ABSTRACT
A communal or reciprocal attitude toward production and consumption, the domestic mode of production, a society on which status was not derived from economic ability, and the subordination of the economy to other forms of social organization determined Indian responses to European demands. Throughout the Americas European powers attempted to make use of the American Indians as a source of labor. There was, in fact, a remarkable similarity among all of the colonial regimes in the New World in the low value placed on Indian laborers in comparison with Africans. For plantation agriculture Indian slavery proved transitory, but in frontier regions like northern Mexico and the Amazon it lasted until the nineteenth century. Examining the nature of Indian slavery in the formative period of a plantation economy in northeastern Brazil can be a way of demonstrating how accurate the impression is, how local conditions and the specific cultures of non-Europeans shaped the formation of the various colonial regimes.
