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
Christopher Columbus and the Participation of the Jews in the Spanish and Portuguese Discoveries Christopher Columbus and the Participation of the Jews in the Spanish and Portuguese Discoveries Christopher Columbus and the Participation of the Jews in the Spanish and Portuguese Discoveries is a scholarly work by Meyer Kayserling, translated into English and published in 1894. In it, Keyserling reports on an extensive search of Spanish archives including those at Alcalá de Henares, Barcelona, Madrid, and Seville. His research showed that Marranos, who attempted to shield themselves and their families from the anti-Semitic violence of the Spanish Inquisition by outwardly professing Christianity, were an integral part of the European colonization of the Americas. Keyserling's