The first transatlantic slave voyages from Africa to the Americas occurred in the early 1520s on Portuguese vessels sailing from West Africa to the large Caribbean island of Hispaniola, the earliest European name for present-day Haiti and the Dominican Republic.
The transatlantic slave trade increased in the mid-1500s, when the Spanish began to use African slave labor alongside Native Americans to mine silver in Peru. Slave ships sailed from Africa to Colombia and Panama, and African captives then were transported overland to the Pacific coast of South America. Until the early 1600s, most Africans enslaved in the Americas worked in Peruvian or Mexican mines. The 1570s marked the development of sugar plantations in Brazil, a Portuguese colony, where merchants adopted production techniques pioneered in Madeira and Sao Tomé . By the 1620s African labor had replaced Indian labor on Brazilian sugar plantations.
The development of an export-based plantation complex in North America and the Caribbean, areas neglected by the Spanish and Portuguese, awaited the arrival of the British, French, and Dutch in the early 1600s. In the initial development of the British colonies Virginia and Barbados (1630s-1640s), Jamaica (1660s), and South Carolina (1690s) and the French colonies Saint-Domingue (present-day Haiti), Martinique, and Guadeloupe (1660s-1680s), most laborers on the plantations were young European males who agreed to work for three to five years in return for free oceanic passage and food and housing in the Americas. These workers were called indentured laborers. By the later 17th and early 18th centuries, tobacco, sugar, indigo (used to make blue dye), and rice plantations switched from European indentured labor to African slave labor. By the mid-1700s, Brazil, Saint-Domingue, and Jamaica were the three largest slave colonies in the Americas. By the 1830s, Cuba emerged as the principal Caribbean plantation colony.