As white colonizers began to claim and clear more land for large-scale farming and the building of plantations, the number of enslaved Africans who were directly imported from Africa began to rapidly increase from the 1660s to the 1700s and thereafter, since the trade in enslaved people who were coming in from the West Indies was much too small to meet the huge demand for the now fast-growing North American mainland slave market. Additionally, most North American buyers of enslaved people no longer wanted to purchase enslaved people who were coming in from the West Indies—by now they were either harder to obtain, too expensive, undesirable, or more often, they had been exhausted in many ways by the very brutal regime that existed on the island's sugar plantations. By the end of the seventeenth century, drastic changes in colonial tax laws, and the Crown's removal of monopolies that had earlier been granted to a very small number of slave-trading companies such as the Royal African Company, had made the direct slave trade with Africa much easier for other slave traders.