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The Atlantic slave trade or transatlantic slave trade involved the transportation by slave traders of enslaved African people, mainly to the Americas. The outfitted European slave ships of the slave trade regularly used the triangular trade route and its Middle Passage, and existed from the 16th to the 19th centuries.
In southern New England, a variant form of indentured servitude, which controlled the labor of Native Americans through an exploitative debt-peonage system, developed in the late 17th century and continued through to the period of the American Revolution. Not all European servants came willingly.
A new life in the New World offered a glimmer of hope; this explains how one-half to two-thirds of the immigrants who came to the American colonies arrived as indentured servants. Servants...
North America. Until the late 18th century, indentured servitude was common in British America. It was often a way for Europeans to migrate to the American colonies: they signed an indenture in return for a costly passage.
The majority of this group were African Americans enduring lives of unpaid labour, a product of the Atlantic slave trade. A smaller but still substantial group was indentured servants: Europeans sold and transported to the colonies under contract.
By the eighteenth century indentured servants outnumbered African slaves in the North American colonies. Unlike the situation endured by slaves, however, the state was an impermanent one for indentured servants.
The English migration system delivered servants to the migrant ports, and was extended to deliver them to the four new ‘Englands out of England’ established in America. Despite the abuses of the servant trade, indentured servitude supplied the greater part of the white colonial labour force.
