European Empires in the Americas

The Columbian Exchange

• diminishing the population of the Americas created an acute labor shortage and certainly did make room for immigrant newcomers

• Deforestation occurred, as the land was burned, logged, and turned into fields and pastures by Europeans,

  • 90% of the old growth of the USA have been destroyed since 1600s.

• European crops such as wheat, barley, rye, sugarcane, grapes, and many garden vegetables and fruits, as well as numerous weeds

  • human numbers from some 60 million in 1400 to 390 million in 1900. (from corn/potatoes)

• American food crops such as corn, potatoes, and cassava spread widely in the Eastern Hemisphere

• African varieties of rice, castor beans, black-eyed peas, okra, sesame, watermelons, and yams.

  • Corn became cheap for enslaved Africans

• New to America: horses, pigs, cattle, goats, sheep

  • Horses caused women to loose much of their earlier role as food producers as a male-dominated hunting and warrior culture emerged

• In China, corn, peanuts, and especially sweet potatoes supplemented the traditional rice and wheat

  • American origin represented about 20% of total Chinese food production.

• In Africa, corn was popularized

• The wealth of the colonies — precious metals, natural resources, new food crops, slave labor, financial profits, colonial markets built foundations on which Europe’s Industrial Revolution was built.

• “Without a New World to deliver economic balance in the Old, Europe would have remained inferior, as ever, in wealth and power, to the great civilizations of Asia.”

General crisis

• The near-record cold winters experienced in much of China, Europe, and North America in the mid-seventeenth century, sparked by the Little Ice Age; extreme weather conditions led to famines, uprisings, and wars.

  • the tropics and Southern Hemisphere also experienced extreme conditions and irregular rainfall,

  • Wet, cold summers reduced harvests dramatically in Europe

  • severe droughts ruined crops in many other regions, especially China

  • the collapse of the Ming dynasty in China, nearly constant warfare in Europe, and civil war in Mughal India all occurred in the context of the General Crisis,

  • human activity — the importation of deadly diseases to the Americas

• Our Lady of Guadalupe, a Catholic representation of the Virgin Mary, who had gained a reputation for producing rain.

  • El Niño weather patterns: weather for yellow fever and malaria

Comparing Colonial Societies in the Americas

• European colonial strategies were based on an economic theory known as mercantilism

  • encouraging exports and accumulating bullion

• many Spanish men married elite native women

• Low class, more women experienced sexual violence and abuse.

  • This was a tragedy and humiliation for native and enslaved men as well because it meant they couldn’t protected their families

In the Lands of the Aztecs and the Incas

• economic foundation for this emerging colonial society lay in commercial agriculture, much of it on large rural estates, and in silver and gold mining.

• legal regime known as encomienda

• hacienda system had taken shape, by which the private owners of large estates directly employed native workers.

• At the top of this colonial society were the male Spanish settlers,

  • Spanish minority, never more than 20 percent of the population,

• Creoles: Spaniards born in the Americas

• Peninsulares: those born in Spain

• Landowning Spaniards felt threatened by the growing wealth of commercial and mercantile groups practicing less prestigious occupations.

• Spanish women were “bearers of civilization,” and through their capacity to produce legitimate children

  • the problem with Spanish women was that there were very few of them.

  • caused unions between Spanish men and Native American women (mestizos)

• Mestizos were largely Hispanic in culture, but Spaniards looked down on them during much of the colonial era

• Maize, beans, and squash persisted as the major elements of Indigenous diets in Mexico.

• The Tupac Amaru revolt in Peru during 1780–1781 was made in the name of the last independent Inca emperor.

  • Micaela Bastidas, was referred to as La Coya, the female Inca

• Colonial Spanish America was a vast laboratory of ethnic variety and cultural change.

  • more fluid and culturally blended society than the racially rigid colonies of British North America.

Colonies of Sugar

• Europeans found a very profitable substitute in sugar

  • used as a medicine, a spice, a sweetener, a preservative, and in sculptured forms as a decoration that indicated high status.

• these sugar-based colonies produced almost exclusively for export,

  • For a century (1570–1670), Portuguese planters along the northeast coast of Brazil dominated the world market for sugar.

• Large-scale sugar production had been pioneered by Arabs, who had introduced it in the Mediterranean.

• It was perhaps the first modern industry in that it produced for an international and mass market

• the African captives transported across the Atlantic, some 80 percent or more, ended up in Brazil and the Caribbean

  • a high death rate, perhaps 5 to 10 percent per year, which required plantation owners to constantly import more enslaved people.

  • More males than females were imported from Africa into the sugar economies of the Americas

  • Women made up about half of the field gangs that did the heavy work of planting and harvesting sugarcane.

• As in Spanish America, interracial unions were common in colonial Brazil.

• Mulattoes: The largest group at the time were the product of European-African unions

  • a highly derogatory term

• the perception of color changed with the educational or economic standing of individuals.

  • A light-skinned person of biracial or multiracial background who had acquired some wealth or education might well “pass” as a white.

Racial Differences

Because European women had joined the colonial migration to North America at an early date, these colonies experienced less racial variety and certainly demonstrated less willingness to recognize the offspring of multiracial unions and accord them a place in society.

in North America, any African ancestry, no matter how small or distant, made a person “Black”; in Brazil, a person of African and non-African ancestry was considered not Black, but some other biracial or multiracial category

A sharply defined racial system (with Black Africans, “red” Native Americans, and white Europeans) evolved in North America, whereas both Portuguese and Spanish colonies acknowledged a wide variety of multiracial groups.

Settler Colonies in North America

• The easy availability of land and the outsider status of many British settlers made it even more difficult to follow the Spanish or Portuguese colonial pattern of sharp class hierarchies, large rural estates, and dependent laborers.

• men in Puritan New England became independent heads of family farms

  • it reinforced largely unlimited male authority

• British settlers were far more numerous than their Spanish counterparts

  • 90 percent or more of the population in the New England and middle Atlantic colonies were Europeans.

• slave labor was not needed in an agricultural economy dominated by numerous small-scale independent farmers working their own land,

  • they lacked the substantial presence of Indigenous, African, and multiracial people who were so prominent elsewhere.

• Settler colonies: Imperial territories in which Europeans settled permanently in substantial numbers. Examples include British North America, Portuguese Brazil, Spanish Mexico and Peru, Australia, New Zealand, Algeria, and South Africa.

• A largely Protestant England was far less interested in spreading Christianity among the remaining native peoples than were the large and well-funded missionary societies of Catholic Spain

• The Protestant emphasis on reading the Bible for oneself led to a much greater mass literacy than in Latin America

• British settler colonies evolved traditions of local self-government more extensively than in Latin America.

• Britain had nothing resembling the elaborate imperial bureaucracy that governed Spanish colonies.