What is now Liberia was part of the Windward Coast during the transatlantic slave trade, but overall, it was not one of the main departure regions or a major source of enslaved Africans in the transatlantic slave trade.

Liberia’s territory during the transatlantic slave trade (around the 1500s–1800s) was part of the larger Windward Coast region, which included parts of Sierra Leone and today’s Ivory Coast.

This region supplied enslaved people to European traders, especially through coastal raiding networks and intermediary African states.

Compared with the largest slave-exporting regions, the Windward Coast (including Liberia) contributed a smaller share of the total forced migration. The largest volumes came from the Bight of Benin (modern Benin and nearby areas), the Bight of Biafra (modern southeastern Nigeria), and the Gold Coast (modern Ghana). These regions had more established, large-scale trading systems that fed directly into Atlantic shipping routes.

Several factors limited Liberia’s role, including fewer large, centralized states controlling export routes (compared with other regions), a more fragmented political geography, and shifting European demand that shifted elsewhere over time.

Liberia is not especially known for a historic site called a “Door of No Return” in the way that Gorée Island in Senegal or Ouidah in Benin are.

Liberia’s historical relationship to the Atlantic world was somewhat different from that of many neighboring countries because it was founded in the 1800s as a settlement for formerly enslaved and free Black Americans through the American Colonization Society. As a result, Liberia became more associated with return and resettlement than with preserved slave-export forts and embarkation memorials.

That said, parts of the Liberian coast were involved in the slave trade before the country’s founding, and there are historical sites connected to that era. But Liberia does not have a widely recognized or internationally prominent monument officially known as the “Door of No Return.”