TL;DR- Chattel slavery/plantation system did in fact dominate in other places; more so in fact than in the United States.

There were more slaves in Brazil than the United States; in fact the United States was something of a backwater as far as the slave trade went; the most valuable and profitable destinations for the slave trade were mostly in the Caribbean sugar colonies. Slavery was extremely important to the economic of Brazil, slavery in Brazil was not abolished until 1888; more than twenty years after the United States officially abolished it. The slave-plantation system that dominated the Southern United States only feels huge and important when the focus is on American history and not the wider Atlantic World- it is in this larger context that the US appears more on the periphery than the center- though the system begins to shift with British and French abolition (1834 & 1848 respectively).

Though I hate boiling something like slavery down to numbers; for they tell us little about the human experience and convey little of the horror or struggle; some people find them useful. Perhaps 3.5 million enslaved Africans were taken to Brazil- primarily to work on Coffee Plantations, but Sugar was also an import commodity. The Portuguese had gone a long way towards perfectly the plantation system in their African colony of Sao Tome before really establishing things in the Americas. Only about 350,000 slaves were ever taken to what became the United States.

Out of 12 million enslaved humans; only a fraction (about 3%) were taken to the plantations in the United States. By destination Brazil looms the largest; but the colonies of Jamaica (1 million enslaves arrivals) and Saint Domingue (1 million+) ; two very important sugar and coffee producing colonies for the British and the French consumed vast numbers of slaves. The plantations there were especially fatal; sugar is hard work, yellow fever and malaria are endemic, and the voyage to the colony was frightful and debilitating. The Souther States on the other hand were slightly less disease ridden and tobacco was only slightly better to grow. Most of the Caribbean colonies also focused primarily on importing grown men; they were simply better laborers; the Southern United states; less worried about the slaves dying within three years, imported more women and so had an enslaved population that reproduced and remained enslaved. The Caribbean never had much internal population growth because of diseases and unbalanced sex ratios; so they constantly required replenishment (not just in Africans, I might add, but also in British/French/white overseers who also died in great numbers in search for their fortunes in the slave colonies).

There are a number of great works about the Atlantic world; here are a few I use when teaching or discussing the subject- note that they are heavily influenced by my background in French Colonialism.

• [Slave Voyages] (http://www.slavevoyages.org/tast/index.faces) a great interactive website/database with information about the Atlantic World

• Vincent Brown, The Reaper’s Garden; Death and Power in the World of Atlantic Slavery. Harvard: Harvard University Press, 2008. (One of my favorites; ethnographic history of death in the slave trade; death as a destroyer and creator of cultures and economy in Jamaica and the wider Atlantic world)

• Madeleine Dobie, Trading Places: Colonization and Slavery in Eighteenth-century French Culture (Ithaca: Cornell University Place, 2010)

• David O. Geggus, “The French Slave Trade: An Overview,” William and Mary Quarterly, Jan. 2001, pp. 119-38

• Jeremy Popkin, You Are All Free: The Haitian Revolution and the Abolition of Slavery (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010) (good book; but mostly on the end of slavery in Saint Domingue- the great slave revolution there that made Haiti only the second newly independent nation in the Americas)

• Malick Ghachem, The Old Regime and the Haitian Revolution (2012)