Born Then1514–1799
Life during the Atlantic slave trade (Kongo and Angola)
Be born in a place it hit, a few years before it began, and see what it did to five ordinary lives.
What it meant for ordinary people
The Kingdom of Kongo and Portuguese Angola supplied more enslaved people to the Americas than any other region, most to Brazil. Wars, Portuguese campaigns and debt and judicial enslavement fed the trade. It drained young people from the region for three centuries.
Deaths: about 5.7 million people were shipped from West Central Africa, the largest single source region.
How hard it hits each person in the game (risk of death, of being conscripted, of leaving) comes from scholarly estimates.
Around the same time
- Indian Ocean slave trade 700–1799
- Sengoku period 1467–1590
- Collapse of the Taíno population 1493–1530
- Atlantic slave trade (West Africa) 1501–1799
- Atlantic slave trade (Kongo and Angola) 1514–1799
- Spanish conquest of the Aztec Empire 1519–1521
- Smallpox epidemic in Mexico 1520–1521
- Smallpox in the Inca Empire 1525–1527
- Ethiopian–Adal war 1529–1543
- Spanish conquest of the Inca Empire 1532–1572
- Cocoliztli epidemic of 1545 1545–1548
- Plantation slavery in Brazil 1550–1799
- Cocoliztli epidemic of 1576 1576–1578
- Russian conquest of Siberia 1580–1700
- Moroccan invasion of the Songhai Empire 1591–1599
- Imjin War 1592–1598
- Tokugawa peace 1603–1780
- Epidemic in coastal New England 1616–1619
- Thirty Years' War 1618–1648
- Dutch conquest of the Banda Islands 1621
- Late Ming famines and rebellions 1627–1644
- Italian plague of 1629–1631 1629–1631
- Deccan famine of 1630–1632 1630–1632
- Sugar slavery in the Caribbean 1640–1799
- Ming–Qing transition 1644–1683
- Slavery in the British North American colonies 1660–1799
- Great Plague of London 1665–1666
- Little Ice Age famines of the 1690s 1693–1698
- 1707 Hōei earthquake and Fuji eruption 1707–1708
- 1755 Lisbon earthquake 1755