The reasons for this shift from various forms of nonracial bondage to a system of Black slavery were largely economic: the turn to labor-intensive cash crops such as tobacco and sugar; the shortage of white labor in the colonies; the constant flight of enslaved natives who knew the land better than their captors; and, finally, the flood of kidnapped Africans onto the Atlantic slave market that followed the foundation of the British Royal Africa Company and the Dutch West India Company.13
