Slave Coast

Captive Africans being transferred to ships along the Slave Coast for the transatlantic slave trade, c. 1880.

Slave Coast, in 18th- and 19th-century history, the section of the coast of the Gulf of Guinea, in Africa, extending approximately from the Volta River in the west to Lagos, in modern Nigeria, or, alternatively, the Niger Delta in the east (in the present-day republics of Togo, Benin, and Nigeria). Although Germans, Danes, French, Portuguese, Swedish, and Spanish made efforts to establish forts and stations in this coastal region, it became primarily a sphere of Afro-British and Afro-Dutch trade in enslaved people and in various commodities.