Bermuda's modern black population contains more than one demographic group. Although the number of residents born in Africa is very small, it has tripled between 2000 and 2010 (this group also includes non-blacks). The majority of blacks in Bermuda can be termed "Bermudian blacks", whose ancestry dates back centuries between the 17th century and the end of slavery in 1834, Bermuda's black population was self-sustaining, with its growth resulting largely from natural expansion. This contrasts to the enslaved blacks of the plantation colonies, who were subjected to conditions so harsh as to drop their birth rate below the death rate, and slaveholders in the United States and the West Indies found it necessary to continue importing more enslaved blacks from Africa until the end of slavery (the same had been true for the Native Americans that the Africans had replaced on the New World plantations). The indigenous populations of many West Indian islands, and much of the South-East of what is now the United States that had survived the 16th- and 17th-century epidemics of European-introduced diseases then became the victims of large-scale slave raiding, with much of the region completely depopulated. When the supply of indigenous slaves ran out, the slaveholders looked to Africa). The ancestry of Bermuda's black population is distinguished from that of the British West Indian black population in two ways: firstly, the higher degree of European and Native American admixture; secondly, the source of the African ancestry.
Why were so many blacks repeatedly being imported from Africa?
conditions so harsh as to drop their birth rate below the death rate