ABSTRACT
This chapter begins by emphasising the novel use of enslaved labour and sugar cultivation on the islands and considers settlement and European-indigenous-African interaction in the sixteenth-century Caribbean and Brazilian coast. It examines the unprecedented mixing of Europeans, indigenous Americans, and Africans in a variety of settings that remade social hierarchies based on multiple criteria of stratification, giving rise to new groups, new elites, and new identities. The establishment of overseas Iberian colonial societies began in the early fifteenth century with the conquest and settlement of the islands located in the Atlantic and close to the African coast: Madeira, Azores, Cape Verde, Sao Tome, and the Canaries. Colonial societies also varied greatly according to location, demographic composition, economic activities, and relationships with other places and the metropolis itself. The wealthier members of colonial urban society maintained large households—casas pobladas—that in addition to immediate family members included other relatives and retainers as well as Indian, African, and mixed-race slaves and servants.
