The Spanish imposed the Encomienda system in the areas they controlled and expanded the Inca Mita. Under these systems, authorities sometimes assigned Indian workers to mine and plantation owners with the understanding that the recipients of these labor grants would defend the colony and teach the workers the tenets of Christianity. In reality, the encomienda system exploited native workers. After Bartolomé de Las Casas complained of Spanish cruelty to the king, it was eventually replaced by another colonial labor system, the Repartimiento, which allowed natives a little more freedom but continued to require Indian towns to supply a pool of labor for Spanish overlords.

Although the Spaniards believed pure Spanish blood (sangre puro) was most the noble, in practice Spanish-American society became quite mixed as Spanish men and native women had Mestizo children.

Because relatively few Spanish women emigrated to the colonies, especially in the early decades, many conquistadors took native women as wives and mistresses.

The Spanish word for gentleman, Hidalgo, literally means “son of something” (hijo de algo), suggesting that common men could become noble by acquiring wealth, lands, and status as a conquistador.

The life of shipping rests in the number of able mariners and worthy captains, which cannot be maintained without assurance of reward of honorable means to be employed for their adventures.

Seeing then in nature this cannot be denied and by experience elsewhere is found to be so, I will show how a trade may be disposed more commodiously into the South sea through these temperate and habitable regions than by the frozen Zones in the supposed passages of Northwest or Northeast where, if the very moment be omitted of the time to pass, then are we like to be frozen in the seas or forced to Winter in extreme cold and darkness like unto hell.

Hard by, we espied seven Indians and coming up to them, at first they expressed some fear. But being emboldened by our courteous usage and some trifles which we gave them, they followed us . . . the second day after our coming from the main we espied nine canoes or boats with fifty Indians in them, coming toward us. And being loth they should discover our fortification, we went out on the sea side to meet them.

They also ejected Jews and Muslims who had refused to convert to Christianity from the Kingdom and used the Spanish Inquisition to prosecute “conversos” suspected of secretly practicing their original religions after converting.

The Reconquista ended around 1415 for the Portuguese but it took Spain the rest of the 15th century to subdue the Emirate of Granada in what is now southern Spain

rofits from sugar fueled the Atlantic slave trade even before European discovery of the Americas, and the Portuguese islands quickly became home to sugar plantations worked by enslaved Africans.

The brother of Portugal’s ruler, Prince Henry the Navigator, spearheaded his country’s exploration of Africa and the Atlantic in the 1400s. With his support, Portuguese mariners  Bartolomeu Dias and Vasco da Gama successfully navigated an eastward route to Asia around the "bottom" of Africa, establishing a foothold there that became a foundation of their nation’s trade empire in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.