USA HISTORY

Detailed explanation-1: -European planters thought Africans would be more suited to the conditions than their own countrymen, as the climate resembled that the climate of their homeland in West Africa. Enslaved Africans were also much less expensive to maintain than indentured European servants or paid wage labourers.

Detailed explanation-2: -The spread of sugar ‘plantations’ in the Caribbean created a great need for workers. The planters increasingly turned to buying enslaved men, women and children who were brought from Africa.

Detailed explanation-3: -The Spanish took the chattel enslavement of Africans to Cuba, in the northern Caribbean, in the 1540s. Inexorably, it spread to the eastern Caribbean and found its most fertile environment in the plantation complex of Barbados exactly a century later.

Detailed explanation-4: -Plantation owners in both North and South America wanted a cheap workforce. Some colonists, including Spanish priest Bartolomé de Las Casas, suggested using enslaved Africans as workers. Africans had already developed immunity to European diseases.