Slave arrivals from Africa to the British Caribbean by region and century 1606-1842

Throughout the transatlantic slave trade, approximately 2.3 million enslaved Africans disembarked in the British Caribbean between the 17^th and early-19^th centuries. Almost half of these slaves disembarked in Jamaica, which was Britain's most valuable and profitable possession in the Caribbean in these times. Barbados was the second most common destination for slaves disembarking in the British Caribbean, and it was the most common destination in the 17^th century, due to the booming sugarcane industry that emerged in the 1640s. Several other islands saw the disembarking of more than one hundred thousand slaves, mostly along the Lesser Antilles in the 18^th century, while British Guiana and other islands saw the arrivals of fewer slaves, although they still numbered in the tens of thousands. Almost eighty percent of all slave arrivals in the British Caribbean took place in the 1700s; the highest number of slaves disembarked in the British Caribbean in the final quarter of this century, as Britain sought to invest in and protect its colonies in the Americas, after the loss of its most profitable colony following the United States' declaration of independence in 1776 (although the subsequent Revolutionary War did greatly disrupt the transatlantic slave trade from1776 to 1783).