Hundreds of thousands of enslaved Africans were shipped from the Gold Coast, today's Ghana. National Maritime Museum, London, CC BY The transatlantic slave trade was a multilayered, highly commercialised global enterprise that lasted from the early 1500s to the mid 1800s. The events over this period are far too complex to fit into a straightforward perpetrator-victim narrative. While the trade catastrophically dehumanised and commodified over 12.5 million Africans, it was not just an external