THE DISCOVERY OF THE NEW WORLD

The writings of the first ‘discoverers’ of America at the end of the fifteenth and beginning of the sixteenth centuries convey the amazement, and frequently the awe, of Europeans confronted by a new world. The ship's log of Christopher Columbus, describing the landscape of the Lucayos Islands and of Santo Domingo, and also the Taíno Indians of the region, who gave the Europeans an idyllic welcome, was a splendid opening to a series of reports on a natural world and a race of men hitherto unknown. It was in Columbus' first letter (printed in Latin in Rome in 1493) that the European conception of the New World was born. Other navigators, such as Pigafetta, a companion of Magellan, and above all Amerigo Vespucci (whose publisher Waldseemüller disseminated the expression ‘Terra America’ to give a new name to ‘Las Indias’) in their turn described the coasts, the flora and the natives of these new lands, all presumed to be islands.

This first vision of the New World was soon succeeded by that of the victims of a long series of shipwrecks, who faced less welcoming Indians, like the Caribs or the people of the Gulf of Florida, armed with powerful bows and ‘arrows capable of piercing even the oar of a whaleboat’. This was the new image of America presented in, for example, the Naufragios (Valladolid, 1542) of Alvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca, an Andalusian gentleman who related his tribulations, lasting several years, among the Indians.

The New World was abundantly peopled when it was first invaded by the Spaniards. Population distribution was, however, uneven, with the heaviest concentrations of people in Mesoamerica and the central Andes, where native American societies had reached the highest levels of economic, social, political and cultural organization. According to circumstances, this distribution of population either helped or hindered the Spanish conquest of America, as it likewise affected Spanish colonization. The presence of a large native American population determined the shape both of the conquest itself and of the colonial structures. They, in their turn, were to influence the process of demographic change. This interaction between population and colonization is the central theme of this chapter, in which the three centuries of Spanish domination have been divided into two. The first part of the chapter deals with the initial sudden and violent clash between invaders and invaded, which was followed by a serious decline in the native American population. The intensity of the demographic catastrophe, and the reasons for it, are discussed. Consideration is also given to the impact of European and African immigration to the New World in the sixteenth and the first half of the seventeenth centuries. The second part examines the way the Indian population slowly recovered, from midway through the colonial period, and the white and mestizo population expanded rapidly, especially in the eighteenth century. The chapter concludes by examining the population of Spanish America, region by region, at the end of the colonial period.

‘Gold is the loftiest and most esteemed metal that the earth brings forth… Among other virtues which nature has bestowed on it, one is singular – that it comforts the weakness of the heart and engenders joy and magnanimity, takes away melancholy, and clears the eyes of cloudiness…’ So wrote a Spanish goldsmith half a century after the conquest of New Spain. Cortés perhaps spoke with less cynical intent than is often thought when he told Montezuma's messenger, ‘I and my companions suffer from a disease of the heart which can be cured only with gold’. But it was not so much gold as silver that awaited Spain in America. The accumulated gold of centuries was looted during the two decades, 1520–40, which saw the Spanish military conquest of Middle and South America. Thereafter, though gold was mined in varying and often substantial amounts, silver predominated in both volume and value produced.

The search for sources of both metals carried the Spaniards far and wide across the Americas, contributing much to the amazing rapidity with which they explored and settled their portion of the continent. On the promise of gold they first settled the Caribbean; finding little in the islands, they were lured on by golden visions to the Isthmus, then to New Spain, then to Peru. Both New Spain and Peru, as well as the north of New Granada, yielded gold booty. But even before Pizarro received Atahualpa's golden ransom, New Spain had begun to reveal her silver deposits, with discoveries about 1530 at Sultepec and Zumpango, close to Mexico City.

SUGAR AND SLAVES

‘A sugar mill is hell and all the masters of them are damned’, wrote Father Andrés de Gouvea from Bahia in 1627. Time and time again observers who witnessed the roaring furnaces, the boiling cauldrons, the glistening black bodies and the infernal whirling of the mill during the 24-hour day of the sugar safra, or harvest, used the same image of hell. Along with mining, the production of sugar was the most complex and mechanized activity that Europeans carried out in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and its ‘modern’ and industrial nature shocked its pre-industrial observers. Yet it was from this nightmarish scene that the society and economy of Brazil grew. During the century from 1580 to 1680 Brazil was the world's largest producer and exporter of sugar. It was in the context of plantation agriculture and sugar that colonial society was formed. Like the sugar-loaf itself, society crystallized with white Europeans at the top, tan-coloured people of mixed race receiving lesser esteem, and black slaves considered, like the dark panela sugar, to be of the lowest quality.

By the final decades of the sixteenth century Brazil no longer resembled the trading-fort establishments of the Portuguese West African and Asian colonies. The shift from private to royal initiative in the exploitation and settlement of the vast Brazilian coastline, the creation of the captaincy system in the 1530s, the subsequent establishment of royal control in 1549, the elimination and enslavement of Indian peoples and the transformation of the principal economy from dyewood cutting to sugar-cane agriculture were all central elements in the colony's formation.

The most satisfactory way of classifying the many hundreds of Indian tribes living in what is now Brazil when the Europeans arrived in 1500 is by language group and by geography and habitat. There were four main language families (in probable order by population): Tupi (or Tupi-Guarani), Gê, Carib and Aruak (Arawak). (Other language families were only represented at the edge of the frontiers of modern Brazil: Xirianá and Tukano in the north-west, Panoan and Paezan in the west, Guaicuruan and Charrua in the south. Some surviving tribal languages are classified as isolated, or only slightly linked to the main language trunks: Nambicuara (Nambikwara), Bororo, Karajá, Mura, Aripaktsá, and doubtless many others among the hundreds of tribes who died out before their speech was studied by linguists.)

The Tupi-Guaraní were established along most of the Atlantic seaboard. They may have originated in the Andes foothills or the plateau of the middle Paraguay and Paraná rivers and been in the process of a gradual northwards invasion of the Brazilian coast. Other Tupispeaking tribes occupied the south bank of the Amazon river, moving up the southern tributaries near its mouth, and upstream on the main river almost to the modern Peruvian border. The Gê occupied the vast, relatively open, plateau of central Brazil. The Gê may be descendants of the original inhabitants of Brazil – the oldest human fossil finds at Lagôa Santa in Minas Gerais, which are over 10,000 years old, correspond physically to modern Gê types. These central Gê-speaking tribes cover an enormous arc of land from Maranhāo to the upper Paraguay.

The history of women in colonial Spanish America is still in the process of being written, and thus contains many lacunae and raises many questions which have not yet been answered. Much of what we know so far about colonial women reflects the life of the upper echelons of society. However, enough research has been carried out to point to significant similarities and differences in life-styles, attitudes, motivations and aims among colonial women of all walks of life. Women's history in the colonial period cannot be measured by events or developments of a political character — the marks of distinction of a man-orientated world. Women were not personally or institutionally encouraged to assert themselves through actions that were in any way political; yet it cannot be said that their role was totally passive or marginal. They must be approached through the specific institutions of which they formed an intrinsic part, forms of collective behaviour, the manners and mores of classes or groups. Change was slow and not deliberate. Certain traditions were preserved at the personal level by unfailing observance; others by legal means. Thus, continuities are more apparent than changes.

Among the most significant topics to be examined in this chapter are: (1) the first movement of Spanish women to the newly discovered lands, which, although not long-lasting, helped to shape the cultural transfer and to form the biological nucleus of a social elite; (2) marriage, as the basis for the formation of families and kinship; (3) the legal status of women and the ways it helped to define their behaviour and opportunities within society; (4) the social mores surrounding male—female relationships; (5) forms of social deviance and their punishment; (6) education as it applied to different groups; and (7) conventual life, of special significance during the colonial period.

The Andean chain forms the warped backbone of South America. Its central ranges and plateaux constituted the heartland of the Inca empire. To a large extent, they maintained this role within the Spanish possessions throughout the colonial period, thanks to their enormous deposits of silver ore and their plentiful supply of hardy Indian workers. It is true that the northern and southern extensions of the Andes, with the adjacent basins of the Orinoco, the Magdalena and Río de la Plata, grew in economic importance. Yet colonial institutions and society bore above all the imprint of the Castilian conquest of the Inca realm.

Throughout the central Andean highlands (the sierra of present-day Peru, Bolivia, and Ecuador) vegetation, fauna and human conditions are determined primarily by the altitude. The percentage of cultivable land is exceedingly small. Also, the zone of pre-conquest agriculture was confined to between 2,800 and 3,600 metres above the sea. Here, after 1532, wheat and other Old World crops were added to the native maize and tubers. Above this zone, land can only be used for pasture. Here, European cattle and sheep gradually replaced the native llama as the chief resource. The eastern slopes (ceja de montaña) and also the deeper mountain valleys offer areas suitable for growing a wide variety of tropical products such as sugar, cacao, and coffee. The various vertical niches thus provide a surprisingly varied alimentary basis for human civilization, not only on a regional but often on a local level as well.

The ‘Frontier’ in this chapter is the European boundary, the limit of colonial expansion into Brazil. Each of the hundreds of native American tribes also had its own frontier, sometimes fluid and shifting but more often geographically defined and well known to every member of the tribe. Tribal frontiers were the boundaries between often hostile, warring groups, or were the limits of each people's hunting forays or annual collecting cycle. The European frontier was a sharper division: the limit of penetration or permanent occupation by an alien culture. It marked a divide between peoples of radically different racial, ethnic, religious, political and technological composition. To European colonists, the frontier was the edge of civilization. Beyond it lay the barbaric unknown of the sertaō – the ‘wilds’, the bush or the wasteland of the interior - or the impenetrable, selva, the Amazonian rain forests.

In practice, the frontier was less precise than it may have been in the colonists’ perception. The men who explored, exploited or attacked the frontier were often mamelucos of mixed European and Indian blood. Many of them spoke Tupi-Guarani or other Indian languages. They were almost invariably accompanied by Indian guides, auxiliaries or forced labourers, and they adopted efficient Indian methods of travel and survival. Even when European colonists were family established on conquered tribal lands, the frontier was not necessarily the boundary between civilization and barbarism. It was often the Indians beyond the frontier who were more civilized.

THE URBAN IDEA

Like much of Spanish American colonial history, the region's urban development has two prehistories: one indigenous, the other peninsular Spanish. The conquistadores found many populous urban centres in Mesoamerica and, less markedly, in the central Andes. The Aztec capital of Tenochtitlán, with at least 150,000 and perhaps 300,000 inhabitants, became a Spanish viceregal capital. Eight more cities surrounded Lake Texcoco, while outlying centres of regional importance included Cholula, Tlaxcala, Tzin Tzun Tzan, Cempoala, and various sites in Yucatán and Guatemala. In the Inca realm the capital at Cuzco, while lacking the commercial importance of Tenochtitlán, had more than 100,000 inhabitants and exercised political sway over various centres along the Incaic camino real, some of pre-Incaic origin: Quito, Cajamarca, Jauja, Vilcas, Huánuco, and Bonbón. These urban hierarchies, in turn, were successors to earlier settlement complexes oriented towards centres at Teotihuacán, Monte Albán, Taj´n, the Maya cities, Chan Chan, and Tiahuanaco.

Although the Spaniards converted some Indian cities like Tenochtitlán, Cholula, and Cuzco to their own uses, more pervasive influences on the European settlement scheme were the spatial distribution and village structure of the Indian populations. Indeed, if one were to carry the urban history of Spanish America only up to the late sixteenth century, the continuities with pre-conquest society would deserve a dominant emphasis. On a longer view, however, the political, social, and economic determinations of European rule, taken with the detribalization, relocation, and severe mortality of the Indian population, introduced many new vectors of change.

Less than two decades ago the topic that we now often call the ‘social history’ of early Spanish America, the study of its ‘social structure’ or ‘social organization’, was just beginning to be explored; a single thoughtful article was able to bring together nearly everything useful that was then known, most of it drawn from formal, self-conscious statements of contemporaries in laws, tracts, political manifestos, or official reports. Since then a whole current of scholarship within the field of early Spanish American history has concentrated on precisely the opposite kind of social phenomena, informal patterns of thought and behaviour which were rarely given overt expression-some, indeed, may have been beneath the level of consciousness. Such work has been highly specific, tied to a certain time and place, giving detailed accounts of individual lives and individual families, businesses, or other local organizations in different periods and different regions. The cases were sometimes chosen for their representation of general types and processes, but the typological aspect often remained implicit.

The time has now come for a provisional synthesis. The emphasis will be on processes and principles, although individual life stories and individual situations have ultimately provided the raw material. It may be felt by some that the colour — the humanity — is missing, that the regional variety has been attenuated, or that aspects of the chronology have been neglected. The first part of this chapter deliberately sets out to examine general patterns of social organization in a somewhat atemporal fashion.

The first account of Brazil dates from Cabral's landfall on the coast of South America in 1500: the letter of Pero Vaz de Caminha to Dom Manuel I, 1 May 1500 (in William Brooks Greenlee (ed.), The voyages of Pedro Alvares Cabral to Brazil and India from contemporary documents and narratives (Hakluyt Society, London, 1937)). The three most important sixteenth-century chronicles are, first, Pero de Magalhāes de Gandavo, Tratado da terra do Brasil and Historia da Provincia da Santa Cruz (Lisbon, 1576; Eng. trans., John B. Stetson, Junior, The histories of Brazil (2. vols., Cortes Society, New York, 1922)); secondly, Fernao Cardim S.J., Do clima e terra do Brasil and Do principio e origem dos indios do Brasil [c. 15 84], published as ‘A treatise of Brasil’ in Samuel Purchas, Hakluytus Posthumus, or Purchas His Pilgrimes (4 vols., London, 1625; 20 vols., Glasgow, 1905–7), and Tratados da terra egente do Brasil, ed. Capistrano de Abreu (Rio de Janeiro, 1925); thirdly, and most important of all, Gabriel Soares de Sousa, Tratado descritivo do Brasil em 1587 (first published Rio de Janeiro, 1851; Sao Paulo, 1938). Especially interesting and valuable are the letters and reports of the Jesuits who arrived with the founders of royal government in 1549. Most notable are the writings of Manoel de Nóbrega (during the period 1549–70) and José de Anchieta (during the period 1554–94). There are a number of collections of Jesuit letters. See, in particular, Serafim Leite, Monumenta Brasiliae (4 vols., Rome, 1956–60).

In Spanish American studies Indian history of the colonial period is a relatively new topic. Throughout the nineteenth century and into the twentieth it was a widely held assumption that little or nothing of consequence in Indian life survived the conquests of the sixteenth century. The view was consistent with the classic writings on conquest, famous for their descriptions of massacres, tortures, and military victories unrelated to events before or after. The conquests appeared to be so concentrated, so cataclysmic, so dramatic in their confrontations of European soldiers with American natives, that no one questioned their power to annihilate. The classic writers knew that individual Indians survived to be utilized by the conquerors as slaves and labourers and tribute-payers. But the prevailing view was that none of the political, social, or cultural values of the American civilizations escaped destruction. The clear implication was that for Indians the aftermath of the conquests was deculturation and stagnation.

The view that no Indian culture persisted after the conquests was consistent with the Leyenda Negra (Black Legend), the tradition of anti-Hispanic criticism that developed in the sixteenth century, flourished in the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries, and continued to exert an influence on interpretations of Spanish and Spanish American history in the twentieth century. The critics of Spanish colonialism argued that the conquistadores were inhumane and that an important consequence of their inhumanity was the unnecessary destruction of American Indian civilizations. Thus the Black Legend emphasized Spanish insensitivity, as if a less crude conqueror, or one with more appreciation for native American cultures, would have salvaged something for the post-conquest future.

Colonies are structured by those who rule them to benefit the mother country and its ruling classes. To the extent that these rulers are successful in this aim colonies are, in Chaunu's word, extrovert. They are, at least in part, organized economically to send out to others significant portions of their most valuable or profitable raw materials and products. In colonial Spanish America much of the economic history which we know has emerged from studies of Spanish attempts to make the colonies serve metropolitan needs. One result has been an emphasis on the sea link, the carrera de Indias, and the fleet system. We know a fair amount about who went to the Indies and when, and what goods were carried in each direction across the Atlantic, more especially from Spanish America to Spain. Within Spanish America itself economic historians have allowed their interests to be shaped to some extent by what primarily interested the Spanish crown: above all, silver and gold mining and plantation agriculture, the bases of the great export trades, and the supply of labour to the mines and plantations. We know much less about the basic institutions, assumptions, systems and practices of the internal economy of colonial Spanish America. Drawing on the available secondary literature, which concentrates on a limited range of topics and regions, an attempt will be made in this chapter to examine three aspects of the internal economy: labour systems; taxation; and trade within the empire, both local and long-distance.

ECONOMIC TRANSFORMATION

The first revolution to transform the land in Mesoamerica was the invention in prehistoric times of agriculture itself. The second revolution took place some decades after the conquest, when the brutal decline in the native American population coincided with the Spaniards’ penetration of the land and the propagation there of European plants and animals. The swiftness with which this process occurred may perhaps be explained by the previous acclimatization of European flora and fauna in the Canary Islands and the Caribbean. The mainland itself offered many different ecological zones for the reproduction of plants and animals. As early as the middle of the sixteenth century, the valleys of Puebla–Tlaxcala and the basin around Mexico City surprised the traveller with their diversified agricultural landscape, where maize, beans, squash, and peppers alternated with wheat, barley, and European vegetables and fruits.

European grain spread to the irrigated highlands south of Puebla (Atlixco, Tepeaca) and north of Mexico City (Tlalnepantla and Huehuetoca), and then on from there, pushing back the Chichimeca frontier (San Juan del Río, Querétaro). By the end of the sixteenth century, wheat and maize gilded the black soil of the Bajío and were harvested around Morelia and Guadalajara in the west and Oaxaca in the south. Within a relatively short period of time grain transformed the traditional landscape of the native countryside, opening up many hundreds of kilometres of fertile land to cultivation. Wheat farming introduced Spanish techniques of cultivation, such as the plough, the yoke, and irrigation, bringing them into permanent use in New Spain.

DISCOVERY

For almost three centuries following the discovery of Brazil in 1500 the Portuguese court was flooded with reports of fabulous gold strikes in Brazil. These had often lacked foundation and had been a blend of misguided trust placed in native American legends, over-optimistic accounts by explorers, and the apparently undeniable logic that a continent which had rewarded the Spaniards with gold, emeralds, and silver must also possess precious metals in that part allocated to the Portuguese by the Treaty of Tordesillas (1494).

Not all these reports had been totally devoid of truth. Gold had indeed been found in São Vicente in the 1560s, and by the 1570s Paulistas had discovered alluvial gold in Paranaguá. There had been reports of gold strikes in the interior of the captaincy of Bahia by João Coelho de Sousa; his brother Gabriel Soares de Sousa had received official authorization (1584) to launch an expedition to confirm these findings. In the seventeenth century as the bandeirantes penetrated deep into the interior of Brazil in their search for Indian slaves and precious metals, reports from Paranaguá, Curitiba, São Vicente, Espírito Santo, and Pernambuco convinced the crown of the potential mineral wealth of Portuguese America. But only at the end of the seventeenth and during the first half of the eighteenth centuries did Brazil yield up her riches.