Women in the Americas in early modern North America. Throughout the Americas, bondage existed—in warmer climates, where plantation systems developed, or in the northern areas, where women were either transported as criminals or worked as indentured servants. As early as the 1530s, Portugal began using slave labor in Brazil to work sugarcane plantations. Initially, the Portuguese used indigenous people as slaves, but in 1574, the crown decreed that unless the native people were cannibals, already slaves, or were spoils of a "just war", they could not be enslaved. The Spanish also used native people as forced labor, but because under the "encomienda" system, neither
Indentured servitude in the Americas Indo-Caribbeans form a majority in Guyana, a plurality in Trinidad and Tobago and Suriname, and a substantial minority in Jamaica, Grenada, Barbados, St Lucia and other Caribbean islands. The British government finally ended indentures in the Caribbean in 1917 by prohibiting the further transportation of persons from India for purposes of servitude for debt. Indentured servitude in the Americas Indentured servitude in the Americas was a means by which immigrants, typically young Europeans under 25, came to the Americas from the early 17th to the early 20th centuries. Immigrants would contract to work for an American employer for a time