The Atlantic slave trade or transatlantic slave trade involvesthe transportation by slave traders of enslaved African people, mainly to the Americas.

The slave trade regularly uses the triangular trade route and its Middle Passage, and exists from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries.

The vast majority of those who are enslaved and transported in the transatlantic slave trade are people from Central and West Africa, who have been sold by other West Africans to Western European slave traders (with a small number being captured directly by the slave traders in coastal raids), who bring them to the Americas.

The South Atlantic and Caribbean economies are particularly dependent on labor for the production of sugarcane and other commodities.

This is viewed as crucial by those Western European states which, in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, are vying with each other to create overseas empires.

The Portuguese, in the sixteenth century, are the first to engage in the Atlantic slave trade.

In 1526, they complete the first transatlantic slave voyage to Brazil, and other Europeans soon follow.

Shipowners regard the slaves as cargo to be transported to the Americas as quickly and cheaply as possible, there to be sold to work on coffee, tobacco, cocoa, sugar, and cotton plantations, gold and silver mines, rice fields, the construction industry, cutting timber for ships, in skilled labor, and as domestic servants.

While the first Africans kidnapped to the English colonies are classified as indentured servants, with a similar legal standing as contract-based workers coming from Britain and Ireland, by the middle of the seventeenth century, slavery has hardened as a racial caste with African slaves and their offspring being legally the property of their owners, and children born to slave mothers were also slaves (partus sequitur ventrem).

As property, the people are considered merchandise or units of labor, and are sold at markets with other goods and services.

The major Atlantic slave trading nations, ordered by trade volume, are the Portuguese, the British, the French, the Spanish, the Dutch Empires, and the Danish, along with an occasional Norwegian.

Several  establish outposts on the African coast where they purchase slaves from local African leaders.

These slaves are managed by a factor, who is established on or near the coast to expedite the shipping of slaves to the New World.

Slaves are imprisoned in a factory while awaiting shipment.

Current estimates are that about twelve million to 1twele million, eight hundred thousand million Africans had been shipped across the Atlantic over a span of four hundred years although the number purchased by the traders was considerably higher, as the passage had a high death rate with approximately one million two hundred thousand to two million four hundred thousand dying during the voyage and millions more died in seasoning camps in the Caribbean after arrival to the New World.

Millions of slaves also died as a result of slave raids, wars and during transport to the coast for sale to European slave traders.

Near the beginning of the nineteenth century, various governments act to ban the trade, although illegal smuggling still occurs.

In the early twenty-first century, several governments issued apologies for the transatlantic slave trade.