The American slave trade was an international business. It began in Western Africa, where prisoners were taken for sale to European and American slave traders, and continued in permanent and impromptu slave markets in the United States, ultimately concentrated in the South. Not only were some ten to fifteen million Africans ripped from their lives and families to be imported to the New World–some half a million of them destined for the United States–but the enslaved were also bred for sale on American soil and transported, often under brutal conditions, throughout the slave states. This Image Gallery will continue to grow over the coming months.