Editing South America (section)

===Slavery===
{{See also|European enslavement of Indigenous Americans|Atlantic slave trade}}
[[File:Johann Moritz Rugendas in Brazil 2.jpg|thumb|Public flogging of a slave in 19th-century Brazil]]
{{Slavery}}

The indigenous peoples of the Americas in various European colonies were forced to work in European plantations and mines; along with enslaved Africans who were also introduced in the proceeding centuries via the [[Atlantic slave trade]]. European colonists were heavily dependent on indigenous labor during the initial phases of settlement to maintain the subsistence economy, and natives were often captured by expeditions. The importation of African slaves began midway through the 16th century, but the enslavement of indigenous peoples continued well into the 17th and 18th centuries. The slave trade brought enslaved Africans primarily to South American colonies, beginning with the Portuguese since 1502.<ref>Anstey, Roger: ''The Atlantic Slave Trade and British abolition, 1760–1810''. London: Macmillan, 1975, p. 5.</ref> The main destinations of this phase were the [[Caribbean]] colonies and Brazil, as European nations built up economically slave-dependent colonies in the [[New World]]. Nearly 40% of all African slaves trafficked to the Americas went to Brazil. An estimated 4.9 million slaves from Africa came to Brazil during the period from 1501 to 1866.<ref>{{cite web|title=Vergonha Ainda Maior: Novas informações disponíveis em um enorme banco de dados mostram que a escravidão no Brasil foi muito pior do que se sabia antes (|url=http://veja.abril.com.br/blog/ricardo-setti/tema-livre/vergonha-ainda-maior-novas-informacoes-disponiveis-em-um-enorme-banco-de-dados-mostram-que-a-escravidao-no-brasil-foi-muito-pior-do-que-se-sabia-antes/|website=Veja|access-date=16 March 2015|language=pt|url-status=dead|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20150313000755/http://veja.abril.com.br/blog/ricardo-setti/tema-livre/vergonha-ainda-maior-novas-informacoes-disponiveis-em-um-enorme-banco-de-dados-mostram-que-a-escravidao-no-brasil-foi-muito-pior-do-que-se-sabia-antes/|archive-date=13 March 2015}}</ref><ref>[[Stephen D. Behrendt]], David Richardson, and David Eltis, [[W. E. B. Du Bois Institute|W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for African and African-American Research]], [[Harvard University]]. Based on "records for 27,233 voyages that set out to obtain slaves for the Americas". {{cite book|last=Stephen Behrendt|title=Africana: The Encyclopedia of the African and African American Experience|year=1999|publisher=Basic Civitas Books|location=New York|isbn=978-0-465-00071-5|chapter=Transatlantic Slave Trade|chapter-url=https://archive.org/details/africanaencyclop00appi}}</ref>

In contrast to other European colonies in the Americas which mainly used the labor of African slaves, Spanish colonists mainly enslaved indigenous Americans. In 1750, the [[Portuguese Crown]] abolished the enslavement of indigenous peoples in [[colonial Brazil]], under the belief that they were unfit for labor and less effective than enslaved Africans. Enslaved Africans were brought to the Americas on [[slave ship]]s, under inhuman conditions and ill-treatment, and those who survived were sold in [[slave market]]s.<ref name=Yeager1995>{{cite journal|last1=Yeager|first1=Timothy J.|title=Encomienda or Slavery? The Spanish Crown's Choice of Labor Organization in Sixteenth-Century Spanish America|journal=The Journal of Economic History|date=December 1995|volume=55|issue=4|pages=842–859|doi=10.1017/S0022050700042182|s2cid=155030781}}</ref> After independence, all South American countries maintained slavery for some time. The first South American country to abolish slavery was Chile in 1823, Uruguay in 1830, Bolivia in 1831, Guyana in 1833, Colombia and Ecuador in 1851, Argentina in 1853, Peru and Venezuela in 1854, Suriname in 1863, Paraguay in 1869, and in 1888 Brazil was the last South American nation and the last country in western world to abolish slavery.<ref name="c">{{cite encyclopedia|encyclopedia=Encyclopedia of emancipation and abolition in the Transatlantic world|title=The 'Golden Law' Abolishing Slavery in Brazil|year=2007|publisher=Routledge|location=London, United Kingdom}}</ref>