The striking fact about slavery in the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries was its universality. Enslaving humans was legal throughout the western hemisphere in the early modern period, sanctioned by every major legal system in operation there. The right to hold another person in bondage depended precisely on legal definitions of who could be enslaved within a given civilization – the English, Spanish, French, Dutch, Portuguese, and Native Americans differed on this and other specific slave laws – but if one could enslave another, the economic advantages to be gained were great, and the status of the slaveholder generally rose or fell in proportion to the fluctuating number of bondsmen he owned. In each New World colony or nation, however, the elevation of the slaveholder depended on the diminution of the slave. Slave law granted slave owners virtually unlimited power over the enslaved, but those laws simultaneously diminished the personhood of the enslaved, as if the bondsman had in some degree endured, in the words of sociologist Orlando Patterson, “social death.”

Two groups of people suffered this social death in disproportionate numbers: Native Americans and Africans. Native Americans enslaved Native Americans, Africans enslaved Africans, and Europeans took advantage of the extant trade on both continents, buying unfree persons in ever increasing numbers until the nineteenth century. Assessments of the magnitude of slavery among Native Americans remain approximate; however, historians suspect that in the southeastern part of North America during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, some 50,000 aboriginal captives ultimately ended up in the hands of European slave traders.