Slavery became of central importance in the early modern Atlantic world when Europeans decided to transport thousands of Africans to the Western Hemisphere to provide labor in place of indentured servants and with rapid expansion of new lands in the mid-west there was a growing need for more labor. The first Africans imported as laborers into the first thirteen colonies were purchased from English settlers at Jamestown, Virginia in 1619 by a Dutch warship. Later, in 1624, the Dutch East India Company brought the first enslaved Africans to Dutch New Amsterdam. Early English settlers in the lower Chesapeake Bay region learned to grow tobacco from Native Americans and this would prove to have a profound influence on the development of Chesapeake society. and the colonies of Virginia and Maryland as a whole. Between 1627 and 1669, annual tobacco exports rose from £250,000 to over £15 million. (p.39. The American Journey). The Chesapeake region became the largest tobacco producer in the New World. Because tobacco cultivation was a labor-intensive crop, planters sought indentured servants from England as a source of cheap labor. However many serfs died in alarming numbers from disease as the supply of indentured servants declined and larger planters who were wealthy were able to purchase slaves. The slave population increased rapidly from 1,708 in 1660 to 189,000 in 1760. (Smith, Billy G., and Nash. Encyclopedia of American History). Rice was another cash crop that required a substantial investment in land, labor, and equipment. It was among the most intensive and extensive crops developed in colonial North America. Its cultivation helped shape the development of societies in the South... paper center... market, but demand in continental Europe and the United States grew even faster after 1840. The profitability of slavery ultimately rested on the huge demand for cotton outside of the South. This made slaves the most valuable commodity of the time, and most of the profits from slave labor and sales went towards purchasing more land and slaves. At the heart of Anglo-American trade was the highly profitable trade in cash crops, from tobacco in the Chesapeake colonies to rice and indigo in South Carolina, from wheat in the middle colonies to cotton in the South; an extensive textile industry in the North, insurance companies that insured slaves as property, to many Wall Street firms that began as middlemen in the cotton trade, I think it would be logical to conclude that the foundation of the American economy lay in breaking the toil and the sweat of slave labor.