People of african descent lived, worked, and struggled in Virginia throughout most of the seventeenth century, but prior to the 1680s they never constituted a very large percentage of the population or of the colony's laboring people. In the decades following 1680 wealthy White Virginians began to turn increasingly toward Africa and Africans to fill their labor needs, rapidly transforming Virginia into a slave society. The people whose forced migration and labor fueled colonial Virginia's development came from a variety of settings, including various African backgrounds and Britain's Caribbean slave societies. Most were bought by White Virginians and set to work growing tobacco on farms and plantations. Though enslaved people of African descent may appear in retrospect to have shared a racial identity, in fact they were separated by linguistic, religious, and other cultural differences as deeply rooted in their experience as were national differences in Europeans' experience. During the first half of the eighteenth century, enslaved Virginians drew on what they brought from their African pasts and what they confronted in their American present to build close-knit, plantation-based local communities. A series of disruptions, including White Virginians' decisions to expand settlement into Virginia's Piedmont, the American Revolution, and the evangelical revivals of the second half of the century, created conditions that encouraged enslaved Virginians to broaden their definitions of community – both geographically and ideologically – to include an ever expanding percentage of Black Virginians.