Transatlantic Slave Trade

Module 1: Module Notes: Africans and the Origins of Slavery in the New World 

Between 1492 and 1820, four out of five migrants who settled in the Americas were enslaved Africans. The Transatlantic Slave Trade was the largest single forced migration in world history. Until this period, slavery had existed throughout world history in nearly every society. But the Transatlantic Slave Trade comprised a much more intensive and extensive forced migration of people to another continent, whose labor produced commodities for world trade. Europeans predominantly constructed the Transatlantic Slave Trade, which has led to many questions about its origin.

Over the past 50 years, two questions have dominated the literature on the Transatlantic Slave Trade:

1. Why did Europeans resort to adopting enslaved laborers to construct their colonial empires in the New World?

2. Why were Africans the predominant source of this enslaved labor?

View  this interactive  (Links to an external site.)Links to an external site. to visualize the growth of the Transatlantic Slave Trade over 315 years.

Despite a preponderance of scholarly works on these two questions, a general consensus remains elusive. The European settlement of the New World lasted over two centuries and evolved during a series of protracted wars, diplomatic disputes, and religious controversy, each of which complicate the historian’s ability to assign a singular reason for Europe’s insistence upon enslaved labor. Moreover, there is a lack of contemporary sources (journals, diaries, and personal letters for instance) on the origins of slavery and the trade, which further impedes our ability to cleanly answer those questions. A clearer understanding of how historians have understood the origins and evolution of the slave trade will help you see how the trade impacted the European settlement of the New World.

Slavery and Slave Trades in World History

Despite its odious nature, slavery was a common institution in the world at the time of European settlement in the Americas. Slavery had existed in virtually every society in the world since the earliest records of human existence. Though a repressive institution that deprived humans of their liberty, slavery was not confined to specific gender, ethnic, or racial categories and depended entirely upon context. Wars, religious disturbances, and other factors shaped the expansion or contraction of slavery throughout world history. By 1492, though much diminished, Europe still counted a sizeable population of slaves in many parts of the continent.

Marble depiction of Roman slaves,  Smyrna, Turkey, 200AD. Click on the image to view in full-size.

Scholars argue that slavery developed in Europe during the rise of  Ancient Greece (Links to an external site.)Links to an external site. , though it experienced an unprecedented expansion under  the Roman Empire (Links to an external site.)Links to an external site.  in successive eras lasting from 800 BC to 400 AD. The Roman conquest of a significant portion of the Eurasian landmass created a dynamic market economy (a system of production and exchange over diverse regions that was united by vast transportation and distribution networks) and an increasing supply of captive peoples. These two factors were crucial in the expansion of slavery throughout the empire. Territorial conquests yielded a considerable supply of workers for enslavement. The creation of a market economy opened up profitable opportunities for the production of commodities suitable for long distance trade and these commodities, of course, were produced via slave labor. Roman slavery is notable because of its concentration and size, as this institution represented almost 40% of the total workforce in many regions in the empire. Slavery receded, however, as the Roman Empire declined in size and eventually collapsed.

Slavery in the Roman Empire imparted some important institutions and traditions that would later shape American slavery and the Transatlantic Slave Trade. For one thing, the Romans demonstrated the potential profitability of exploiting enslaved laborers to produce commodities for long distance trade. Territorial conquest granted the Romans new lands to expand commodity production and this expansion created more potential recruits for enslavement. Finally, the Romans created legal institutions to bolster the existence of slavery, such as laws regulating masters’ property rights and slaves’ behavior and treatment. These institutions were later passed to the New World helped to foster the evolution of slavery there. In these ways, the Roman tradition of slavery served as the model that Europeans later imposed in their American Empires.

While slavery expanded in Europe under the Romans, the institution was also widespread in Africa. For centuries before 1492, various forms of enslaved labor emerged in Africa, which ranged from domestic servants to farm workers. As early as 800 A.D., an international slave trade developed in Africa in which Muslim traders exported captives from the continent to the burgeoning Islamic World spanning North Africa, the Middle East, and parts of Eurasia. When European merchants began exploring Western Africa in the 1400s, they discovered a continent with a long tradition of slavery and a complex network capable of exporting captives to international markets.

Map of the Slave Trade among West Africa, North Africa, and the  Middle East in the medieval era. Click on the map to view in full-size.

Questions to Consider

These were the conditions prevalent in the world when European nations began colonizing the Americas. As you complete the reading for this week, consider the following: how did the Transatlantic Slave Trade fit within the larger historical context of slavery and slave trades across the globe? Why was slavery adopted as the major source of labor in the New World? Why were Africans captured and shipped across the Atlantic to supply this labor?

Next, please read about your final project before moving to the discussions on the myths and misconceptions of the Transatlantic Slave Trade and the origins of slavery in the New World.

Module 2: Module Notes: Making Sense of the Numbers: A Statistical Analysis of the Slave Trade

I. Introduction The Transatlantic Slave Trade involved the forced capture and transportation of millions of enslaved Africans across the Atlantic to destinations throughout the Americas, where an uncertain fate awaited the frightened and demoralized passengers. This trade was the largest forced migration in world history, one that involved the untold suffering of millions and the massive destruction and deprivation of societies in Africa. Forced migrations have existed throughout history, owing to natural disasters, military defeats, and earlier enslavement systems like those we examined in Module 1, but none occurred on so large a scale. Starting in the early sixteenth century, thousands of ships crowded captive Africans in deplorable conditions for their transportation across the Atlantic.

II. Early Study of the Transatlantic Slave Trade Despite the centrality of the Transatlantic Slave Trade to world history, scholars largely ignored the trade for most of the first half of the twentieth century. Collective guilt in the Western world largely accounts for this neglect. Moreover, the nature of the trade rendered difficult the collection of evidence on its size, magnitude, and direction for most of the twentieth century. The Transatlantic Slave Trade was truly an international business, as European merchants pooled capital and goods to exchange for captives from many parts of the world, purchased slaves from various regions in Africa, and dispatched their ships to hundreds of markets in the Americas for their final sale. The complexities of individual voyages meant that sources which document the trade have been dispersed in archives throughout the world. Furthermore, twentieth century conflicts, lack of funds for travel, and a general disinterest in the trade meant that few scholars were willing or able to travel overseas to conduct fruitful research on the trade. Transportation improvements (air travel for instance), better funding from international organizations desiring more studies on the trade, improved collection and accessibility of archives, and a general recognition of the historical importance of the trade has transformed the field, resulting in a massive, international endeavor to quantify the Transatlantic Slave Trade. Understanding the size, origin, and destination of the number of captives shipped in the Transatlantic Slave Trade has helped scholars conduct a range of new studies on transatlantic slavery, many of which we will examine in the coming modules.

III. Twentieth Century Analysis The Transatlantic Slave Trade became a politically “hot” topic during the twentieth century. During the mid-twentieth century, Europe began the slow, painful process of  decolonization (Links to an external site.)Links to an external site. , granting independence to dozens of former colonies in Africa and other parts of the world. Independence involved an international acknowledgement of the painful history of European interaction with the rest of the world, consisting of exploitation of colonial resources, labor, and capital. It was in this period that many scholars across the globe argued that the wealth of the West was predicated on the historic exploitation of the rest of the world. Anticolonial scholars regarded Africa’s enduring poverty and civil strife as a product of European colonialism. An international debate emerged in the 1950s, in which one group of scholars (often ex-colonial subjects educated in the European tradition) blamed most of the problems in the so-called “Third World” on the destructive nature of European colonialism, while Western scholars often sought to undermine these assertions highlighting European colonialism as a form of “modernization” which brought to Africa schools, hospitals, roads, and other “progressive” infrastructure. Such arguments, however, cast “Third World” nations as implicitly inferior to paternalistic “First World” nations in the West, which scholars continued to portray as the major “civilizing” forces in the world against African poverty, illiteracy, and overpopulation. The Transatlantic Slave Trade became a major focal point in this international debate on the role of European imperialism in the postcolonial world. The trade involved unprecedented suffering for millions of Africans who were crammed onboard vessels in the most deplorable and inhumane conditions and their transportation to the Americas to work on plantations producing cash crops for the European market. The process of procuring captives from Africa involved over four centuries of warfare and internal strife within the continent itself. Moreover, the loss of millions of people, mostly males between 10 and 30 years of age, undermined population growth in Africa and deprived the continent of a considerable source of labor.

Slave Manifest of the Schooner Wild Cat, departing from Charleston, SC on September 1, 1832 and arriving in New Orleans, LA on September 24, 1832. Six slaves on board are identified by first name only. Image courtesy of the National Archives and Records Administration  Click on the image to view in full-size.

Until the 1970s, the few scholars who wrote on transatlantic slavery proffered wildly divergent estimates on the number of Africans shipped to the Americas in the slave trade, none of which were based on scientific or archival research. Several estimates ranged as low as 5 million. Most scholars settled on the estimate of 15 million captives shipped in the slave trade, while a few scholars offered significantly higher estimates between 25 million and the almost certainly too high estimate of 100 million Africans. All of these estimates were based on simple observations and guesses on the magnitude of the trade. Scholars presenting guess estimates of the number of Africans shipped during the slave trade were directly and indirectly participating in what came to be known as the “numbers game,” a back and forth debate on the size of the slave trade. Scholars who estimated low numbers directly and indirectly hinted that the trade had a minimal impact on African development. On the other hand, scholars estimating higher numbers suggested that it had a much larger effect on African development, essentially arguing that the trade was central in explaining the continent’s economic decline.

Slave manifest of the Schooner Thomas Hunter, departing from Norfolk, VA on October 17, 1835 and arriving in New Orleans, LA on November 11, 1835. Five slaves on board are identified by first and last name. Image courtesy of the National Archives and Record Administration. Click on the image to view in full-size.

The year 1969 signaled a pivotal shift in the “numbers game.” The publication of Philip Curtin’s The Atlantic Slave Trade: A Censusproduced an explosion of works seeking more accurately to quantify the Transatlantic Slave Trade. Instead of guesswork, these studies relied on the careful and systematic examination of archives throughout the world. Curtin intended his book to serve as an invitation for scholars to take his lead and begin a major investigation of the trade based on hard data rather than simple guesses. In particular, rather than relying on calculations based on little or no evidence, the post-Curtin scholars collected thousands of shipping manifests and port records to tabulate the number of slaves transported to the Americas (see two examples of this below). Scholars mined archives throughout Europe, Africa, and the Americas to collect such data.

IV. Voyages: An Revolutionary Collaboration In the 1990s, historians David Eltis and Stephen Behrendt decided to merge their independent research on the British slave trade. From there, their project grew into perhaps one of the most innovative and collaborative enterprises in the study of history. Scholars from all over the world submitted their findings to the massive  Voyages: The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database (Links to an external site.)Links to an external site. , a central repository. This massive effort resulted in the most complete reconstruction of the Transatlantic Slave Trade and the data is open to the wider public through their website. The website has truly revolutionized historical data collection in the modern era—anyone, including you, can use the data to draw conclusions about the trade or even to trace your genealogy. Every year, the discovery of new data has led to upward revisions on the overall size of the trade. The existence of this new online database has allowed students to gain a greater understanding of the overall size of the trade, the major regions where captives were procured in Africa, the number of slaves that died during the  Middle Passage (Links to an external site.)Links to an external site.  (the leg of the voyage that ships took carrying slaves from Africa to the Americas), and the major destinations of slaves in the Americas. Moreover, the online database allows students to examine the stories of individual vessels engaged in the slave trade as they left their port of origin, arrived in Africa, and sailed to the Americas. This smaller, micro view offers a wide range of data on the number of slaves collected on individual ships, occasional revolts or major epidemics in the trade, mortality onboard ships, as well as a host of other fascinating facts about the trade. As you complete your reading and your examination of the online database, consider the following: what were the leading European nations engaged in the trade? What were the main regions in the Americas that imported African slaves? How did the experience of one vessel in the trade compare and contrast to the larger trade? What can the database tell us about how historians collect and synthesize information in the twenty-first century?

Module 3: Module Notes: African Experiences during the Slave Trade

The “door of no return,” at the House of Slaves Memorial Museum on Gorée Island off the cost of Dakar, Senegal. Click on the image to view in full-size.

A significant portion of the literature on the Transatlantic Slave Trade over the past 50 years has centered on quantifying the trade, which was the topic of Module 2. But much attention has also been devoted to analyzing the social, economic, and political situation of West Africa (Links to an external site.)Links to an external site.  before and during the trade. The African continent supplied all of the captives shipped to the Americas, around 12 to 13 million people. Researchers have tried to uncover the histories of pre-slave trade societies of West Africa in order to gain a greater understanding of the conditions that fostered the rise and expansion of the trade. They considered the social, economic, and political conditions in pre-slave trade West Africa, each of which remain a pressing question of analytical discussion surrounding the trade.

Furthermore, since the trade involved the forced migration of almost 13 million people to an uncertain fate in the Americas, scholars have been interested in discovering African explanations of their ordeals as a part of the trade in humans. The vast majority of studies quantifying the trade tend to overlook the human element in this destructive traffic. Regardless of how many Africans were captured and shipped to the Americas, this trade involved untold suffering as families were destroyed and millions were uprooted from their ancestral homelands and forced into labor on plantations throughout the Americas. A major question in the literature considers how Africans responded to their enslavement in the Transatlantic Slave Trade. These two major issues comprise the content in this module.

The Transatlantic Slave Trade was the most destructive forced migration in the history of the world. The trade destroyed families, communities, and many regions of Africa. Husbands and wives, brothers and sisters, and sons and daughters were ripped away from their families and exported to distant continents. Moreover, the acquisition of captives throughout Africa was made possible for four centuries through almost incessant warfare (many of the captives shipped across the Atlantic were prisoners of war acquired from wars instigated to obtain captives). Even Africans not captured and shipped to the Americas had to endure the continual suffering of warfare and upheaval in their everyday lives. Constant wars (even just the threat of them) further uprooted peoples from their traditional societies and created an ever-present atmosphere of anxiety in West Africa during this time period.

Given the hardships generated by this trade, scholars have been interested in the social, economic, and political conditions of West African societies before and during the Transatlantic Slave Trade. Put simply, scholars have questioned why African societies and political units were willing and able to supply captives to European slave traders. Questions scholars examined include, but are not limited to: what was the power structure of West African societies in this era? Was it possible to resist European demands for captives to toil in the American colonies? Or, why were certain African groups (kings and groups of merchants for instance) willing to allow this trade that clearly was detrimental to their continent? Who, if anyone, in African communities benefited from the slave trade and the resultant warfare and upheaval?

A European slave trade post in modern day Ghana. Davis, Amanda. "Slave Castle, Ghana." June, 2004.

Scholars have also grappled with African interpretations and understandings of the Transatlantic Slave Trade. Millions of Africans were affected by the trade, either directly through their own capture and indirectly as their families and societies were clearly disrupted for more than four centuries. How did Africans comprehend their lives during this rather unpredictable and destructive era? How did they perceive and remember the horrors of captivity on the coast of West Africa and during the Middle Passage? These questions remain some of the most difficult ones to answer given the sheer paucity of sources. Captives spoke many different languages, depending on their region of origin, making it almost impossible for Europeans to record their thoughts about the trade. Moreover, there was little incentive for Europeans to even record the experiences of Africans (both those enslaved and those remaining in the continent) during this era or to preserve those narratives for future generations. A major exception to this was abolitionists who used slave trade narratives as evidence in the growing campaign for abolition, which we will return to in Module 8. Even so, only scattered recollections and stories survived, which historians have mined to present a voice of the African victims of this trade. The narrative readings and the film for this module present a story of the suffering endured during this era, which illuminates a human side to the Transatlantic Slave Trade to make more understandable and powerful the quantitative story of Module 2.

Module 4: Module Notes: Anomabo: An African Region during the Transatlantic Slave Trade Era

As we have seen in previous modules, there has been an explosion of interest in studying the Transatlantic Slave Trade, its volume, direction, and, as we will see in future modules, its effects on Europe and Africa. Nevertheless, a glaring gap remains in the literature on the role of West Africa. In Module 3, we examined African societies and states prior to and during the Transatlantic Slave Trade era. While the readings for that module present a concise narrative of a larger region of Africa, the information can be daunting and difficult to understand on its own. Students in the United States often have only a limited knowledge of African history, a topic that is not studied sufficiently in American schools. Furthermore, Africa in the period 1500 to 1800 consisted of thousands of different languages and ethnic groups, dozens of kingdoms and other political entities, and various regional climates.

Lázaro Luis, map of Western Africa, 1563. Click on the image to view in full-size.

A new approach to understanding Africa’s history of the slave trade is to take micro or regional approaches. The Voyages database now allows scholars to estimate which particular regions of Africa supplied most of the captives in the trade. Using this information, scholars conducted case studies of individual regions of West Africa, or, in the case of the historian we will study in this present module, an individual port town.

Africa is perhaps the most diverse continent in the world, consisting of a multitude of languages, ethnic groups, climates, and geographies. These differences shaped the continent’s history. Moreover, prior to and during the era of the Transatlantic Slave Trade, there were massive political changes in the Western portion of the continent (new political entities rose and fell with significant regularity, for example) that shaped the evolution of the trade.

Compounding the complexities of studying the trade, European nations had shifting experiences in trading with West Africa. Some European ships traded mainly with one particular region of West Africa in order to develop relationships and establish ties with communities. For example, Portuguese merchants tended to trade predominantly in the region in the modern nation of Angola, while English merchants traded heavily in the regions in the modern nations of Ghana and Nigeria. The French, on the other hand, traded overwhelmingly with the regions in the modern nation of Senegal. However, some European traders took the opposite approach and visited several different regions during individual voyages to diversify the ethnic origins of their slaves.

Individual African communities also had shifting experiences in the trade, exporting many captives in one era, tapering off their connection to the trade in another era, and re-entering the trade again decades later. Given the number of variables involved, arriving at a cohesive narrative of African history during this era is rather complicated.

A depiction of Mansa Musa I of the Mali Empire holding a gold nugget from the 1375 Catalan Atlas Click on the image to view in full-size.

Randy Sparks’ Where the Negroes Are Masters (2014) represents a new and innovative approach to the study of Africa’s involvement in the slave trade. Sparks examines Anomabo (also known as Anomabu or Annamaboe), a single port town on the Gold Coast, which was one of the major regions of West Africa supplying captives to the Transatlantic Slave Trade. Today, the Gold Coast is part of the Republic of Ghana (Links to an external site.)Links to an external site. . During the 1400s, European merchants (primarily the Portuguese) began exploring this part of the coast for the opportunity to develop profitable trading relationships. Essentially, European merchants were looking for products that Europe could not produce, including spices, tropical foodstuffs such as cocoa, and gold. Europeans discovered plentiful gold resources in this area of West Africa, resulting in the moniker the “Gold Coast.” British, Dutch, Danish, Prussian, Swedish, and Portuguese traders then came to the region to trade goods like guns and rum for gold, making the area one of the largest suppliers of gold on Earth. By the late 1600s, however, traders’ attention shifted from gold to captives who would be shipped to the Americas.

Sparks’ study focuses on this transformation, from trading gold to trading for humans, in the port town of Anomabo. He details African responses to the trade, its development, expansion, and ultimate collapse through examinations of the relationships between a few key individuals. Such a micro approach allows students to gain a greater understanding of how the Transatlantic Slave Trade operated within Africa. It also presents a detailed description of how Africans participated in the trade and its effects on the sociopolitical conditions of one port town. Such a focused approach also aids students’ comprehension of the trade during this complex era.

Module 5: Module Notes: Inherited Privilege and Collective Guilt: Economic Effects of the Slave Trade in Europe and the Americas

The Triangle Trade across the Atlantic World Click on the image to view in full-size. 

During the Transatlantic Slave Trade, hundreds of vessels left Europe (and many from parts of the Americas) carrying a range of manufactured goods (European and Asian textiles, metal goods, alcohol, and many other products), which were exchanged for captives in West Africa. Merchants purchased captives for low prices in Africa and sold for much higher prices in the Americas, netting significant profits. Trade vessels then took slave-manufactured goods such as sugar back to European ports, netting further profits. This trade cycle across the Atlantic World was known as the Triangle Trade (Links to an external site.)Links to an external site. , as we have discussed in previous modules.

Tens of thousands of Europeans were employed directly in some aspect of the Triangle Trade (for example, as sailors and dock workers who loaded and unloaded the vessels) and indirectly (building slave vessels, selling slave grown products in Europe, and manufacturing products for sale in Africa). American involvement in the trade similarly produced economic benefits for regional development. To what extent did this trade foster the economic development of the regions that procured the most captives in Africa?

How does the historical issue of economic benefit from the slave trade translate in the contemporary period? Considering the legacy of the Transatlantic Slave Trade, how have politicians, historians, and future generations attempted to come to terms with this deeply contentious history? These are the issues tackled in this module.

Dr Eric Williams (1911 - 1981), Prime Minister of Trinidad and Tobago is greeted by British prime minister Alec Douglas-Home (1903 - 1995) at Marlborough House, at the start of the Commonwealth Prime Ministers' Conference, 8th July 1964. (Photo by Ron Case/Keystone/Hulton Archive/Getty Images) Click on the image to view in full-size.

In 1944 Eric Williams (Links to an external site.)Links to an external site. published  Capitalism and Slavery (Links to an external site.)Links to an external site. , first drawing scholarly attention to the connection between European economic development and the slave trade. Williams was a scholar of West Indian slavery who later led the independence movement in his native Trinidad and Tobago and became the nation’s first Prime Minister. In his work, Williams argued that the profits derived from the slave trade and slavery in the West Indies were funneled into England to provide the necessary stimulus to finance and foster the Industrial Revolution (Links to an external site.)Links to an external site. . England was the first nation in the world to industrialize and it was the second largest slave trading nation. Williams clearly linked these two factors in his book. According to Williams, the English slave trade was the most profitable business endeavor in the nation, the profits of which were invested in developing the industrial sector of England. These profits underpinned the expansion of the banking system in England, which further allowed merchants to draw on funds to build factories and essentially kick-start the Industrial Revolution. Furthermore, as the slaves exported to the Americas grew a range of products (raw cotton, sugar, and many other tropical goods) that were exported back to England, they in turn helped provide raw materials for England’s nascent industrialism. This was particularly true in the case of raw cotton grown on slave plantations in the Americas. The premier industry of England’s Industrial Revolution was cotton textiles (clothing and household draperies for instance), which relied on raw cotton for its production. Finally, Williams argued that English textile and metalworking industries then profited a second time off of the institution of slavery—particularly as American slave owners purchased cotton clothing, manacles, and shackles to clothe and bind millions of slaves.

A water color painting of a cotton mill in England during the Industrial Revolution Click on the image to view in full-size.

Williams’ book produced an explosion of interest on the subject. Over the next 70 years, dozens of scholars examined the relationship between the Transatlantic Slave Trade and industrialization in Europe and the United States. Some scholars added to Williams’ conclusions and argued that the Transatlantic Slave Trade was also the vital impetus to the economic development of Portugal, France, and the Netherlands. However, since England was the first nation to undergo the Industrial Revolution, most studies have focused there rather than other Western European nations.

But not all scholars agreed with Williams’ postulations, essentially taking three sides in this debate. The first group agreed with Williams, arguing that the slave trade was the fundamental force behind European industrialization. A second group of scholars argued that the slave trade was too insignificant to play any role in industrialization. Essentially, scholars in this camp argued that the profits derived from the trade were too small to have any appreciable impact on the Industrial Revolution. For example, they argued that slave-grown products were only one source of many supplying the required raw materials for industrial output, and, they argued, English factories sold more of their output to domestic consumers than slaveholders in the Americas. Third, some scholars fell somewhere in the middle, arguing that the slave trade was important to the industrialization process but it was only one of many different factors (such as technological inventions that made the production of manufactured goods quicker, larger, and cheaper, for instance) which could explain such a large socio-economic transformation in Europe. Seventy years after the publication of Capitalism and Slavery, a general consensus remains elusive. The continuing vitality of this debate suggests the need for further study into some fundamental remaining questions about industrialization in each Western European nation.

Dr. Eric Williams, 1962.

This scholarship has spawned new debates outside the academy about the ethical implications of the profitability of the Transatlantic Slave Trade. If entire economies benefitted off of the backs of unfree labor, who, if anyone, is responsible today? In the past 30 years, an international movement has evolved, calling on European and North and South American governments to pay reparations (Links to an external site.)Links to an external site.  to Africa and the descendants of former slaves in the Americas. Much of the impetus behind this movement derives from major discoveries over the past three decades that many large corporations, colleges and universities, and wealthy individuals can trace their wealth and privilege to a past involvement in the Transatlantic Slave Trade and slavery. For example, recent international inquiries have established that Brown University, Lehman Brothers, Aetna, J.P. Morgan, and New York Life (to name only a few of the major institutions) derived at least a portion of their financial bases from either the Transatlantic Slave Trade and/or the employment of slaves throughout the Americas. The documentary assigned for this module, the Emmy nominated film Traces of the Trade, examines this issue for one family from Bristol, Rhode Island. To what extent are these contemporary Americans responsible for their ancestors’ past crimes against humanity? What, if anything, can they do to lessen the societal harm their ancestors caused?