European explorers first enslaved individuals and groups native to the American continent during the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries in a drive for the accumulation of capital wealth. When indigenous slavery failed, systematically organized African slave-labor became integral to the complex economic systems of British mercantilism and Western capitalism. The voyages of European explorers made the trade in Africans, and the staples of their labor, top priorities in the exchange and development of European markets and wealth. Hence slavery emerged in the thirteen American colonies in relation to the development of the Western world. As W. E. B. DuBois notes in The Suppression of the Slave Trade to the United States, 1638–1870 (1965 [1898]), the colonies played a vital role in the Triangular Trade between Europe, North America, and Africa during the eighteenth century. The British maintained that the slave trade was the "very life of...