The continued reliance upon indentured servitude until the dissolution of the Somers Isles Company in 1684 meant that Bermuda's economy did not come to rely on slavery during the 17th century.

Black and Native American slaves continued to trickle in Bermuda, however, due to privateers using the colony as a base of operations (Bermuda's utility as a base for his privateers having attracted Robert Rich, 2nd Earl of Warwick, to become one of the major shareholders of the Somers Isles Company and the namesake of Warwick Parish).

This included particularly Algonquian peoples from New England, such as Pequots and Wampanoags, and native Irish Gaels, following the Cromwellian conquest of Ireland.

As in the United States and Britain, the term "coloured" came to be seen as offensive in Bermuda by the mid-20th century and fell out of official use.

The small numbers of Asians and other non-African minorities in Bermuda had always been included in the "coloured" demographic, but are now listed separately.

[citation needed] Currently, Bermuda's largest demographic group is black, accounting for 54% of the territory's population.

Typical Bermudian surnames that date to the Seventeenth Century indicate that the primary area of England from which settlers were sourced during that period was East Anglia and neighbouring regions.

This history has been well understood from the written record, and was confirmed in 2009 by the only genetic survey of Bermuda, which looked exclusively at the black population of St. David's Island (as the purpose of the study was to seek Native American haplogroups, which could be assumed to be absent from the white population) consequently showed that the African ancestry of black Bermudians (other than those resulting from recent immigration from the British West Indian islands) is largely from a band across southern Africa, from Angola to Mozambique, which is similar to what is revealed in Latin America, but distinctly different from the blacks of the British West Indies and the United States.

[13] 68% of the mtDNA (maternal) lineages of the black islanders were found to be African, with the two most common being L0a and L3e, which are sourced from populations spread from Central-West to South-East Africa.

Of the individuals with European NRY haplogroups, more than half had R1b1b2, which is common in Europe and is found at frequencies over 75% in England and Wales.