Blacks of the land : Indian slavery settler society and the Portuguese colonial enterprise in South America Beginning in the 1490s in the Caribbean and through the slow demise of native slavery in North and South America over the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries millions of Amerindians were subjected to enslavement captivity and forced labor. Indian slavery was practiced across the Americas at one point in time or another in jurisdictions claimed by every European power that engaged in New World colonialism. Spanish Portuguese Dutch English Scottish French and Russian colonists held native Americans as slaves exerting their mastery over them and dealing in them as chattel. In parts of the United States Mexico and Brazil native slavery survived the ending of European colonial claims and the formation of independent nation states lasting well into the nineteenth century. By that point however the numbers of Amerindians held as slaves in Brazil and the United States were tiny compared to the masses of African and Afro American captives that made up the absolute majority of the populations of the two countrys plantation zones. Indian slavery thus seemed a small thing economically socially demographically when set alongside African and Afro American slavery on the ascent through the first half of the new century in Brazil and the southern United States alike. Until recently and for many good reasons scholarly attention to Indian slavery has been similarly dwarfed by the volume of care and attention paid to African and Afro American slavery in the Americas. Over the last fifteen years however the study of native slavery has undergone a remarkable boom among North American historians