The African diaspora refers to the communities throughout the world that have resulted by descent from the movement in historic times of peoples from Africa, predominantly to the Americas, Europe, the Middle East, Asia, and among other areas around the globe. The term has been historically applied in particular to the descendants of the West and Central Africans who were enslaved and shipped to the Americas in the Atlantic slave trade between the 16th and 19th centuries, with their largest populations in Brazil (see Afro-Brazilian), the United States, and others. Some scholars identify "four circulatory phases" of migration out of Africa.