All events · The Medieval World

The Trans-Saharan Slave Trade, 7th–15th Centuries

c. 650–1450 · Sub-Saharan Africa

Displacement

Displaced

4 million

Roughly 3 to 5 million people over eight centuries, on the standard modern reconstructions. There is no register of the trade; the figure is an extrapolation built by Ralph Austen from scattered Arabic geographical and commercial references, caravan sizes and later nineteenth-century observations, and adopted with modifications by Paul Lovejoy, whose census puts the total for 650–1600 at roughly 4.3 to 4.8 million. Britannica's summary of the same evidence gives a rate that 'could rarely if ever have transported more than 6,000 or 7,000 slaves a year'. These are order-of-magnitude estimates from fragmentary evidence, not counts, and John Wright and others have criticised the precision they imply.

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What happened

From the Arab conquest of North Africa onward, an organised long-distance trade carried enslaved Africans north across the Sahara to markets in the Maghrib, Egypt and the wider Islamic world, where they were used as domestic servants, concubines, soldiers, miners and agricultural labourers. The trade was sustained by Sahelian states that raided their southern neighbours and by caravan networks tied to the gold and salt trades. Nothing resembling a register survives; the volume is reconstructed by extrapolation, principally by Ralph Austen, whose census gives an average of a few thousand a year and totals in the low millions for the medieval centuries, with Paul Lovejoy putting the whole period 650–1600 at roughly 4.3 to 4.8 million. Mortality on the desert crossings was high and is not separately measurable. Because most of those taken were women and children, and because male captives were frequently castrated for the eunuch trade with very high death rates, the demographic effect on source regions is thought to have been severe, but it too cannot be quantified.

Parties

Merchants and states on both sides of the Sahara — the Maghribi and Egyptian markets, and the Sahelian polities of Ghana, Mali, Kanem-Bornu and the Hausa states — moved enslaved Africans northward across the desert over eight centuries

Disputed

The volume estimates are extrapolations from fragmentary evidence rather than counts; John Wright and other specialists have criticised the confidence placed in Austen's census, and no independent check on the medieval figures exists.

The denominator

No defensible denominator exists, for the same reason as the Atlantic trade: the traffic ran for eight centuries across dozens of polities from the Senegal to the Nile, and there is no population reconstruction for medieval West and Central Africa that could serve as a base. The volume figure itself is an estimate — Ralph Austen's reconstruction from Arabic geographical and commercial sources, later revised by Austen himself and challenged by others — with margins of error that some scholars put at 50 per cent or more.

Where the baseline comes from

Trans-Saharan slave trade — Wikipediaopen-edited
Arab slave trade — Wikipediaopen-edited

On the death toll

No defensible figures. Deaths in raiding, on the desert crossing and in the castration of boys for the eunuch trade are attested qualitatively in Arabic sources and are believed to have been very high, but there is no basis for a total.

Documented forms of violence

Forced Labour

Enslavement for labour, military service and domestic and sexual servitude across the Sahara is documented in the Arabic geographical and legal literature and reconstructed in Austen's and Lovejoy's censuses of the trade.