## Introduction  
Brazilian history is organically linked to modern slavery. While LusoBrazilian history stretches back over 500 years, barely a fifth of this corresponds to the post-abolition era. Over the course of almost 400 years, indigenous and African populations were used as slave labour. In the beginning of the Portuguese conquest of the territory that was to become Brazil, it was the indigenous populations that were enslaved throughout the sixteenth century and part of the seventeenth century. During the latter period, they were replaced by Africans, particularly as of the seventeenth century. Although Africans were mainly used as workers in the sugar mills, over time they came to occupy the entire sugar production chain, from planting and harvesting to grinding and making the final product, which was exported to Europe. Sugar was thus the classic commodity of a colonial agro-export economy, linked not only to the metropolis of Portugal, but also to other regions, such as Holland, Italy and Germany - countries that had not yet been formed - where the slave business and the slave trade were financed. This traffic, in turn, provided the bulk of the labour exploited by this Atlantic system, and thus remained in its various developments in the production of other goods - particularly gold and coffee - until the final abolition of the traffic to Brazil in the mid-nineteenth century.