Enslaved Africans and their descendants were bought and sold within mainland British North America from the moment they were first brought to Virginia in the early seventeenth century. Tens of thousands of enslaved people were exchanged domestically throughout the colonial era and during the first several decades of the American republic. But this trade was limited, relative to what it would later become, and opportunities for men working as slave traders even more so. Through the age of the American Revolution, and continuing for a generation thereafter, enslavers in places such as South Carolina and Georgia met many of their labor demands by importing enslaved people from Africa and the Caribbean. White migrants to new western territories and to states like Kentucky and Tennessee tended to bring enslaved laborers with them when they moved. At the same time, the American banking system was immature and undercapitalized, which limited capital for large-scale transactions. There were men who worked as domestic slave traders, but large, professional slave trading businesses were nearly unheard of into the early nineteenth century.