The Atlantic Age

S1 E5: The series’ fifth hour examines the tremendous changes wrought in Africa by the trans-Atlantic slave trade, flowing out of the new era of European exploration in the New World that had begun in 1492 and reached a crucial point in the 16th century. For centuries, Eastern Africa, West Africa and Northern Africa had all been tied deeply into long-distance commercial networks linking across the Eastern Hemisphere. However, the European discovery of the Americas, and the pass age of Portuguese seamen farther and farther south along Africa’s Atlantic coast, reaching the Cape of Good Hope in 1488 and then traveling around the Cape and all the way to India in 1497, transformed those relations.