 Since most of these nations did not have a prison system, convicts were often sold or used in the scattered local domestic slave market.In 1778, Thomas Kitchin estimated that Europeans were bringing an estimated 52,000 slaves to the Caribbean yearly, with the French bringing the most Africans to the French West Indies (13,000 out of the yearly estimate).The Atlantic slave trade peaked in the last two decades of the 18th century, during and following the Kongo Civil War.