Why did the slave trade start?

If you're referring to the slave trade that was practiced by the European powers primarily from the 16th through 19th centuries, the purpose of the slave trade was to obtain a cheap and reliable supply of labor to develop the vast resources of the newly colonized American continents.

For the same reason any other trade starts - people can make money out of it. In the ancient world the selling of slaves was a way of keeping difficult people under control once you have conquered them - to use it as a punishment for breaking laws, for example, or for rebelling, but it also made the slave traders a lot of money. Labour is also a valuable commodity - in the ancient world and in the early colonial times (and indeed to this very day) getting people to work for you for free meant you could maximise profits, and so the trade of labour became valuable, like the trade of metals or any other commodity people highly value.

Because Portuguese explorers wanted to buy slaves from West Africa, the Catholic Church approved adding that any 'saracens' and 'pagans' were fair game for hereditary slavery and existing Arab traders were happy to sell them to European merchants. The difference between the Arab slave trade and the Atlantic slave trade is that once the mass enslavement of people in the New World drew to an end, European colonists bought and sold African negro slaves only and the human toll of the Atlantic trade is without precedent in recorded history especially when taken together with the subjugation of the Americas, even when we consider that slavery is as old as civilization itself, but that's another matter.

It is believed to have started as a way to pay off debt, indentured slave. When the debt was paid, they were set free. I suppose this led to the idea of punishing people with slavery for the free labor. Then people were used as slaves as the result of losing wars. There were likely no laws about kidnapping and such in areas that were not as developed as other regions so people would be captured and sold by their own people. This was pretty much global since the beginning of recorded history and affected all races and cultures.

Which slave trade are you referring too? There was White Slavery, Black on Black slavery, Arab Slavery, Celtic slavery, every race and ethnic group in the world has practised it at one time and some still do.

If you are referring to the slave trade of Africans to the Americas between the 16th to 19th centuries there is a theory that the white colonists brought lots of European deceases like smallpox, Flu and many others that the Native American Indians could not have any defence too so literally there was decimation of the native indian populations in the Americas. Therefore there was not enough native labour to exploit the land and its resources so Black Slavery was a convenient alternative. So it started around 1600.

The slave trade prospered because of an enormous need for cheap labour to work on plantations in the west indies and to pick cotton in the southern states of the USA, which supplied cotton to the cotton mills/spinners of northern england.

The slave trade started when the English people used the Scottish people as slaves

It started more than 2000 years ago due to wars between tribes in middle east and africa.In Baudoin cultures It was a practise to kill looser and take looses wives as slaves and impregnate them so children borne to those become slaves providing free labour needed.

It reduced the strength of opposing tribes and created wealth for the tribal leader as those slaves became marketable commodity.

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If you're talking about slavery in general, then it probably started not too long after trade farming intended for a market economy. Nomadic hunter gatherers do not keep slaves and only have a loose concept of private property. When people begin to farm for their own consumption they become attached to the land. This fosters the first strong idea of private property. Farming tends to result in a surplus of what is being grown and this can be traded for other goods. In a world without money what you own is your wealth and if you want to increase your wealth you'll need to increase your surpluses for exchange in a simple market economy. There is an opportunity cost to this as working to further increase your surplus means that you cannot enjoy the goods gained in trade as you must increase your labour input. Slavery likely began off the back of these issues when fused with balance of trade goods work for debt management, population management through war and management for community based anti social behaviour (ancient cultures rarely operated prisons). By holding another person as private property the owned can be made to generate a large surplus without impacting upon that surplus beyond subsistence. The remainder can be used by the owner in exchange for more goods to be used for their own personal enjoyment and wealth generating reinvestment.

Slavery has very little to do with race and much to do with economics. Subsistence farming began approximately 10,000 years ago. By the rise of the first civilisations capable of writing (about 6000 years ago) people already seemed well acquainted with the idea of slavery.

If you're talking about the transatlantic slave trade of Africans then it operated from the sixteenth century through to the nineteenth century. It essentially started because of mass genocide and death through disease epidemics experienced by Native American peoples due to contact with Europeans. Their "New World" colonies often had huge labour shortages as a result. A slave is the cheapest form of labour and is a capital good capable of multiple replication of itself. As members of the "Old World" Africans and Europeans had already exchanged many diseases in past pandemics and so were resilient to each others germs. Europeans usually bought - but often captured - slaves in Africa and typically set them to work on plantations for agricultural raw goods that could be transported to Europe as expensive luxury materials. In Europe these were changed into finished goods, and a portion of the cheaper finished goods were used in exchange for more slaves in Africa. This is known as the classic model of triangular trade. This model had huge potential for profit and economic growth for those on the right side of the triangle.