Between 1500 and 1800, almost 10 million enslaved Africans were taken to the New World. They were brought by the Portuguese, Spanish, British, and Dutch.
About 500,000 were taken to Britain’s mainland colonies. Those colonies became the United States. In the South, colonists needed workers for their plantations. Those were large farms where cotton and other crops were grown. But European workers were hard to find. And many Native Americans would not do that kind of work. Also, they died from diseases the Europeans brought. By the late 1600s, planters needed the forced labor of enslaved Africans. Most were brought from West Africa.
