3 The Americas and the Impact of Columbus

When your parents were in school, modern world history and U.S. history usually began in 1492, with the Italian Cristoforo Colombo’s “discovery” of America. Even today, typical histories of America tend to consider the moment of Columbus’s landing on October 12, 1492, to be a significant turning point. Some continue to consider Columbus a heroic explorer, while others regard him as a monster and accuse him of deliberate genocide. Others, more concerned with the historical moment and primary source accounts, simply point out that Columbus was convicted in Spanish courts of the day for his tyranny, misrule, and extreme brutality. Indeed, the court removed him from his post on Hispaniola for that very reason in 1500 CE.

European contact with the Americas was a momentous event, but the story is a bit more complicated than it is usually depicted. This chapter will add detail to the traditional stories of the conquest and colonization of the “New World.”

The Spanish Arrival in South America

By the early 14th century, the urban Aztecs had surrounded their island capital of Tenochtitlán with raised planting beds called chinampas on floating platforms in Lake Texcoco. This technique allowed Aztec farmers to carefully control soil fertility and watering. The term “Aztec” in its origins actually comes to us from Spanish. The people we call Aztecs actually spoke Nahuatl, an indigenous language of Mexico, and a language that is still spoken by some 1.7 million people in Mexico today. The name for Nahuatl speakers is “Nahua,” and the Nahua people who founded the Aztec Empire were called “Mexica” in the Nahuatl language.

The Aztecs were so concerned about the quality of the water, they created a dike across the lake that separated the fresh water around their city from the brackish water of the main lake to the east, and they drank water brought into the city via an aqueduct from springs in the hills overlooking the lake. The Aztecs supported six people per acre using chinampas in the fifteenth century. By comparison, Chinese intensive rice farming, the most successful agricultural technique known in Europe and Asia, supported only about one person per acre at the same time. However, it is important to note that this was primarily because much of the Chinese population was supported by a robust combination of hearty grains, including millet, and rice farming supported a much more significant portion of the population in Southeast Asia, where steppe farming techniques aided cultivation in a fashion not dissimilar from the Andean techniques we will see later in this chapter.

Around Lake Titicaca in Bolivia, there were terraces rising from the lakeside elevation of 12,500 feet (nearly 3,700 meters) for centuries. Dotting the eastern slopes of the Andes were cities like the Inca capital at Cusco and its nearby towns and villages, which were also surrounded by terraced farms, many of which are still in use today. These terraces were not only built and irrigated by hand at extremely high altitudes, but guano from coastal islands hundreds of miles away was carried in via well-built Inca roads to fertilize the Andean farms. Many of these native cities have been hidden and their buildings and terraces torn apart by rainforest trees over the last five centuries. Machu Picchu, a smaller settlement located on a mountain peak about sixty miles from Cusco, was only encountered by Westerners in 1911. The fact that it had been undiscovered by the Spanish helps show how the Inca had organized their settlements, with terraces for agriculture and buildings made of seamless stonework using large blocks of carved rock—far superior to most European masonry at the time.

Complex societies in the Americas were not restricted to just the Aztec, Maya, and Inca. In Colombia, there is evidence of large ceremonial cities built in the northern highlands near the Caribbean Coast before the arrival of the Spanish, while other indigenous groups built complex irrigation systems in the lowlands just off the Caribbean coast. The Muisca settled in the eastern highlands of present-day Colombia. They cultivated corn and quinoa on the flatland valleys between the mountains, controlled extensive salt deposits, and traded salt for gold, emeralds, fruits, and other lowland products with neighboring indigenous groups. Their architecture was impressive, but it was built with massive tree trunks rather than stone so that no examples survived the Spanish conquest.

The Muisca did not develop a writing system like the Maya and Aztecs but maintained religious rituals and beliefs focused on ancestor worship and the sacredness of their kings. Each year, at a round ceremonial lake outside of present-day Bogotá, the Muisca king powdered himself in gold dust and dove into the waters as a purification rite for the gods. This practice is the origin of the myth of El Dorado, the “Golden Man,” sought by the Spanish in their early explorations. Over time, Spaniards such as Coronado came to believe they were searching for a city of gold, which they never found.

The Spanish Arrival in North America

The native peoples of North America also settled in complex societies in various regions, based mainly on managing their environment; cultivating crops such as corn, wild rice, squash, and pumpkins; and hunting fish and game animals. North American forest dwellers also developed the sap of the maple tree as a key source of sugar. The traditional U.S. and Canadian Thanksgiving dinner celebrates the native foods of North America, including the turkey. Along the Mississippi River and its tributaries, indigenous people lived mostly in villages but occasionally gathered into cities and built mounds like those found at Cahokia. The Algonquian and Iroquois were semi-sedentary, living throughout what is now Upstate New York and southern Quebec and Ontario. By the time of contact with Europeans, the Iroquois had formed a confederacy of five major tribes. The Ojibwe and Dakota were also semi-sedentary, living in settlements in the western Great Lakes region and on the edge of the northern Great Plains. The Dakota dominated the Plains, where they took advantage of the large herds of buffalo as a source of protein, clothing, and housing while gathering wild rice and cultivating corn and squash for carbohydrates. The Navajo and Pueblo made their home in the southwestern desert, the latter sharing secret societies, producing fine baskets and cloths, and using distinctive adobe bricks.

Of course, all this agriculture and city-building and civilization was happening in the Americas without anyone in Europe, Asia, or Africa knowing about it. This concurrent evolution tends to suggest that the discovery of agriculture and urban dwelling is inherent in our experience as human beings. It can also be taken to suggest that societies go through roughly similar stages of development.

Although it is not true that everybody believed the world was flat until Columbus came along, some Europeans were unclear on the actual size of the Earth and the existence of American continents and the Pacific Ocean. But not all Europeans were unaware that there was something valuable across the Atlantic. It’s important to realize that European exploration did not begin with Columbus. Around 1000 CE, five hundred years before the Italian explorer set out to discover a new trade route to Asia for Spain, Norse explorers from Europe and Iceland had established a presence on Greenland. The Greenland colony lasted four hundred years and was a base for exploration and settlement even farther west. Leif Erikson, son of the Greenland colony’s leader Erik the Red, began a colony in what is now northern Newfoundland. For a long time, historians thought Scandinavian claims about a North American colony called Vinland were just patriotic folktales. But in 1978, archaeologists discovered a site called L’Anse aux Meadows in Newfoundland, Canada, that dates to about 1000 CE. The settlement was more than just a fishing camp: the eight buildings include a blacksmith shop and a spinning room including artifacts that suggest women lived there and wove cloth for their families.

The Little Ice Age was a period of global cooling that hit the North Atlantic particularly hard beginning around the 1430s. Sailing became increasingly dangerous, and as the agricultural season was cut short by longer and more severe winters, the Greenland colony was abandoned in the early 1400s, and without a base in Greenland, the Vikings were unable to sustain a North American colony. They also faced strenuous opposition from natives they called Skraelings, who, according to the Viking sagas, were fierce warriors.

Textbooks tend to stress the European desire for gold and silver, and finding precious metals was very important to explorers like the conquistadors. But we shouldn’t underestimate Europeans’ fear of famine, especially during the Little Ice Age. Even before Columbus’s voyage, Basque and Portuguese fishermen were regularly visiting the Grand Banks off the coast of Newfoundland to catch cod. A 1497 account by Giovanni Caboto (another Italian explorer who anglicized his name to John Cabot) claimed cod were so plentiful on the coast of North America that European fishermen could almost walk from ship to ship on their backs. Salted cod is still an important element of traditional Portuguese cuisine, although nowadays, they get their fish from Norway. The fisheries were originally a closely guarded trade secret, but by the time Columbus made his famous journey, they were well known—and since cod was usually dried on racks onshore before being carried back to Europe, Columbus and his crew were probably not the first Europeans to make landfall in the Americas after the Viking settlements had been abandoned.

Columbus’s promise to find a sea-route to Southeast Asia (the “East Indies”; i.e., the Maluku Islands, or Indonesia today) interested European monarchs like Ferdinand and Isabella because land-based trade routes to Asia were becoming more difficult and expensive. The collapse of the Mongol Empire at the end of the thirteenth century led to the emergence of wars between regional rivals in Central Asia, while the plagues of the fourteenth century increased the perceived danger of overland travel. Columbus had failed to interest Portugal in his proposal because Bartolomeu Dias had already discovered a route to India around the bottom of Africa. On the other hand, Spain had recently unified with the marriage of King Ferdinand of Aragon and Queen Isabella of Castille, and the monarchs had just completed the Reconquista and ejected Muslims from Granada, their last kingdom on the Iberian Peninsula, and then formally expelled the entirety of the Sephardi Jewish community (about 200,000 people) from Spain. Many forced conversions to Christianity followed.

It is worth considering that as they turned their interests outward, the Spanish royalty had been at war for nearly 800 years aiming to erase every sign of influence of non-Christian peoples from the Iberian Peninsula. Their war on behalf of religion and their “glory” would continue in the New World. It’s also worth noting that the inventions that sparked this new era of exploration and empire building, like the sternpost rudder, the compass, gunpowder, and the printing press, were all Chinese inventions that found their way to Europe over an already existing international trade network dominated by Muslim merchants, which was about to become truly global with the European encounter of the Americas.

Columbus arrived in the Caribbean on October 12, 1492, and explored until late December. His flagship, the Santa María, ran aground on Hispaniola on December 25 and had to be abandoned. With permission of the local chief, Columbus left 39 sailors behind in a settlement he named La Navidad. He returned to Europe with two ships, a few captive Taino natives, some gold, and specimens of New World species including turkeys, pineapple, and tobacco. Arriving in Barcelona in mid-March, Columbus was celebrated as a hero.

It is often mentioned that Columbus believed he had reached Asia, and he did make that claim in his extravagant “Letter on the First Voyage.” But this document was the explorer’s report to his royal sponsors, and Columbus wanted very badly to be sent back again. Columbus wrote, “Hispaniola is a miracle…both fertile and beautiful…the harbors are unbelievably good and there are many wide rivers the majority of which contain gold.” Whether or not Columbus understood he was reporting on lands previously unknown to Europeans, he definitely got his readers excited about the places he had visited.

When other European explorers reached America, they were equally amazed. People throughout Europe read exciting traveler’s accounts like Amerigo Vespucci’s 1504 best-seller, Mundus Novus, which actually coined the term New World and made it clear for anyone who might still be confused that these lands were not Asia but a previously unknown continent. Like Columbus, the explorers carried back to Europe not only eyewitness accounts of wealthy empires but samples of native plants, animals, and captive people.

Columbus returned to the Caribbean in 1493 with 17 ships, 1,200 men, and according to his diaries, “seeds and cuttings for the planting of wheat, chickpeas, melons, onions, radishes, salad greens, grape vines, sugar cane, and fruit stones for the founding of orchards.” Other old-world crops that thrived in the Americas included coffee and bananas, originally cultivated in Africa and Asia, which were brought from the Canary Islands in 1516. The Spanish had introduced sugar cultivation to the Canary Islands in the early fifteenth century and transplanted canes to the tropical paradise their explorers had discovered across the Atlantic.

Cattle were delivered to Spanish conquistadors in Mexico in 1521. Most of the significant Eurasian species brought to the Americas by European explorers and colonists were introduced by the Spanish by the early 1500s, long before North American settlement began. Even species like the wild horses of the American West that would transform Plains Indian culture in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries were the descendants of escapees from the herds of the conquistadors. The Americas had very few large mammal species, and, as elsewhere around the world, most could not be domesticated. Nearly all the species humans have successfully domesticated, the familiar residents of the modern farmyard, originated in Europe and Asia. These include goats, sheep, cows, horses, and pigs. Chickens, of note, originated in Southeast Asia—precisely the region that the Europeans were attempting to reach—but were brought to the Americas, ironically, by Europeans.

The Spanish and Portuguese dominated the first century of exploration, conquest, and colonization in the Americas for many reasons. Spain and Portugal had an eight-century-long tradition of warfare from fighting the Reconquista against Muslims in the Iberian Peninsula and were prepared for further battle for glory and religion. The Portuguese also had a maritime tradition, which was how Columbus learned his trade. But the two Catholic nations also had a papal charter. The Spanish and Portuguese were granted a license by the pope under the 1494 Treaty of Tordesillas, which awarded all the territory east of the 47th meridian to Portugal and everything west of it to Spain. The pope (Alexander VI) who made this deal was a Spaniard named Rodrigo Borja—his reign was known for nepotism and corruption, and despite a pledge of clerical celibacy, he was the father of the famous Italian political family known for poisoning their enemies, the Borgias. The Portuguese received the east because they were already establishing colonies on the east and west coasts of Africa. The Spanish were assigned the unknown west, which turned out to be bigger than anyone had expected. The pope granted nothing to any other European kingdom. This type of corruption and political manipulation by the Vatican caused discontent across the continent, some of which would be manifested by Martin Luther and his challenges to papal authority, and ultimately helped to generate the Protestant Reformation.

The Columbian Exchange

Historians call the transfer of plants and animals that began with the encounter between Europe and the Americas after 1492 the “Columbian exchange,” a term that originates from the work of the environmental historian Alfred Crosby. The directions of these biological transfers and their effects on the environments and people of Europe and the Americas shaped the modern world we live in. Over time, American maize, potatoes, and cassava fed growing European, African, and Asian populations, allowing the building of new cities and industries. European and Asian animals such as pigs, sheep, chickens, and cattle thrived in the Americas, enabling both Native Americans and Europeans there to add and maintain animal protein to their diets and eventually expand their populations. But before most of the indigenous had a chance to benefit from the new food sources introduced by Europeans, they were struck down by the largely accidental transfer of viruses and bacteria from Europe to America, which caused the deaths of at least 90% of the indigenous American population.

When prehistoric Eurasians began living in close contact with the species they domesticated, the people were affected almost as much as the animals they kept. Most of humanity’s major diseases originated in animals and crossed from domesticated species to their human keepers. Whooping cough and influenza came from pigs; measles and smallpox from cattle; malaria and avian flu from chickens. The people who domesticated these species and lived with the animals for generations co-evolved with them. Animal diseases became survivable when people developed antibodies and immunity. Without the inherited protection enjoyed by most Eurasians and Africans, even a routine childhood disease such as chickenpox was initially devastating for Native Americans, who did not have domesticated animals and thus little acquired immunity to these diseases.

The introduction of a disease into an area without inherited immunity is called a virgin soil epidemic. Such epidemics had happened in Eurasia, when the Romans spread smallpox into the populations they conquered, and in Europe, when the expanding Mongols introduced the bubonic plague, the Black Death, which killed probably half the population of Europe in the fourteenth century, reducing world population by about a hundred million. Virgin soil epidemics spread across the Americas when explorers and colonists introduced Eurasian diseases to the Native Americans. The Eurasian diseases that attacked native populations included smallpox, measles, chickenpox, influenza, typhus, cholera, typhoid, diphtheria, bubonic plague, scarlet fever, whooping cough, and malaria.

The impact of these Eurasian diseases on Native Americans was one of human history’s most abrupt and severe population disasters. Even the Black Death did not kill as large a percentage of Europeans, and when diseases recurred in Europe, they generally killed their victims over a much longer time-span due to the inherited immunity from overlapping Eurasian and North African populations. American native populations had no such safeguards, and disease spread virulently. For example, there were over a million people living on the Caribbean island of Hispaniola in 1492 when Columbus left his 39 sailors in La Navidad. By 1548, there were only 500 natives left alive. Some 999,500 people had disappeared in a little over 50 years. Furthermore, there were also outbreaks of local diseases that would have a dramatic impact on the indigenous populations. For example, recent research has indicated there was likely an outbreak of a hemorrhagic fever in Central America just prior to Spanish arrival, which also would have decimated the local population.

From the combinations of diseases, most of which were arriving to the Americas via Europeans, populations of other Caribbean islands like Cuba were similarly decimated. Whole empires declined in power and fragmented. The reduction of native populations began a cycle of violence that became central to the history of the Americas. Once there were no natives left to work on European sugar plantations, enslaved Africans—who had a similar acquired immunity as Europeans—were considered crucial to the survival of the West Indies sugar economy.

The greater population densities of Central and South America enabled contagious diseases to spread more quickly there. Heavily traveled roads in central Mexico actually helped spread disease beyond areas that had been reached by Spanish explorers. Cities were decimated that had never seen Europeans. The population of the Aztec heartland dropped from about 25 million on the eve of the Spanish conquest in 1519 to just under 17 million a decade later. One out of every three native people died in just ten years. After another decade, the Aztec population was reduced to about 6 million. Three out of four people in the Aztec world died in 20 years. However, it is important to recognize the Spanish military invasion had a direct impact on the severity of the epidemic: massive post-war droughts deepened the impact of the disease. Imagine writing a list of your 10 closest friends and family and then randomly crossing off seven names. By 1580, the Aztec Empire had been hollowed out to less than 2 million people from a starting point of 25 million. Cross off two more—you’re down to one friend.

The depopulation of the Americas is one of the Earth’s most significant population disasters, both in its human toll and in the changes it brought about. Over the years, as you might expect, there has been a lot of controversy about what happened. Critics of Spanish colonialism (many of them Spanish, like the priest Bartolomé de las Casas) recorded Spaniard atrocities. However, it is also important to point out that de las Casas directly argued in favor of the importation of African enslaved people to replace the labor supply of the repressed indigenous Taino population, giving rise to the transatlantic slave trade. To defend themselves, colonialists accused the Aztec and Inca Empires of atrocities of their own and have emphasized the support conquistadors received from indigenous rivals of these empires.

Traditional European or Eurocentric American histories of exploration often present the victory of the Spanish over the Aztec as an example of the superiority of Europeans over the so-called savage Indians. The reality is far more complex. When Cortés explored central Mexico, he encountered a region simmering with conflict. Far from being unified and content under Aztec rule, many peoples in Mexico resented the overlords of Tenochtitlán and were ready to rebel.

Cortés was also aided by an enslaved Nahua woman, Malintzin (also known as La Malinche or Doña Marina, her Spanish name), whom the natives of Tabasco gave him as a tribute slave. In addition to speaking Nahua and Maya, Malintzin quickly learned Spanish and translated for Cortés in his dealings with Aztec emperor Moctezuma. Malintzin also—willingly or under force—had a son with Cortés. Their son, Martín, became one of the first “mestizos,” or persons of mixed indigenous American and European descent, in Spanish America. Malintzin remains a controversial figure in the history of the Atlantic world. Some view her as a traitor because she helped Cortés conquer the Aztecs, while others see her as a victim of European imperialism whose choices were very limited. In either case, she demonstrates one way in which native peoples responded to the arrival of the Spanish. Without her, Cortés would not have been able to communicate, and without the language bridge, he surely would have been less successful in destabilizing the Aztec Empire. By this and other means, native people helped shape the conquest of the Americas.

The Inca Empire in the Andes suffered the same fate. 90% of the South Americans died, and they started dying before the Spanish invaders arrived in 1532, which caused confusion and dismay. However, the diseases that ravaged the populations of the Inca Empire were probably variants of those same diseases that had either originated in Central America (hemorrhagic fever) or were transmitted from the Spanish to Central Americans (such as smallpox). When Pizarro crossed the Andes with eighty conquistadors, he found social chaos. Huayna Capac, the Inca leader who had triumphantly extended the empire into Chile and Ecuador, had died of smallpox in 1527. His two sons fought a brutal civil war for control of the empire, with the younger son, Atahualpa, finally defeating and assassinating his older brother, Huáscar. The civil war exacerbated the effects of epidemics, and the weakness of the reduced Inca population gave Pizarro the opportunity he needed to capture and kill Atahualpa in 1533, beginning the end of the Inca Empire.

Although the conquistadors focused much of their energy on Central and South America, they brought disease to North America as well. After helping Pizarro conquer the Inca, Hernando De Soto landed an expedition in Florida in 1539 and explored territory now in the states of Georgia, South Carolina, North Carolina, Tennessee, Alabama, Mississippi, and Oklahoma. Everywhere he went, the conquistador reported the land was “thickly settled with large towns.”

De Soto didn’t stay long. He died of fever in Louisiana in 1542, and although the region was visited by a few missionaries, it was not seriously considered again by Europeans until the French aristocrat La Salle traveled down the Mississippi River in 1670. Where De Soto had seen fortified towns, La Salle saw none. The entire region had been emptied by the diseases that accompanied De Soto and his men and had returned to wilderness. The French explorer reported traveling hundreds of miles without passing a single village. Historians assumed that the American South had not been heavily populated before the arrival of contagious Spanish explorers and missionaries.

Spanish invaders had not deliberately infected the natives with all these diseases (Europeans still had no idea at this time how viruses or bacteria worked), but they were quick to take advantage of the opportunities provided by the social chaos and military weakness of native societies in crisis. In both Mexico and Peru, the conquistadors found allies among different indigenous groups who often thought of themselves as the victors, with Spanish help, rather than the other way around. Still, within a few years, the Spaniards took over the capital cities of the Inca and Aztec Empires, inserting themselves into the top positions in the pre-existing governments. Patterns of tribute were maintained, as well as the labor draft of the Inca mita—although now labor would be devoted to the silver mines and not just road, irrigation, and building projects.

As they had been in Spain during the Reconquista, conquistadors were rewarded for military service with encomiendas. From a root word meaning “entrusting,” encomiendas were grants of captured territory and the people who lived on it, and whom the encomendero was theoretically responsible for bringing into the Christian community. This technique had been used in Spain to keep track of conquered Muslims and make sure they did not backslide after their forced conversions. In Spanish America, there was a much greater emphasis on taxing and working the new peasants rather than leading them to religion.

Spanish Silver

Like the Portuguese in their exploration of Africa, the Spanish were also interested in finding sources of gold and silver for European commerce. Although they never found El Dorado, the “Golden Man” that expanded in legends to a city of gold, Europeans did find a fair amount of gold.

And they found even more silver. For example, the Bolivian city of Potosí, located in the Andes at an elevation of 13,420 feet (over 4,000 meters), still has the largest population of any city at that altitude at 165,000. Potosí was established by the Spanish in 1542 on the site of a long-standing native mining village at the foot of the Cerro Rico, which is a literal mountain of silver.

Spanish silver coins called “pieces of eight” from the Cerro Rico and from similar mines in Zacatecas, Mexico, were so plentiful that they became the international currency of Europe, the Spanish Philippines, and in areas controlled and influenced by the Qing (Manchu) dynasty in much of Central and East Asia, as well as the Mughal Empire in India. However, it is important to recognize that the Mughal Empire had many other sources of wealth, and East Asia also already used an additional form of paper currency. Every year between 1566 and 1815, a treasure fleet sailed from Acapulco to Manila laden with silver for trade in Qing China and Mughal India. Another fleet carried not only precious metals but spices and expensive Chinese-style ceramics acquired in East and Southeast Asia from Veracruz to Spain.

Products originating in the Americas were a spur to the later global Industrial Revolution. Without the money minted from Latin America’s silver and gold, there might have been no global commercial boom to finance industrialization in England, France, Germany, and Spain. And Potosí’s story is not over yet. Although most of the easily extractible silver was taken out of the mountain centuries ago, the Cerro Rico is still being worked by Bolivian children whose story is told in the award-winning documentary The Devil’s Miner, which you can view on the web if you’re interested in learning more.

Mestizos

Because most of the Spanish in the New World were male soldiers in the first decades of the conquest, women were taken, often forcibly, from native communities to be wives and mistresses. One high-ranking Inca native named Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala wrote to the king of Spain around 1600, complaining that Spaniards were taking all the Indian women of childbearing age, so the place was being flooded with mestizos who were not required to work as the Indians were. Worse, the fathers were not supporting their illegitimate children, and “if a Spaniard steals away four Indian women to make little mestizos, he will bribe the judges and refuse to recognize his paternity,” leaving their support up to the state. “Spaniards ought to live like Christians,” Guaman argued, “marrying ladies of equal status and leaving the poor Indian women alone so they can have Indian children.”

Most of the countries of Latin America are built on mixed or mestizo populations—so much so that in the 1700s, the colonists tried to make distinctions between all the various types of people they believed made up their societies to “prove” to the Spanish Crown that a logical caste system existed in the colonies. Although these distinctions were somewhat arbitrary and were often used to uphold the power of the group at the top, in the long run, many of these mixed Euro-American populations have developed strong ethnic identities. A similar process happened in New France—today’s Quebec in Canada. There were only about twenty-five hundred French people in the province by 1663. Most of them were voyageurs, fur traders who went into the northern forests to make their fortunes. Voyageurs frequently married local Indian women, and their Canadian descendants are now recognized as a distinct ethno-cultural group called Métis.

The social caste system developed in Latin America was based on both blood and origin. At the top were peninsulares, Spaniards born in Spain (on the Iberian Peninsula), who were appointed to nearly all of the important administrative positions in the government and to the highest clerical offices (archbishops and bishops). Next were criollos (creoles), Spaniards born in the colonies. They made up the landed elite, often descendants of the original encomenderos, and were the vast majority of the merchant class and some of the higher clergy. Beneath them were mestizos, people of mixed race, who worked as artisans and in the lower clergy or farmed their own small holdings or the estates of criollo landowners. Indians were below mestizos, and although they often managed their own communities (under the supervision of missionary priests), tribute and labor obligations required them to work in the wage economy managed by the Spanish. Later, when the colonists started importing African slaves, new designations like mulatto and zambo were developed to describe children of black-white and black-Indian unions. These new “mixed” populations often played the same role in the economy and society as mestizos, although they were located closer to the sugar-growing regions to which enslaved Africans were initially brought.

The Portuguese were initially more interested in dominating trade routes in the Indian Ocean, so they mostly ignored their new possession in Brazil until French Huguenots—protestant Christians fleeing Catholic France—tried to establish a colony near present-day Rio de Janeiro in the mid-1500s. By that time, the Portuguese had watched the Spanish become successful in cultivating sugarcane in the Caribbean. Sugar, which the Spanish and Portuguese had learned how to grow and process in the Middle East during the Crusades, was already grown with enslaved African labor on profitable plantations in Portugal’s island colonies off the African coast. Portuguese entrepreneurs brought cane and slaves to Brazil and set up plantations along the northern coast. By this time, the Catholic Church had prohibited the enslavement of Indians, but not of Africans. Native Brazilians did not establish the complex societies found in Mexico, Central America, and Andean South America, so it was actually harder to “conquer” them, as they escaped deeper into the interior jungles and forests. However, the Portuguese already had established colonies and trade ties in Africa, which soon supplied enslaved labor to the sugar plantations.

As described in the previous chapter, slavery was a traditional element in all world societies, including those of Africa, but Europeans quickly grasped the usefulness of having enslaved Africans in European communities because it would be harder for them to blend in with the local population. The sugar trade spurred the slave trade, as well as European notions of racial superiority to justify the enslavement of people with darker skins.

By the mid-1500s in Europe, Spanish wealth began to cause problems. Wealthy Spanish nobles married into aristocratic families like the Austrian Hapsburgs. In 1519 (the same year Cortés attacked Tenochtitlán and Magellan set out to circle the Earth), the grandson of Ferdinand and Isabella, Charles V, became the Holy Roman emperor. Charles was also king of Spain and (by marriage) Portugal, which gave him legal control of all the American colonies. When his wife Isabella died in 1555, Charles was inconsolable. He abdicated in 1556 and retired to a monastery, leaving his younger brother Ferdinand in charge of the Holy Roman Empire in Europe and his son Philip II in control of Spain, Portugal, and their possessions, including the “Spanish Netherlands” on the European coast.

Although Philip II was called “The Prudent” and was also briefly king of England while married to Queen (Bloody) Mary, after she died in 1558, he lost control of the rebellious Protestant Dutch Republic, and Spain declared bankruptcy five times. Spain’s financial troubles were partly due to debts Philip’s father Charles V had accumulated as the Holy Roman emperor. After Queen Mary’s death, Philip proposed to her successor, Elizabeth I, who turned him down. Elizabeth’s father, King Henry VIII, had separated the Church of England from Rome in the 1530s after a dispute with the pope over the annulment of his marriage to Catherine of Aragon, daughter of Ferdinand and Isabella and aunt to Charles V. Philip supported the claim of Mary Queen of Scots to the British throne, but when she was executed in 1587, Philip decided to invade and return England to Catholicism.

In 1588, the Spanish Armada, organized by Philip, was hampered by bad weather on the English Channel and then defeated by the British Royal Navy, which lost no ships, while Spain lost five before withdrawing. During the retreat, most of the Spanish navy was destroyed by storms, leaving the British in control of the Atlantic. Later that year, an English fleet sailed into the harbor at Cadiz, burned 200 Spanish ships, and made off with the annual silver shipment. It was the beginning of the end of the Spanish Empire as a major European power.

Another reason Spain did not permanently dominate the European economy was that for centuries, most of the silver they shipped from Peru and Mexico ended up in Qing China, where silver gradually became the basis of the earth’s largest economy after Qing officials adopted a policy of stabilizing the paper notes with silver as a backing currency. In one of its most common routes, Spain sent its silver to Manila, its colony in the Philippines (named after Phillip II), to trade for Qing China’s porcelains and silks and other goods, many of which actually originated in Southeast Asia. For example, spices such as black pepper could be acquired in Chinese markets, although black pepper was predominantly produced in Southeast Asia. Spain’s concentration on trade also distracted from potential investments at home, and Spain would be slow to develop its own domestic goods and later industries.

Buoyed by China’s economic dominance, the Asian population increased from 60% of the world’s people to 67% between 1500 and 1800. In addition to the Ming and Qing dynasties in China, the Mughals in India ruled an empire of 150 million people, and they were very interested in expanding trade with the West, in addition to connections they had made on all sides of the Indian Ocean network via ports along the Bay of Bengal. Mughal India was also highly productive; between the two empires, Asia produced 80% of all the world’s goods. Even though we are concentrating in this chapter on the intricacies of the Atlantic world and the intersection of Africa, Europe, and the Americas, until the mid-1700s, it is important to remember that Qing China and Mughal India dominated world commerce and industry. They consumed massive imports of luxury items from Southeast Asia, Central Asia, and Southwest Asia. Chinese silks and Indian cotton were the world’s best-quality and lowest-cost textiles, and clothes made from them were worn throughout the world—even in Spain’s colonies, where the law required people to trade only with the home country. The national costume of Mexico is called the China Poblana; it was originally a contraband silk dress worn by women of the towns. The British were so intimidated by Asian textiles that they imposed tariffs to try to protect their own weavers from being driven out of the business. Mercantilism, in which colonies served the home country as both a market and a source of raw materials in a closed economy, was actually not a primitive economic system that eventually evolved into an economic system we would call protectionist capitalism—it was an attempt to shield British and European merchants from already existing international market networks in which they were too often the losers to the dominant Asian powers.

Media Attributions

• “Mariposa Indian Encampment, Yosemite Valley, California” by Albert Bierstadt, ca. 1872 is  licensed under a Public Domain license
• Waldseemüller map, ca. 1507, is  licensed under a Public Domain license
• Lake_Texcoco_c_1519 © Madman2001 is licensed under a CC BY-SA (Attribution ShareAlike) license
• MachuPicchu_Residential_(pixinn.net) © Christophe Meneboeuf is licensed under a CC BY-SA (Attribution ShareAlike) license
• Skálholt-Karte © Sigurd Stefánsson is licensed under a Public Domain license
• Old Greenland © Emanuel Bowen is licensed under a Public Domain license
• Gadus morhua Cod-2b-Atlanterkavsparken-Norway © Hans-Petter Fjeld is licensed under a CC BY-SA (Attribution ShareAlike) license
• Viajes_de_colon_en.svg © Phirosiberia is licensed under a CC BY-SA (Attribution ShareAlike) license
• CantinoPlanisphere © Unknown is licensed under a Public Domain license
• FlorentineCodex_BK12_F54_smallpox © Bernardino de Sahagún is licensed under a Public Domain license
• Tenochtitlan_y_Golfo_de_Mexico_1524 © Fridericum Peypus is licensed under a Public Domain license
• Cortez & La Malinche © unknown Tlaxcalan artists (facsimile at Bancroft Library) is licensed under a Public Domain license
• 1920px-Inca_roads-en.svg © Manco Capac is licensed under a CC BY-SA (Attribution ShareAlike) license
• Capitulo-CIX © A.Skromnitsky is licensed under a Public Domain license
• Potosi_Mining_Photo_by_Sascha_Grabow © Sascha Grabow is licensed under a CC BY-SA (Attribution ShareAlike) license
• Casta_painting_all © Unknown is licensed under a Public Domain license
• Lázaro Luis 1563 © Alvesgaspar is licensed under a Public Domain license
• La batalla de Gravelinas, por Nicholas Hilliard © Nicholas Hilliard is licensed under a Public Domain license
• Poblanas © Carl Nebel is licensed under a Public Domain license