Americas fact of the day

…the flow of Europeans to the New World before 1800 did not stand out, at least numerically.  Somewhere between 1 million and 2 million Europeans came to the New World between 1500 and 1800; by contrast, over 8 million Africans came via the slave trade.  (The predominantly European population of North America resulted from very high birth rates…while wretched conditions and an absence of females kept the African population down.)

That is from Kenneth Pomeranz and Steven Topik, The World That Trade Created, second edition, p.56.  And here is Alex’s earlier post on textbooks and slavery.