In the 18th century, Europe's coffee demands were met by plantations in the Caribbean. Plantations were large farms run usually by one rich family on which worked many slaves that cultivated the land and provided all of the labor. As the native population of the Americas were greatly reduced by disease, Europeans imported slaves from Africa to work on the plantations. Taken against their will by slave ships across the Atlantic, they were bought and …showed first 75 words of 620 total…

…showed last 75 words of 620 total…Serfs were born into their station in life as some slaves were, but in contrast, many slaves were captured from their homeland and taken away to work. One last similarity between the two labor systems was that the slave or serf class greatly outnumbered the rest of the population. At the height of Russian serfdom, serfs constituted about 3/4 of the population. In both cases, a small elite class ruled over the rest of the population.