Likkmee
Gold Member
Syphilis^ Yet, not unlike North America, slavery existed in South America even before African slave importation transformed the region’s landscape. After Christopher Columbus’s discovery of the Americas in 1492, much of South America was divided between the Spanish and the Portuguese with the Treaty of Tordesillas in 1494. When the Europeans arrived in South America, they enslaved the native inhabitants and used them as a free labour force to work on their mines and the cotton, sugar, coffee and tobacco plantations that were being developed. Moreover, shortly after the European colonisation, natives of these regions rapidly decreased in number.
The Europeans that came to America brought with them diseases that the natives were unaccustomed to, which has been described by some as the ‘Columbian Exchange’. Diseases such as measles, influenza, mumps, typhus and small pox were detrimental to the Indian inhabitants of South America.