Discuss the original purpose and the nature of transatlantic slave trade.

Begun by the Portuguese in the fifteenth century, the transatlantic slave trade, by which millions of Africans were bought and shipped against their will to colonies in the New World, reached its peak in the eighteenth century. The origin of the slave trade was economics; it was big business. One eighteenth-century merchant described it as the hinge on which all trade of this globe moves. In order to supply this market, Africansincluding childrenwere frequently kidnapped by their unscrupulous countrymen, who profited handsomely by selling their captives to white slave-traders.