West Morris Central High School
Department of History and Social Sciences
Encomienda
From: Encyclopedia of World History: The First Global Age, 1450 to 1750, vol. 3.
Encomienda ranked among the most important institutions of early colonial Spanish America. Described
as a kind of transitional device between the violence of conquest and the formation of stable settler
societies, encomienda has been the topic of enormous research and debate among scholars.
Rooted in the verb encomender ("to entrust", "to commend"), an encomienda was a grant of Indian
labor by the Crown to a specific individual. Holders of such grants, called encomenderos, were said to
hold Indians in encomienda or "in trust." The institution and practice of encomienda originated during
the Spanish Christian reconquest of Iberia from the Moors (718–1492 C.E.), creating an institutional
template that was quickly transferred to the New World after 1492. Unlike its Iberian predecessor,
encomienda in the Americas did not include land grants, except occasionally in marginal areas.
Instead, it was primarily a mechanism of labor control that also permitted the Crown to maintain the
legal fiction that Indians held in encomienda were technically free, were not chattel, and could not be
bought or sold. It also served as an effective way to reward conquistadores and others in service to the
Crown, including priests and bureaucrats. The term encomienda was often used interchangeably with
repartimiento ("distribution" or "allotment") during the early years of conquest and colonization, though
the two were legally distinct. The later practice of compelling subject Indian communities to purchase
Spanish goods, common in the 17th and 18th centuries, was also called repartimiento. Later forced-sale
repartimiento had little relation to the institution of encomienda.
The first substantial effort to codify encomienda in the New World were the Laws of Burgos (1512–13),
which required encomenderos to "civilize," "Christianize," protect, and treat humanely Indians held in
encomienda. A vast corpus of subsequent laws, proclamations, and edicts further refined and limited the
institution. The practical effect of these laws was minimal. In practice encomienda was akin to slavery,
especially during the early years of the conquests. Abundant evidence exists of the abuses and
mistreatment inflicted upon encomienda Indians, who were bought and sold, worked to death, and in
other ways treated for all practical purposes as slaves.
These abundant abuses prompted some Spaniards to condemn the institution as unchristian, most
prominently the priest Bartolomé de Las Casas, beginning in 1514. In response to this simmering debate,
in 1520 Holy Roman Emperor Charles V decreed that the institution of encomienda was to be abolished.
In the Americas the decree had little practical effect, as most encomenderos and officials ignored it. The
Crown, concerned that encomenderos not become a permanent aristocracy, continued its efforts to
impose strict limits on the institution, culminating in the so-called New Laws of 1542–43, which from the
perspective of encomenderos were far more draconian than the Laws of Burgos issued 30 years earlier.
The major features of the New Laws included provisions preventing the inheritance of encomiendas; the
forbidding of new grants, requiring royal officers and ecclesiastics to give up their encomiendas; and
prohibitions against Indian enslavement for whatever reason. The New Laws provoked an outcry across
the colonies, especially in Peru, where factions of colonists rose in rebellion against them. In 1545–46,
three years after they were issued, the New Laws were repealed as unenforceable.
Encomienda nevertheless died a slow death over the next half-century. The principal cause for its
decline was not royal decree but Indian depopulation. Grants of Indian labor became moot when there
were so few Indians left to grant. Encomienda lasted less than a century in most areas, enduring into the
late colonial period only in peripheral regions such as Yucatán. The transition from encomienda to
hacienda (private landownership) was neither direct nor clearcut, and comprises another major arena of
scholarly research and debate.