Slavery became of fundamental importance in the early modern Atlantic world when Europeans decided to transport thousands of Africans to the Western Hemisphere to supply of labor in place of indentured servants and with the rapid expansion of new lands. in the Midwest, the need for labor was growing. The first Africans imported as laborers into the original thirteen colonies were purchased by English settlers at Jamestown, Virginia, in 1619, on a Dutch warship. Later, in 1624, the Dutch East India Company brought the first African slaves to Dutch New Amsterdam. Early English settlers in the lower Chesapeake Bay region learned to grow tobacco from Native Americans and this proved 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 increased from 250,000 pounds to more than 15 million pounds. (p39. The American Journey). The Chesapeake region became the largest tobacco producer in the New World. As tobacco cultivation was labor intensive, planters sought indentured servants in England as a source of cheap labor. However, many servants died in alarming numbers from disease due to the dwindling supply of indentured servants, and larger wealthy planters were successful in purchasing slaves. The slave population grew 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 substantial investment in land, labor, and equipment. It was one of the most intensive and extensive crops developed in colonial North America. Its culture helped shape the development of Southern market societies, but demand in continental Europe and the United States grew even more rapidly after 1840. The profitability of slavery ultimately rested on the enormous demand for cotton outside the South. This made slaves the most valuable commodity at the time and most of the profits from slave labor and sales went toward purchasing more land and slaves. At the heart of Anglo-American trade was the highly profitable trade in cash crops, tobacco in the Chesapeake region. from the colonies to rice and indigo in South Carolina, from wheat in the central colonies to cotton in the South; a vast textile industry in the North, from 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 foundations of the American economy lay in the breaking labor and sweat of slave labor.