In the tobacco-producing regions of North America, the newly secured availability of expanded numbers of enslaved ‘Negro servants’ allowed the plantation owners to begin to make the full and irrevocable transition away from white indentured servitude and towards the full reliance on African slavery. This transition was to be written into the laws of Virginia in the following decades, in a series of slave laws that formalized the binary, black and white, nature of Virginia society. Like Barbados, the North American colonies became full slave societies.
