world, massive demographic changes occurred. Indigenous populations began dying at unprecedented rates due to the influx of old world diseases brought by colonists. Estimates of these population losses vary from 8.4 million to 112.5 million. This extreme diminishment of native populations cleared room for plantation construction and lessened the conflicts between Europeans and indigenous peoples. Move from South America to the Caribbean Although the sugar trade in the Americas was initially dominated by the Portuguese Empire, the Dutch–Portuguese War would cause a shift which would have knock-on effects for the further growth of the sugar trade in the Caribbean and particularly the production of rum (made from sugar cane juice). In 1630, the Dutch seized Recife near Pernambuco in what is today Brazil (the Dutch called this New Holland after they took over) and this territory included some sugar plantations worked by African slaves who had been brought to the territory earlier. Some of the slave plantation owners were Cristão-Novo, i.e. "New Christian" Sephardic Jews who had been forced to convert to the Catholic Church. As the Portuguese Inquisition was in operation and the Dutch Calvinists were generally more tolerant of Jews, they were happy to side with them over the Catholic Portuguese and remained in the area operating their substantial sugar-orientated slave plantations, now under Dutch sovereignty. They even founded the first public synagogue in the Americas there in 1636; the Kahal Zur Israel Synagogue. Further north in the Caribbean, the Protestant Kingdom of England was beginning to challenge the interest of the Catholic powers in the region such as the Spanish Empire and the Kingdom of France, taking control of a number of islands, including Jamaica and Barbados. One of these men, Colonel James Drax who had interests in Barbados, visited Dutch Brazil in 1640 and purchased a triple-roller sugar mill and a set of copper cauldrons (used for turning sugar cane into molasses, i.e. sugar cane juice used in rum production). This technology, although originating in Sicily had spread to the New World and had been improved on by the Sephardim and the Dutch. After 1654, the Portuguese had taken the territory back and pushed the Dutch out of Brazil. Many of the Sephardic Jewish sugar plantation owners fled to English-controlled Barbados, supported by Francis Willoughby and set up the Nidhe Israel Synagogue. In competition with English merchants and due to accusations of favouring the Dutch in