The author below records that of the forced migration of Negroes from Africa to the Western Hemisphere, “about 9 to 10 million Africans were brought to the New World. Of these the thirteen British colonies, and later the United States, took only a small part – probably less than 400,000, surely not more than 500,000.”
A Vast Empire of Slavery
“Before [slavery as it existed in America] is examined, it is important to see hemispheric slavery as a whole. The growth of slavery in the English mainland colonies was only a small part of the immense world historic process in which over a span of three centuries African kings and chieftains, Portuguese, Spanish, Genoese, English, French, Dutch and Danish slave traders, Yankee merchants from England’s northern colonies, Portuguese, Spanish, English, Dutch and French planters in Latin America and the Caribbean islands, and the planters of the rice and tobacco colonies of the North American continent were all knit together in a far-flung fraternity of the unfraternal, engaged in the business of creating, supplying and exploiting a vast empire of slavery in the New World.
The North American colonies were only on the fringes of the immense South Atlantic system of slave trading and slave exploitation, which was mainly an affair of Central and South America and the sugar islands of the Caribbean. The precise dimensions of the slave trade are unknown, but the most educated guess, which has emerged from the impressive research of Philip Curtin, is that over the centuries of the slave trade territory of the United States received less than 5 percent of all the slaves brought to the Western Hemisphere.
The primary development of Negro slavery [after Africa itself] took place in tropical America, starting with Brazil in the late Sixteenth century and proceeding into the Caribbean where it reached its peak two hundred years later.”
(America at 1750: A Social Portrait. Richard Hofstadter. Vintage Books, 1973, pp. 67-68)