Indeed, from the European perspective it was much too complete. The epidemiological impact of the Old World destroyed not only Native American societies, but also a potential labor supply.
Every society in history before 1900 provided at least an unthinking answer to the question of which groups are to be considered eligible for enslavement, and normally they did not recruit heavily from their own community. A revolution in ocean-going technology gave Europeans the ability to get continuous access to remote peoples and move them against their will over very long distances. Strikingly, it was much cheaper to obtain slaves in Europe than to send a vessel to an epidemiologically coast in Africa without proper harbors and remote from European political, financial, and military power. That this option was never seriously considered suggests a European inability to enslave other Europeans. .
Except for a few social deviants, neither Africans nor Europeans would enslave members of their own societies, but in the early modern period, Africans had a somewhat narrower conception of who was eligible for enslavement than had Europeans. It was this difference in definitions of eligibility for enslavement which explains the dramatic rise of the trans-Atlantic slave trade. Slavery, which had disappeared from northwest Europe long before this point, exploded into a far greater significance and intensity than it had possessed at any point in human history. The major cause was a dissonance in African and European ideas of eligibility for enslavement at the root of which lies culture or societal norms, not easily tied to economics. Without this dissonance, there would have been no African slavery in the Americas. The slave trade was thus a product of differing constructions of social identity and the ocean-going technology that brought Atlantic societies into sudden contact with each other.
The trans-Atlantic slave trade therefore grew from a strong demand for labor in the Americas, driven by consumers of plantation produce and precious metals, initially in Europe.
