Born Then1660–1799
Life during the Slavery in the British North American colonies
Be born in a place it hit, a few years before it began, and see what it did to five ordinary lives.
What it meant for ordinary people
From the 1660s colonial laws in Virginia, Maryland and then the Carolinas made slavery a lifelong, inherited status for Africans and their children. Tobacco, rice and indigo were grown with enslaved labour. By the American Revolution about one in five people in the colonies was enslaved.
Deaths: about 400,000 enslaved Africans were brought to mainland North America; by 1790 about 700,000 people were enslaved in the United States.
How hard it hits each person in the game (risk of death, of being conscripted, of leaving) comes from scholarly estimates.
Around the same time
- Indian Ocean slave trade 700–1799
- Atlantic slave trade (West Africa) 1501–1799
- Atlantic slave trade (Kongo and Angola) 1514–1799
- Plantation slavery in Brazil 1550–1799
- Russian conquest of Siberia 1580–1700
- Tokugawa peace 1603–1780
- Thirty Years' War 1618–1648
- Late Ming famines and rebellions 1627–1644
- Sugar slavery in the Caribbean 1640–1799
- Ming–Qing transition 1644–1683
- Slavery in the British North American colonies 1660–1799
- Great Plague of London 1665–1666
- Little Ice Age famines of the 1690s 1693–1698
- 1707 Hōei earthquake and Fuji eruption 1707–1708
- 1755 Lisbon earthquake 1755
- Burmese–Siamese War and fall of Ayutthaya 1765–1767
- Bengal famine of 1770 1769–1771
- Spanish missions in California 1769–1799
- Great Tenmei famine 1782–1788
- Laki haze and the cold winter of 1783–1784 1783–1784
- Laki eruption and the Haze Famine 1783–1785
- Smallpox epidemic around Sydney 1789–1790
- Atlantic slave trade, final decades 1800–1866
- Slavery in the United States 1800–1865
- Slavery in Brazil 1800–1888
- Serfdom in the Russian Empire 1800–1861
- Napoleonic Wars 1803–1815
- Fulani War and the Sokoto Caliphate 1804–1808
- Spanish American wars of independence 1808–1826
- Eruption of Mount Tambora 1815–1816