Appolonia: the story of an African kingdom that resisted the Atlantic slave trade

Hundreds of thousands of enslaved Africans were shipped from the Gold Coast, today's Ghana. National Maritime Museum, London, CC BY

The transatlantic slave trade was a multilayered, highly commercialised global enterprise that lasted from the early 1500s to the mid 1800s.

The events over this period are far too complex to fit into a straightforward perpetrator-victim narrative. While the trade catastrophically dehumanised and commodified over 12.5 million Africans, it was not just an external conquest.