Europeans had a profound impact on the lifestyle of the Africans on the Western Coast.

The Portuguese especially, turned profits by establishing large trading posts all over the west African coasts, where merchants would work instead of going out to sea to bring back goods. These trading posts were called factories, and one of the most prominent factories was El Mina, a gold trading post. The Portuguese, in need of a new revenue base, turned to slavery as a form of merchant trading. The slave trade was controlled by Europeans and turned many of the disunited African tribes and small empires against each other in order to take slaves from the losing side. Because slavery was already present in these tribes after feuds and wars, the Europeans had their work cut out for them, allowing them to take so many slaves that slaves became a commodity or a product for selling. This form of slavery that involved slaves being traded like objects was called chattel slavery, and the Atlantic slave trade was driven by merchants from Europe taking slaves and selling them to the settlers in the Americas who desperately needed a form of cheap labor. As demand for raw materials rose in the Americas, the global trade network for crops grown on the American plantations needed a labor force to back it. Because hiring people to work the fields would be too expensive for many plantation owners, they took slaves to work the fields for them for free. For much of its early life, the Portuguese and the Spanish, who brought slaves to the Caribbean to work on their settlers plantations, controlled the trans-atlantic slave trade. Soon after, however, the English and the French decided to create their own slave trading systems further than the Caribbean. The Royal African Company was founded by the English to bolster its economy with a slave market in the Americas, where soon after, nearly every nation established slave markets and trading companies to take captives to the Americas. This then lowered the need for a cheap labor system, but as more slaves were taken and more land conquered, the need continued to be fed by the European slave trade. In addition to plantation workers, slaves were also a bargaining chip for many merchants in times of triangular trade, in which slaves were simply another product on the market just like tobacco and sugar. Europeans in West Africa heavily affected the political structure and already imbalanced government system, making a divided people easy to conquer and exploit. The expansion of gunpowder empires in West Africa constantly feuded for land and people, in order to maintain the slave empires they had worked so hard to maintain. The endless warring of the many nations stationed in Africa led to instability and the greater importance of military forces. This change made Africa inhospitable for the natives, who were led inexorably to the Americas to be sold as slaves. The Asante empire was an empire founded in the Gold Coast Region of Africa during the slave trade times, and the people of this empire had access to gunpowder weaponry from Europeans. The Asante did more than just trade however, for they had to survive against the Europeans, and as such, their ruler, the Asantehene in an effort of conquest, led them. The Kingdom of Dahomey, however, emerged in the 1700s as a less coastal region than the Asante, but their kingdoms autocratic

government and access to firearms made them a powerful empire that dealt in firearms and slave trades with the Europeans. The slave trade took thousands of people from Africa, but the gender and regional ethnicity was actually quite specific to the slave traders. While the Atlantic slave trade took mostly men, the trans-Saharan slave trade took mostly women. This was because the occupations that the traders needed the slaves for required different skillsets. The Atlantic trades sent men to the Americas to work on plantations and mines, a replaceable commodity to the slave masters because they needed a cheap labor system to make themselves richer. The Middle East and North Africa, though, used female slaves as domestic workers and concubines instead of heavy lout work. The women were often used in places where they would be used to extend kin while the men were the short-term heavy lifters. This imbalance in certain areas led to polygyny, when women would share men in their communities due to the lack of men and their apparent need to reproduce despite their constant enslavement. The Boers were Dutch settlers, and as many European nations, they insisted on moving outward, to expand and make more money. However, they did not take into account the banning of slavery after many decades, and as a result, the Great Trek took place. The Great Trek, was a migration by the Boers to North and East away from British powers and to the Eastern Coast, which they believed to be less inhabited. The other Americas still needed slaves, so the slave trade continued although banned in Britain. The slaves endured the worst possible conditions in their Middle Passage during their African Diaspora, when millions of them were forced out of their ancestral home and into the Americas, where the vast majority would die in captivity.