"Slavery, though imposed and maintained by violence, was a negotiated relationship....
First, even as they confronted one another, master and slave had to concede, however
grudgingly, a degree of legitimacy to the other.... [T]he web of interconnections between
master and slave necessitated a coexistence that fostered cooperation as well as
contestation. Second, because the circumstances of such contestation and cooperation
continually changed, slavery itself continually changed.... Slavery was never made, but
instead was continually remade, for power-no matter how great-was never absolute,
but always contingent."
Ira Berlin, historian, Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in North
America, 1998
Which of the following contributed most to the increasing use of African slave labor in
North America during the 1600s and 1700s?

North America during the 1600s and 1700s was the constant demand of more hands, more labor workers to work in the large plantations of the North American colonies.

At the beginning of the colonial settlings, most colonies used indentured servitude. But the need for more hands made plantation owners import African slaves to grow crops such as cotton, tobacco, and rice. Southern plantations depended too much on slaves because landlords had to export crops to Europe.