why did slavery in the colonies grow more rapidly in the last decades of the 17th century than in the earlier.

Question

decades of that century?

Answer 1

More need for labor. As the colonies and territories expanded more settlers arrived and more settlers had larger farms which required more workers than before. At first many farmers used indetured servants as labor. Indentured servants usually worked for a landholder as a way of repaying a debt maybe such as funding ones journey to the colonies. The contract was usually for at most several years.

Slavery was on the other hand cheaper than hiring indentured servants and the slave owners really didn't have much legal obligation to slaves as they would to indentured servants. Slaves were seen basically as legal property like a horse or cow. If someone was a slave, the slave owner kept them for life or could sell them at a later date where as indentured servants were released of their duties when their contract ended and could not be sold. After the indentured servant completed his or her duties they were often given maybe a small parcel of land or a monetary payment and were free to go into business for themselves.

Convict labor was also used but convicts were really unreliable and were only availible for the duration of their sentence and well think about it would you really want convicted murderers and rapists walking around your property?

So from their standpoint slavery was the best option for them.

Answer 2

If I was to take a guess, I'd say that was probably a time of considerable growth and development in the colonies, especially in the agricultural South, where cotton as a crop literally took off due to a high demand by English textile mills.

If you looked at total population growth in the colonies from about 1600 to 1700, I think you would see that from 1600 to 1650 the population grew slowly. (Mayflower sailed to Plymouth in 1620.) By 1650 new colonies were being built and Georgia was becoming a penal colony, and the colonies were growing steadily.

I assume by the 17th Century you mean 1600 to 1700.

From 1700 on the situation was becoming very dynamic and increasingly political. Once the North American colonies became dominated by the British following the French and Indian War we were on track to economic growth and the American Revolution.

Hope I answered your question.

Answer 3

Just more people making more babies.

Remember that in the antebellum south, only ten percent of whites were slaveholders in a population equal to modern day Atlanta. Slavery wasn't growing, slave population was.

With the invention of the cotton gin many farmers were trying to figure out how to get out from under slavery themselves.
Read, "Our Peculiar Institution".

Answer 4

I know only the North American colonies well, so I'll stick to those in this answer. It essentially comes down to questions of power, economics and sickle cell anemia.

Most colonies were established for one reason: economic exploitation for the use of the establishing country. They went in with the intention of seizing gold. Locals were enslaved as a matter of course. But diseases wiped out huge numbers of them, and enslavement killed many more.

Europeans had a major problem: they were just as susceptible to maleria. In North America, there was no gold lying around like they thought. But there were many crops that the natives grew that were worth money, and the two that held up best for the long voyage back were tobacco and cotton. In the Caribbean there was sugar as well, but I'm not familiar enough with that to really comment on it except it was also durable, particularly if turned into molasses and rum.

There were debtors prisons in England, and many of these people were offered the chance to become "servants" in North American colonies. Except that servitude under colonial rule was nothing like servitude in England, there were no protections. Until you paid your ticket off, you had few if any rights. At first there were mostly white servants, and it took a while for Africans to show up. Both groups were treated equally crappy at first. But whites usually died in the first couple of seasons, all the time working for the profit of the company. Those few who survived their term were guaranteed by contract land and a small sum of money. They often were ensured to either die or be forced into a legal situation where their time would be reset by judiciary decision. Some few got through and started their own operations, but not enough to really threaten the status quo. But they treated their people well, and this wasn't the plan of the companies involved.

Africans, however, didn't often die of maleria. A mutation that can result in sickle cell anemia if inherited from both parents also makes someone immune to fatal maleria if inherited from at least one. So most adult Africans brought over had proven themselves immune to maleria, and this meant that they could work their full term of servitude. Some few were actually released before the laws were changed to prevent any Africans from escaping the system.

It was after this legal change that many of the slave importations took place, which is what you are referring to in your question I believe. Once a big enough population was present in North America, they sustained their own growth on plantations and so importation declined even as their numbers grew. I'm not sure how long it took for the importation of slaves to level off. But it wasn't until African resistance to maleria was understood that African slaves took the place of British indentured servants for agricultural activities. And it took this to make it worth their while to bring Africans over as slaves.

Hopefully this answers your question. It was a matter of discovering that Africans could survive in plantation country where Europeans tended to die, and thus make intensive agriculture profitable enough to sustain an ongoing exploitative economy.

Answer 5

The slave states tried to expand slavery into the new western territories to make sure that when the new territories became states they were slave states. They were trying to get more votes in the federal government to keep slavery a permanent institution.

Answer 6

a need for more labor due to the increased demand in agricultural products such as cotton and tobacco. as the population of the colonies expanded,so did the dependence on crop yielding produce. hence the need for more cheap labor.

Answer 7

work changed, population grew

Answer 8

more need