The Columbian exchange, Is where slavery started. Where Africa sold their own people.
Tobacco and cotton could be grown by a farmer with help from a few farm workers. The local peoples had been all but wiped out by the first European settlers. So farm workers were brought from Europe. On the British islands, these workers were indentured servants and convicted prisoners. Indentured servants were men and women who agreed to work for a given number of years for a fixed wage, their board and lodging and the cost of their journey out to the islands. Convicted prisoners could be transported to the plantations for a fixed term, instead of being hung or jailed in Britain.
This system did not supply enough workers as the tobacco farms became sugar plantations. Sugar needed a large number of workers. The Portuguese had been using enslaved Africans to grow sugar in the Madeira Islands (in the north Atlantic Ocean) since about 1460. Africa was closer to the Caribbean than Europe was. The African climate was similar to that of the Caribbean. Many African peoples were farmers. Europeans argued that the so-called ‘uncivilised’ African was hardly human. This sort of thinking allowed the inhumanity of slavery to be dismissed. They thought that if the slaves were not human, then they could not be treated inhumanely. Therefore, Africa seemed the obvious place to go for labor for the sugar plantations.
I hope this helpes
