Chapter 19
Early Latin America
Map Skills
• Where is Portugal?
– Where are Portugal’s colonies?
• Where is Spain?
– Where are the Spanish colonies?
Conquest of the Americas
Three Periods in the development of
Early Latin America
1) 1492-1570-conquest
2) 1570-1700-consolidation and maturity
3) 18th century-reform and reorganization
Why the Iberians
• Both Spain and Portugal had strong military
traditions
• Their countries were heavily urban
• Many of the people who came wanted to
succeed and become noble. So they were driven
• Families were patriarchal, but women had an
active role
• Already had a tradition as slave holding societies
• The paths of conquest led in 2 directions:
Mexico and South America
• “God, Gold, and Glory.”
• Why were the Spanish successful?
– Horses, firearms, steel weapons, leadership,
disease, internal divisions and rivalries among
the Indian tribes
The Moral Question
• Take a minute and discuss:
• Can you justify Conquest
– Spread the holy word
– Control the Indian labor
– Free from unjust lords and bring salvation
– They were not fully human
Colonialism and Labor
Spain
Economy
• agrarian society
– 80% lived and worked on the land
• Also large scale farming
– Sugar, tobacco, cotton
• What happens to prices when other countries get
involved?
• Mining became very important
– Gold and Silver
Silver is GOOD
• The Spanish system was based upon silver.
• Potosi: Peru largest mine of all
• Continuous wealth was flowing into Spain
– Treasure ships made a regular round
– Galleons
• And flowing out of Spain. . .
• AND MOSTLY TO CHINA
Silver is BAD
• The massive amounts of silver flowing into Europe had
caused inflation.
• Treasure never accounted for more that 25% of Spain’s
revenue…so it depended more on taxes than treasure
• Because thee was so much silver flowing into Spain,
bankers kept loaning the government more many
because they assumed they could make a profit on the
silver.
• So why did Sancho de Moncado write in 1619 the “the
poverty of Spain resulted from the discovery of the
Indies.”?
Trade
• Controlled very closely
• All trade done through the part at Seville and
only the Spanish could trade with Latin
America
– Monopoly
– Able to keep prices high
Encomiendas
• Grant of indigenous people to individual Spaniards
• given to conquerors, which allowed them to use local
inhabitants as laborers
• Practice quickly ends to prevent growth of a newworld nobility
• What does this system remind you of?
Haciendas
• Spanish ranches and rural estates
– Developed due to a decrease in Indian population
• Owning Land and not people
• Bases of wealth and power for the local
aristocracy
Outcomes of
Labor
• Formation of “castas”
– People of mixed race
– Over 100 different
variations
– Varied by region
• What is this social
hierarchy based on?
• What happens over
time?
General Order (Top to Bottom)
Very Basic there are a lot of rules
•
•
•
•
Peninsulares: White born in Spain
Criollos: Fully Spanish born in America
Indios: Original inhabitants of America
Mestizos: One Spanish and One American
Parent
• Mulattos: One Spanish and One Black Parent
• Negros: Africans
•
Spain and Portugal
Government
Spain
The Spanish Bureaucracy
1. The King ruled through the Council of the Indies:
Located in Spain
– Viceroy: High ranking noble who directly represents
the king in Latin America
– 2 viceroyalties in the West Indies
• Mexico City
• Lima
2. Viceroyalties subdivided into 10 judicial
divisions
– Controlled by audiencias: judicial courts
• Staffed by official royal magistrates
Spanish Bureaucracy cont.
3. Royally appointed magistrates carried out
laws on the local level
• The Clergy were along branch of the state
– Conversion
– Catholic church held great influence on the
colonists
Brazil
Brazil
• The Portuguese and Spanish claims had been
decided by the Treaty of Tordesillas
• Little in the region originally interested the
Portuguese until the French showed interest
in woods from the region
• Where the towns were established, and the
Indians were peaceful, they began to establish
sugar plantations with Indian, and then
African slaves
Labor and the Economy
Brazil
Plantation Economy
• Gold and Sugar
– Both very labor intensive
– Slaves were needed to do the work
• By 1800 150,000 slaves had been brought
• ½ of the total population
• Like Spain, Portugal had little or no industry of it’s
own, but with the gold, they could buy whatever
they needed.
But what will happen when the gold runs out?
GOLD
• Found by woodsmen near Sao Paulo
– Paulistas
– Opened the interior to settlement which was
devastation for the Indian population.
• Opened new areas for mining and ranching
• Biggest problem…Portugal had a trade
imbalance on it’s hands…how?
sugar
• Worlds leading sugar
producer
– Combo agricultural and
industrial
• Cut the Sugar
• Turn the sugar into
something usable
– Large number of workers
for VERY hard work
th
18
Century Reforms
Shifting
• What was happening in Europe at this time
with intellectual thought?
• Spain more or less monopoly of the West
Indies
– Unable to hold onto their mercantile interests
• Other countries wanted to trade
– Colonies were very self sufficient
– Loosing territories
• England, France and Holland
Crisis, The beginning of the end
• Charles II dies (Spain)
– NO HEIR!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
– Was of the Spanish Succession
• Treaty of Utrecht
– Puts a French Family (Bourbon) on the thrown
– Allows England to trade
– Spanish Monopoly is broken
• Bourbon Reforms
Good Stuff to know
Basic Information that we can’t
spend too much time on but you
need to know
Terms to know for sure
•
encomiendas: grants of estates Indian laborers made to Spanish
conquerors and settlers in Latin America; established a framework for
relations based on economic dominance..
•
Treaty of Tordesillas: concluded in 1494 between Castile and Portugal;
clarified spheres of influence and rights of possession; in the New World
Brazil went to Portugal and the rest to Spain.
•
Hispaniola: 1st island in Caribbean settled by Spaniards by Columbus on
his second voyage.
•
Recopilación: body of laws collected in 1681 for Spanish New World
possessions; bases of law in the Indies.
•
Bartolomé de las Casas: Dominican friar who supported peaceful
conversion of native American population; opposed forced labor and
advocated Indian rights.
•
Council of the Indies: Spanish government body that issued all laws and
advised king on all issues dealing with the New World colonies
•
•
Hernán Cortés: led expedition to Mexico in 1519; defeated Aztec empire
and established Spanish colonial rule.
Pedro Alvares Cabral: Portuguese leader of an expedition to India; landed
Brazil in 1500.
•
•
Moctezuma II: last independent Aztec ruler; killed during Cortés's
conquest.
Paulistas: backswoodsmen from São Paulo, Brazil; penetrated Brazilian
interior in search of precious metals during 17th century.
•
•
New Spain: Spanish colonial possessions in Mesoamerica in territories
once part of Aztec imperial system.
Minas Gerais: Brazilian region where gold was discovered in 1695; a gold
rush followed.
•
•
Francisco Vácquez de Coronado: led Spanish expedition into the
southwestern United States in search of gold.
sociedad de castas: Spanish American social system based on racial
origins; Europeans on top, mixed race in middle, Indians and African
slaves at the bottom.
•
mita: forced labor system replacing Indian slaves and encomienda
workers; used to mobilize labor for mines and other projects
•
peninsulares: Spanish-born residents of the New World.
•
•
Francisco Pizarro: began conquest of Inca empire in 1535.
•
haciendas: rural agricultural and herding estates; produced for
consumers in America; basis for wealth and power of the local aristocracy.
War of the Spanish Succession: caused by the succession of the Bourbon
family to the Spanish throne in 1701; ended by the Treaty of Utrecht in
1713; resulted in recognition of Bourbons, territorial loss, and grants of
commercial rights to English and French.
•
•
Casa de la Contratación: Spanish Board of Trade operated out of Seville;
regulated commerce with the New World.
Charles III: Spanish enlightened monarch (1759-1788); instituted fiscal,
administrative, and military reforms in Spain and its empire.
•
Marquis of Pombal: Prime Minister of Portugal (1755-1776);
strengthened royal authority in Brazil, expelled the Jesuits, enacted fiscal
reforms, and established monopoly companies to stimulate the colonial
economy.
•
galleons: large, heavily armed ships used to carry silver from New World
Colonies to Spain; basis of convoy system utilized for transportation of
bullion.
Question yourself:
The answers are at the end of the slides
1. What aspects of Iberian society were
transferred to the New World?
2. What model for American colonization was
established in the Caribbean?
3. What was the nature of the exploitation of
Indians in the Americas?
4. How did the discovery of gold and diamonds
change the economic organization of Brazil?
Good stuff to keep in mind
Stuff from this chapter that goes with
the APWH Themes
Key Concept 1: Globalizing Networks
of Communication and Exchange
• European technological developments in
cartography and navigation built on previous
knowledge developed in the classical, Islamic
and Asian worlds, and included the production
of new tools, innovations in ship designs, and
an improved understanding of global wind
and currents patterns—all which made
transoceanic travel and trade possible
• Remarkable new transoceanic maritime
reconnaissance occurred in this period
– Portuguese development of a school for
navigation led to increased travel to and trade.
This results in the construction of a global tradingpost empire
– Spanish sponsorship of the first Columbian and
subsequent voyages across the Atlantic and Pacific
dramatically increased European interest in
transoceanic travel and trade
• The new global circulation of goods was facilitated by
royal chartered European monopoly companies that
took silver from Spanish colonies in the Americas to
purchase Asian goods from the Atlantic markets but
regional markets continued to flourish in Afro-Eurasia
by using established commercial practices and new
transoceanic shipping services
– Commercialization and creation of global economy
connected to new global circulation of American silver
– Influenced by mercantilism, joint-stock companies were
new methods used to control the domestic and colonial
economies
– The Atlantic system involved the movement of goods
wealth and free and unfree laborers and the mixing of
African, American and European cultures and people
• The new connections between the Eastern and
Western hemispheres resulted in the Columbian
Exchanged
– European colonization of Americas led to the spread
of disease
– American foods became staple crops in Europe, Asian
and Africa. Other crops were grown on plantations
with coerced labor were exported mostly to Europe
and the middle East
– Populations in Afro-Eurasia benefitted nutritionally
from the increased diversity of American food crops
– European colonization and the introduction of
European agriculture and settlements practices in the
Americas often affected the physical environment
through deforestation and soil depeletion.
Key Concept 2. New forms of social
organization and modes of
production
• Traditional peasant agriculture increased and
changed, plantations expanded, and demand fro
labor increased. These changes both fed and
responded to growing global demand for raw
materials and finished products
– Peasant labor grew in many places
– The Atlantic slave trade increased demand for slaves
– The purchase and transport of slaves supporeted the
growth of the plantation economy throughout the
Americas
– Spanish colonists transformed Amerindian labor
system
• Introducing the encomienda and hacienda systems or
changing the Inca labor obligation into a forced labor system
• A new social and political elites changed, they
also restructured new ethnic, racial and
gender hierarchies
– Both imperial conquests and widening global
economic opportunities contributed to the
formation of new political and economic elite
– The massive demographic changes in the America
resulted in new ethnic and racial classifications
• Mestizo, mulatto or Creole
Key Concept 3: State Consolidation
and Imperial Expansion
• Imperial expansion relied on the increased use
of gunpowder, cannons and armed trade to
establish large empires in both hemispheres
– European states, including Portugal, Spain, the
Netherlands, France and Britain, established new
maritime empires in the Americas
• Competition over trade routes, state rivalries,
and local resistance all provided significant
challenges to state consolidation and
expansion
Answers to the question yourself
section
1.
2.
3.
4.
Heavy urbanization in Iberian peninsula reproduced in American colonies; use of planned cities; not
an even population distribution; emphasis on nobility carried over to America; belief of conquerors
of right to Indian labor as new form of serfdom; patriarchal society; encomienda system;
slaveholding; slave trading; plantation agriculture.
Columbus attempted to employ West African model of colonial administration in Caribbean – trade
forts, private investment under royal contract, trade and gold and slaves; modified after Columbus’s
family removed as primary administrators.
Mita- enforced labor (serfdom) of the Indians- worked by the lower classes, like slavery in some
ways. Purpose?: to provide labor for the silver/gold mines + SUGAR estates. Slavery of Indians
causes depopulation of the Indians- instigates the labor trade from Africa. Encomiendas- A grant to
land/labor from Native Americans to Spanish- Given by the crown to the Conquistadors
(Peninsulares).
Mines were worked by slaves. Government controls followed to tightly manage a production which
peaked between 1735 and 1760. Brazil then was the greatest source of gold in the Western world.
The gold, and later diamond discoveries, opened the interior to settlement, devastated Indian
populations, and weakened coastal agriculture. The government managed to reinvigorate coastal
agriculture and control the slave trade, while the mines stimulated new ventures in farming and
ranching. Rio de Janeiro, nearer to the mines, became a major port and the capital in 1763. A
societal hierarchy based on color remained in force. The gold and diamonds did not contribute
much to Portuguese economic development. The resources gained allowed Portugal to import
manufactures instead of creating its own industries.