After sustained European contact along the African coast, forced transport carried Africans into the Caribbean, Central America, and parts of South America under Spanish and Portuguese rule. These were Indigenous lands already destabilized by conquest, disease, and forced labor. Africans entered the Americas inside an existing colonial crisis.
Early colonies relied heavily on Indigenous enslavement for mining, plantations, and tribute. Violence, displacement, and epidemics drove steep population loss. As that labor base was destroyed, colonizers expanded the purchase and trafficking of African captives to meet production demands. This was a policy shift tied to profit, not a natural transition.
Africans and Indigenous peoples met under coercion. Sometimes they labored side by side. Sometimes they were pushed into conflict by colonial control. In some regions, Africans escaped and found refuge with Indigenous nations. In others, both groups were targeted by the same legal regimes. The pattern varied by place, but the power structure did not.
Racial categories were still developing. Status laws differed across colonies and changed over time. Before hereditary racial slavery hardened, identity could be more fluid, though never equal. These early collisions shaped later racial slavery, land seizure, and the regulation, or denial, of mixed communities.
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