Unit 1.5 Labor, Slavery, and Caste in Spanish America

• The African Slave Trade

  • Before slaves were usually prisoners of wars or people who deserved it.

    • It was not for a lifetime and was not inhertiable.

  • However during this period, Europeans, began establishing forts along the African Coast.

    • In those ports, they traded goods for enslaved people and many Africans wanted guns. So they traded people for weapons and other resources.

Justification for Slaves

• Europeans thought they were inferior or of a different race or species.

  • The main justification came from the bible and from story about Noah and his son Ham.

  • Native Americans made very bad/poor slaves, so they decided to recruit African slaves in their place.

Encomienda System of Labor

• The one who implemented this system was Christopher Colombus and he implemented it into the Carribbean right before he left and it managed to spread.

  • This was a system where leading men called incommeneros were granted a portion of land and the natives living on the land became for the labor force for that land where they had to farming, mining, or etc…

How was the Encomienda System justified.

• It was justified on religious grounds.

  • This system was meant to spread christianity and monarchs were granted a document called the Requerimiento.

    • It was granted by the pope to claim lands in America and try to convert the people in those areas into Christians.

Why didn’t the system work well?

• This system didn’t work well for Natives because they knew the land better than the Europeans and so they started importing Africans to replace the natives.

The Caste System

• They also implemented the cast system in the Americas.

  • It was based completely on race and it determined how much tax you payed.

    • The more white blood you had, the lower amount of taxes you had to pay.