Everyone now is going around either angry, guilty, or remorseless, but it's one or the other, about only black slavery.
No one remembers, because almost none of them are now around, that the white settlers killed off droves of American Indians, admittedly mostly by disease, but also by war, and enslaved also a goodly number, when they got their hands on them.
Indian slaves weren't worth as much as black slaves because the Indians died quicker in the tropics, whites quicker still. That's an example of what I call comparative disadvantage.
Under Adam Smith's principles, supply and demand, comparative advantage, etc., if blacks were better at surviving tropical conditions than either whites or Indians, then they should, by market forces, have cornered the market for being tropical slaves, and that is what happened.
For example, it would have made no Adam Smith economic sense for slavers to have raided, say, Eastern Europe, rounded up and or bought a bunch of Orthodox serfs (would have been easy to buy, and cheap, from greedy oligarchs) only to send them to the West Indies where they would have brought 25 cents on the dollar, and died like flies in tropical conditions.
Chinese coolies were popular as more or less slave labor up into the 20th Century, especially in places like Africa and Latin America, in spite of some Western outrage.
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