How did the trans-Atlantic slave trade benefit European plantation owners in the West Indies? It provided them with a new labor force that cost less money. It provided them with guns and ammunition to defend their plantations. It provided them with goods from Africa unavailable in the Americas. It allowed them to sell enslaved people to landowners in the Middle East.

The Atlantic slave trade, also known as the transatlantic slave trade, refers to the slave trade that took place across the Atlantic Ocean between the 16th and 19th centuries. The vast majority of the slaves involved in Atlantic trade were Africans from the central and western parts of the continent, mostly prisoners of the wars between rival ethnic groups that were sold by African slave traders to European buyers, who transported them to their colonies in North and South America. There, the slaves were forced to work in the plantations of coffee, coconut, tobacco and cotton, in the gold and silver mines, in the rice fields, in the construction industry, in the wood, in the construction of boats and in homes as servants.

The slave trade is called "Maafa" by African and African-American scholars, a term that means "holocaust" or "great disaster" in Swahili. Some scholars, such as Marimba Ani and Maulana Karenga, use the expressions "African holocasuto" or "holocaust of slavery."