Born Then1800–1866
Life during the Atlantic slave trade, final decades
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
Britain and the United States banned the trade in 1807–08, but ships kept carrying captives to Brazil and Cuba until the 1860s. Wars and raids in West and Central Africa fed the trade, and coastal rulers and merchants profited from it. In the simulation the poorest people here can be captured and carried away.
Deaths: more than 3 million Africans were shipped across the Atlantic after 1800; many died before boarding or at sea.
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
- Atlantic slave trade (West Africa) 1501–1799
- Atlantic slave trade (Kongo and Angola) 1514–1799
- Plantation slavery in Brazil 1550–1799
- Tokugawa peace 1603–1780
- Sugar slavery in the Caribbean 1640–1799
- Slavery in the British North American colonies 1660–1799
- Spanish missions in California 1769–1799
- Great Tenmei famine 1782–1788
- Laki haze and the cold winter of 1783–1784 1783–1784
- Laki eruption and the Haze Famine 1783–1785
- Smallpox epidemic around Sydney 1789–1790
- Atlantic slave trade, final decades 1800–1866
- Slavery in the United States 1800–1865
- Slavery in Brazil 1800–1888
- Serfdom in the Russian Empire 1800–1861
- Napoleonic Wars 1803–1815
- Fulani War and the Sokoto Caliphate 1804–1808
- Spanish American wars of independence 1808–1826
- Eruption of Mount Tambora 1815–1816
- British emigration to the colonies and America 1815–1913
- Year Without a Summer 1816–1817
- First cholera pandemic 1817–1824
- Java War 1825–1830
- Cultivation System in Java 1830–1870
- Abolition of slavery in the British Empire 1834–1838
- Indian indenture system 1834–1917
- First Opium War 1839–1842
- German emigration to the Americas 1840–1893
- Great Famine in Ireland 1845–1852