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
Islam in the Americas Islam in the Americas Islam is a minority religion in all of the countries and territories of the Americas. Suriname has the highest percentage of Muslims in its population for the region, with 13.5% or 66,307 individuals, according to its 2004 census. However, the United States, in which estimates vary due to a lack of a census question, is generally believed to have the largest population, with between 1.3 and 2.7 million. Some West African slaves taken to the Americas by colonists may likely have been Muslims, although they became forcibly converted to Christianity. Most Muslims in the former British