European Empires in the Americas

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

Mercantilism

European colonial strategies were based on an economic theory known as mercantilism: encouraging exports and accumulating bullion; ex. silver, gold

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 percent of total Chinese food production.

• 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.”

The Colonies

Lands of the Aztecs and the Incas

Economy & Society

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

• Encomienda system: a forced labor system not far removed from slavery. Native Americans were the slaves

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

• Spanish settlers were at the top of the colonial society

  • “I obey but I do not enforce”

  • Spanish minority, never more than 20 percent of the population, was a divided community between creoles and peninsulares

• 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.

Women

• Many Spanish men married elite native women

  • more women experienced sexual violence and abuse and This was a tragedy and humiliation for native and enslaved men as well because they weren’t able to protect them

• Spanish women: “bearers of civilization,” and through their capacity to produce legitimate children and keep a “purity of blood”

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

• Mestizo: product of unions between Spanish men and Native American women

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

Miscellaneous and Important facts

• 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, the wife of the emperor

• 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

• Sugar was used as a medicine, a spice, a sweetener, a preservative, and in sculptured forms as a decoration that indicated high status.(by europe)

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

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

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

  • Then the British, French, and Dutch turned their Caribbean territories into highly productive sugar-producing colonies

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

• Sugar Plantations:

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

    • 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.

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

• Mulattoes: A derogatory term commonly used to describe people of mixed African and European origin.

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

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

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.

• British settlers were far more numerous than their Spanish counterparts

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

• Women were subordinate to their husbands

• Devastating diseases and a highly aggressive military policy had largely cleared the colonies of Native Americans

• slave labor was not needed in an agricultural economy dominated by numerous small-scale independent farmers working their own land, (only the elite used servants)

• Settler colonies: Imperial territories in which Europeans settled permanently in substantial numbers.

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

• 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.

  • Instead, they used joint-stock companies or wealthy individuals

• power struggle between the English king and Parliament meant that the British government paid little attention to the internal affairs of the colonies

• Suddenly North America became the United States, more politically stable, more democratic, more economically successful, and more internationally powerful than a divided, unstable, and much less prosperous Latin America.