American traders, in partnership with African states and merchants, shipped captives across the Atlantic until the trade was suppressed
The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database records about 7.7 million people embarked between 1750 and 1867, roughly two thirds of the entire Atlantic traffic, of whom some 6.7 million disembarked. There is no single population from which they were drawn: estimates of the population of West and West-Central Africa in 1750 range from roughly 25 million to well over 50 million, they rest on backward projection from twentieth-century censuses rather than evidence, and the trade's demographic effect was concentrated on particular regions - the Bight of Biafra, the Loango coast, Angola - rather than spread evenly.
The range is the shortfall between embarkations and disembarkations after 1750, derived from the voyage database itself: about 1.8 million captives died in the Middle Passage across the whole trade, of which roughly 1.0-1.4 million fall in this period. It excludes deaths during capture, the march to the coast and detention in barracoons, for which no comparable records exist and which some scholars believe were of similar or greater magnitude.
The forms are documented in the voyage records, court and captured-ship papers assembled by the SlaveVoyages project and in the abolition-era parliamentary inquiries on which the database and the African Economic History Network survey draw.
Benin, Angola, Ghana, Jamaica, Sierra Leone, Cuba