The conversion to slavery in Virginia did not unravel as a widespread shift confined largely to the end of the seventeenth century. It was a very complex process with multiple phases of subregional diversity. The extent of a planter's investment in slave labor varied widely according to their location, wealth, and economic needs. An initial phase that lasted into the 1650s. The English’s participation in transatlantic slaving was still in infancy, and access to slaves were limited to Virginians but not all members of the Council of State. A broad segment of the gentry contained at least a few slaves and by the end most councillors had more slaves than servants. The 1650s to late 1670s constituted another phase in which the growth of intercolonial slave trading and limited deliveries from Africa facilitated the expansion of slave ownership. A third phase that lasted from the 1670s to the end of the seventeenth century, was marked by the emergence of the colony’s first largely enslaved labor force and extending slaveholding to a percentage of non elite Virginians. The fourth and final phase began with ending the Royal African Company monopoly in 1698 due to slavery spreading to the mass of ordinary planters and labor owning planters. There was no cause for the conversion.
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The rise of slavery began in the first decade of settlement and grew with the development of England’s empire, the expansion of English in commercial slave trading, and Virginia’s integration with the Atlantic
The rise of slavery began in the first decade of settlement and grew with the development of England’s empire, the expansion of English in commercial slave trading, and Virginia’s integration with the Atlantic