Ap World - Chapter 12

Chapter 12: The Integration of the Americas and Oceania with the Wider World Colliding The Integration of the Americas and Oceania with the Wider World A remarkable young woman played a pivotal role in the Spanish conquest of Mexico. Sometimes called Malintzin, over the years she has come to be better known as Doña Marina, the name bestowed on her by Spanish forces. Doña Marina was born about 1500 in central Mexico. Her mother tongue was Nahuatl, the principal language of the Aztec Empire. When she was a girl, Doña Marina’s family sent her to the Mexican coast as a slave, and later, her slaveholders sent her to their neighbors in the Yucatan peninsula. On her journey, she became uent in Maya as well as her native Nahuatl language. When Hernán Cortés arrived on the Mexican coast in 1519, his small army included a Spanish soldier who had learned the Maya language during a period of captivity in the Yucatan. But he had no way to communicate with the Nahuatl-speaking peoples of central Mexico until a Maya chieftain presented him with twelve young women, including Doña Marina, when he entered into an alliance with Cortes against the Aztecs. Doña Marina’s linguistic abilities enabled Cortés to communicate through an improbable chain of languages—from Spanish to Maya to Nahuatl and then back again —while making his way to the Aztec capital of Tenochtitlan. Before long, Doña Marina learned Spanish and thus eliminated the Maya link in the linguistic chain. Doña Marina provided Cortés with information and diplomatic services as well. On several occasions she learned of plans by indigenous peoples to destroy the tiny Spanish army, and she alerted Cortés in time for him to prevent an attack. Once, she was able to report the precise details of a planned ambush because she played along with an eort by Cortes’ enemies to bring her into the scheme. She also helped Cortés negotiate with emissaries from Tenochtitlan and other major cities of central Mexico. In fact, without Doña Marina’s help, it is dicult to see how Cortés’s small band could have survived to see the Aztec capital. Precisely because of her pivotal role in aiding Cortés in his invasion of the Aztec Empire, Doña Marina earned another name commonly bestowed on her in Mexican history: La Malinche, or the traitor. The belief that she betrayed her people by collaborating with the Spanish underscores the complicated choices Doña Marina was faced with in their encounters with Europeans. Mesoamerican societies were not monolithic, and many people chose to ally themselves with the Spanish because of their disaection from Aztec imperial rule. In Doña Marina’s specic case, it is also important to remember her lack of power as a slave woman. After being given to Cortes, she may have felt the need to protect her new membership in his group by making herself valuable. Using her linguistic and diplomatic talents to aid Cortes may well have been a means of survival. Whatever her motives, it is clear that Doña Marina’s aid was crucial to the success of Cortes’ small group. In addition to facilitating the Spanish conquest of the Aztec Empire, Doña Marina played a role in the formation of a new society in Mexico. In 1522, one year after the fall of Tenochtitlan, she gave birth to a son fathered by Cortés, and in 1526 she bore a daughter to a Spanish captain whom she had married. Given her status as a slave, historians have no way of knowing whether Doña Marina conceived her children willingly or not. Nevertheless, although her ospring were not the rst children born in the Western Hemisphere of indigenous and Spanish parentage, they symbolize the early emergence of a mestizo population in Mexico. Doña Marina died soon after the birth of her daughter, probably in 1527, but during her short life she contributed to the thorough transformation of Mexican society. Historians use the term Atlantic World to discuss the interconnections of western Europe, west Africa, and the Americas. ▸ Initial exploration and exploitation of the Americas was all about silver and sugar. ▸ Silver was the engine of the world’s economies in the seventeenth century. After the Spanish conquered the Aztec and Inca empires, the Spanish extracted so much silver from the Inca Potosi mine that it wreaked inationary havoc on the western European economy throughout the 1600s. The Pacic also became part of the globalizing trade networks when the Spanish claimed lands and sent enormous amounts of silver across the ocean to buy luxury goods from China. ▸ Sugar, metaphorically and literally, was the frosting on the economic cake. The wealthy in Europe paid dearly for it, and families in Africa were decimated because of it. Spanish, Portuguese, French, and British sugar planters transported enslaved Africans to work on the sugar plantations in the Caribbean and coastal tropical areas. ▸ Historians identify two patterns of European settlement in the Americas: non-settler colonies and settler colonies. ▸ In the Americas, new social classes were created as people from three continents lived together for the rst time. Children of these encounters became the foundation of mixed ethnicity in Central and South American populations. ▸ Religions commingled through conversion and evangelization. ▸ Indigenous peoples and enslaved Africans retained their traditional beliefs and practices while outwardly acknowledging the conquerors’ Christian religion. Historical Developments Driven largely by political, religious, and economic rivalries, European states established new maritime empires, including the Portuguese, Spanish, Dutch, French, and British. Newly developed colonial economies in the Americas largely depended on agriculture, utilized existing labor systems, including the Incan mit’a and introduced new labor systems, including chattel slavery, indentured servitude, encomienda, and hacienda systems. State expansion and centralization led to resistance from an array of social, political, and economic 

Chapter Review:Until 1492 the peoples of the Eastern and Western Hemispheres had few dealings with one another. After 1492, however, the voyages of European mariners led to permanent and sustained contact between the peoples of the Eastern Hemisphere, the Western Hemisphere, and Oceania. The resulting encounters brought profound and violent change to both American and Pacic lands. European peoples possessed powerful military weapons, horses, and sailing ships that provided them with technological advantages over the peoples they encountered in the Americas and the Pacic Islands. Moreover, most Europeans also enjoyed complete or partial immunity to diseases that caused demographic disasters when introduced to the Western Hemisphere and Oceania. Because of their technological advantages and the wholesale depopulation that followed from epidemic diseases, European peoples were able to establish a strong presence throughout the Americas and much of the Pacic Ocean basin. In Australia and the Pacic Islands, the European presence laid a foundation for dramatic and often traumatic change in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In the Western Hemisphere, however, large numbers of European migrants helped to bring about a profound transformation of American societies in early modern times. In Mexico and Peru, Spanish conquerors established territorial empires that were ruled from Spain. In Brazil, Portuguese entrepreneurs founded sugar plantations and imported African slaves to perform the heavy labor required for their operation. In North America, French, English, and Dutch fur traders allied with indigenous peoples who provided them with animal skins, and their more sedentary compatriots founded settler societies concentrating on the production of cash crops for export. Throughout the Western Hemisphere, peoples of European, African, and American ancestry interacted to fashion altogether new societies. 

COLLIDING WORLDS When European peoples rst sought to establish their presence in the Americas, they brought a range of technology unavailable to the peoples they encountered in the Western Hemisphere. Even more important than technology, however, was the combination of devastating epidemic disease Europeans brought with them and European willingness to exploit existing divisions between indigenous peoples. With the help of technology, disease, and ruthless political maneuvering, Spanish conquerors toppled the Aztec and Inca empires and imposed their own rule in Mexico and Peru. In later decades Portuguese planters built sugar plantations on the Brazilian coastline. French, English, and Dutch migrants displaced indigenous peoples in North America and established settler colonies under the rule of European peoples. The Spanish Caribbean The Taíno When Spanish mariners arrived in the Caribbean, the Taíno (also known as Arawaks) were the most prominent people in the region. During the late centuries ..., the ancestors of the Taíno sailed in canoes from the Orinoco River valley in South America to the Caribbean islands, and by about 900 .. they had settled throughout the region. The Taíno cultivated manioc and other crops, and they lived in small villages under the authority of chiefs who allocated land to families and supervised community aairs. They showed interest in the glass, beads, and metal tools that Spanish mariners brought as trade goods because these were new to them. Meanwhile, the Spanish showed great interest in trading for the gold jewelry worn by the Taíno. Although at rst the Taíno received the Spanish warmly, within a few months relations between the Taíno and the Spanish turned sour when it became clear that the Spanish were not satised with the amount of gold they were getting through trade alone. Spanish Arrival Christopher Columbus and his immediate followers made the island of Hispaniola (which embraces modern Haiti and the Dominican Republic) the base of Spanish operations in the Caribbean. There, Spanish settlers established the fort of Santo Domingo, and the city, ocially founded in 1498, became the capital of the Spanish Caribbean. Columbus’s original plan was to build forts and trading posts were merchants could trade with local peoples for products desired by European consumers. Within a few years of Spanish arrival, however, it became clear that the Caribbean region oered no silks or spices for the European market. If Spanish settlers wanted to maintain their presence in the Caribbean, they would need to find some way to make a living. The settlers rst attempted to support their society by mining gold. Spanish settlers were too few in number to mine gold—and in any case they were not inclined to perform heavy physical labor—so the miners came largely from the ranks of the Taíno. Recruitment of labor came through an institution known as the encomienda, which involved Spanish encomenderos (“settlers”) forcing the Taíno to work in their mines or elds. In return for labor, encomenderos were supposed to look after their workers’ health and welfare and to encourage their conversion to Christianity. Conscription of Taíno labor was a brutal business that, in practice, functioned like a system of slavery. Encomenderos worked their charges hard and punished them severely when they did not deliver the expected quantities of gold or work suciently hard in the elds. The Taíno occasionally organized rebellions, but their bows, arrows, and slings had little eect against horse-mounted Spanish forces wielding steel swords and rearms. By about 1515, enslavement and physical abuse had brought dramatic decline to Taíno populations on the large Caribbean islands of Hispaniola, Jamaica, Puerto Rico, and Cuba. On the island of Hispaniola alone, by 1514 the Taíno population had declined to about 32,000 from a precontact population of several hundred thousand. Smallpox Another serious demographic decline then set in after 1518, when smallpox reached the Caribbean region and touched on devastating epidemics among the peoples of the Western Hemisphere. To replace laborers lost to disease, encomenderos launched raiding parties to kidnap and enslave Taíno and other peoples. This tactic exposed additional victims to introduced diseases and hastened the decline of indigenous populations. Under pressure of epidemic disease, the indigenous population of the Caribbean plummeted from about four million in 1492 to a few thousand in the 1540s. As a result, some indigenous societies passed almost completely out of existence. Only a few Taíno cultural elements survived: canoe, hammock, hurricane, barbecue, maize, and tobacco all derive from Taíno words, but the society that generated them had largely disappeared by the middle of the sixteenth century. From Mining to Plantation Agriculture Deposits of gold were not plentiful in the Caribbean, but optimistic Spanish adventurers continued to seek treasure there for a century and more. After the mid-sixteenth century, however, when Spanish explorers located exceptionally rich sources of silver in Mexico and Peru, the Caribbean became a much less important part of the Spanish Empire. English pirates lurked in Caribbean waters hoping to intercept imperial eets carrying American silver to Spain, but the region was not a center of production. Then, in about the 1640s, French, English, and Dutch settlers began to ock to the Caribbean with the intention of establishing plantations. It became clear that even if the Caribbean islands lacked precious metals, they oered ideal conditions for the cultivation of cash crops, particularly sugar, which would fetch high prices in European markets. Later, tobacco also became a prime cash crop of the region. Meanwhile, because indigenous populations had been decimated, planters lacked the labor they needed to operate their estates. Based on earlier Spanish practices in the Azores and Canary Islands, Europeans solved the labor shortage by forcibly importing several million slaves from Africa. By 1700 Caribbean society consisted of a small class of European landowners and large numbers of enslaved Africans. Mexico and Peru at the Time of Contact Spanish interest soon shifted from the Caribbean to the American mainland, where settlers hoped to need more resources to exploit. During the early sixteenth century, Spanish conquistadores (“conquerors”) pressed beyond the Caribbean islands, moving west into Mexico and south into Panama and Peru. Aided especially by the spread of epidemic disease, between 1519 and 1521 Hernán Cortés and a small band of men brought down the Aztec Empire in Mexico, and between 1532 and 1533 Francisco Pizarro and his followers toppled the Inca Empire in Peru. Those conquests laid the foundations for colonial regimes that would transform the Americas. 

COLLIDING WORLDS Continued Mexico and Peru at the Time of Contact Continued In Mexico and Peru, Spanish explorers found societies quite dierent from those of the Caribbean islands. Both Mexico and Peru had been sites of agricultural societies, cities, and large states for more than a millennium. In the early fteenth century, both lands fell under the sway of powerful imperial states: the Mexica people and their allies founded the Aztec Empire that expanded to embrace most of Mesoamerica, while the Incas imposed their rule on a vast realm extending from modern Ecuador in the north to modern Chile in the south— the largest state South America had ever seen. But neither the Inca nor the Aztec Empire could count on all its subjects to rally to its defense. In fact, the very success of Spanish military campaigns often rested on the support of indigenous allies, who were eager to shake off Aztec or Inca rule. As allies they played a crucial role in the conquest, supplying auxiliary troops, logistical support, and secure bases in friendly territory. Hernán Cortés The conquest of Mexico began with an expedition to search for gold on the American mainland. In 1519 Cortés led about 450 soldiers to Mexico and made his way from Veracruz on the Gulf coast to the island city of Tenochtitlan, the large and vibrant Aztec capital situated in Lake Texcoco. They seized the emperor Motecuzoma II, who died in 1520 during a skirmish between Spanish forces and residents of Tenochtitlan. Fierce Aztec resistance soon drove the conquistadors from the capital, and Cuauhtémoc (ca. 1502–1525)—the nephew and son-in-law of Motecuzoma—emerged as the last Aztec emperor. Cortés built a small eet of ships, placed Tenochtitlan under siege, and in 1521 starved the city into surrender. Cuauhtémoc withstood the torture Cortés inicted upon him in an attempt to uncover the whereabouts of Aztec gold and treasures. However, he ultimately could not escape the execution ordered by Cortés in 1525. Steel swords, muskets, cannons, and horses oered Cortés and his soldiers some advantage over the forces they met and helped to account for the Spanish conquest of the Aztec Empire. Yet weaponry alone clearly would not enable Cortés’s tiny force to overcome a large, densely populated society. Quite apart from military technology, Cortés’s expedition forged alliances with peoples who resented domination by the Mexica, the leaders of the Aztec Empire, and who reinforced the small Spanish army with thousands of veteran warriors. Indigenous allies also provided Spanish forces with logistical support and secure bases in friendly territory. Epidemic Disease On the mainland, as in the Caribbean, epidemic disease aided Spanish eorts. During the siege of Tenochtitlan, smallpox raged through the city, killing inhabitants by the tens of thousands and fatally sapping the strength of defensive forces. Smallpox rapidly spread beyond the capital, raced through Mexico, and killed so many people that Aztec society was unable to function. Only in the context of this drastic depopulation is it possible to understand the Spanish conquest of Mexico. Francisco Pizarro Francisco Pizarro experienced similar results when he led a Spanish expedition from Central America to Peru. Pizarro set out in 1530 with 180 soldiers, later joined by reinforcements to make a force of about 600. The conquistadors arrived in Peru just after a bitter dispute between Huascar (1503–1532) and Atahualpa (ca. 1502–1533), two brothers within the Inca ruling house, and Pizarro’s forces exploited the dierences between those factions. By 1533 they had taken the Inca capital at Cuzco. Under the pretext of holding a conference, they called the Inca ruling elites together, seized them, and killed most of them. They spared the Inca ruler Atahualpa until he had delivered a large quantity of gold to Pizarro. Then they strangled him and decapitated his body. The search for treasure continued after the end of Inca rule. Pizarro and his conquistadores looted gold and silver plaques from Cuzco’s temples and public buildings, melted down statuettes fashioned from precious metals, and even stole jewelry and ornaments from the embalmed bodies of deceased Inca rulers. Several considerations help to explain how Pizarro’s tiny force was able to topple the Inca Empire. Many subjects of the empire despised the Incas as overlords and tax collectors. Indeed, many allied with the Spanish invaders. Epidemic disease also discouraged resistance: smallpox had spread from Mexico and Central America to Peru in the 1520s, long before Pizarro’s arrival, and had already signicantly weakened Andean populations. Hence, by 1540 Spanish forces had established themselves securely in Peru. 

COLLIDING WORLDS Continued Spanish and Portuguese Empires in the Americas During the early days after the conquests, Cortés and Pizarro allocated lands and labor rights to their troops on their own authority. Gradually, however, the Spanish monarchy extended its control over the growing American empire, and by about 1570 the semi private regime of the conquistadors had given way to formal rule under the Spanish crown. Bureaucrats charged with the implementation of royal policy and the administration of royal justice replaced the soldiers of fortune who had conquered Mexico and Peru. The conquistadores did not welcome the arrival of the bureaucrats, but with the aid of Spanish lawyers, tax collectors, and military forces, royal ocials had their way. Spanish Colonial Administration Long Description Tlaxcalan allies of the Spanish on their way to the Aztec capital of Tenochtitlan. A Spanish warrior is at the front right of the drawing on his horse. Taken from the sixteenth-century Lienzo de Tlaxcala manuscript. Spanish administrators established two main centers of authority in the Americas—Mexico (which they called New Spain) and Peru (known as New Castile)—each governed by a viceroy who was responsible to the king of Spain. In Mexico they built a new capital, Mexico City, on top of Tenochtitlan. In Peru they originally hoped to rule from the Inca capital of Cuzco, but they considered the high altitude unpleasant and also found the Andean city too inaccessible for their purposes. In 1535 they founded Lima and transferred the government to the coast where it was accessible to Spanish shipping. The viceroys were the king’s representatives in the Americas, and they wielded considerable power. The kings of Spain, attempting to ensure that their viceroys would not build personal power bases and become independent, subjected them to the review of courts known as audiencias staed by university-educated lawyers. The audiencias heard appeals against the viceroys’ decisions and policies and had the right to address their concerns directly to the Spanish king. Furthermore, the audiencias conducted reviews of viceroys’ performance at the end of their terms, and negative reviews could lead to severe punishment. In spite of this structure, in many ways Spanish administration in the Americas was a ragged aair. Transportation and communication diculties limited the ability of viceroys to supervise their territories. In many regions, local administration fell to audiencias or town councils. Meanwhile, the Spanish monarchy exercised even less inuence on American aairs than the viceroys. It often took two years for the central government in Spain to respond to a query from Mexico or Peru, and many replies simply asked for further information rather than providing rm directives. When viceroys received clear orders that they did not like, they found ways to procrastinate: they often responded to the king that “I obey, but I do not enforce,” implying that with additional information the king would alter his decision. New Cities Spanish rule in the Americas led to the rapid establishment of cities throughout the viceroyalties. Like their compatriots in Spain, colonists preferred to live in cities even when they derived their income from the agricultural production of their landed estates. As the numbers of migrants increased, they expanded the territory under Spanish imperial authority and built a dense network of bureaucratic control based in recently founded cities. The jurisdiction of the viceroyalty of New Spain reached from Mexico City as far as St. Augustine in Florida (founded in 1565). Administrators in Lima oversaw aairs from Panama (founded in 1519) to Concepción (founded in 1550) and Buenos Aires (founded in 1536). The Portuguese in Brazil While Spanish conquistadores and administrators built a territorial empire in Mexico and Peru, Portuguese forces established an imperial presence in Brazil. The Portuguese presence came about by an odd twist of diplomatic convention. In 1494 Spain and Portugal signed the Treaty of Tordesillas, which divided the world along an imaginary north-south line 370 leagues west of the Azores and Cape Verde Islands. According to this agreement, Spain could claim any land west of that line, so long as it was not already under Christian rule, and Portugal gained the same rights for lands east of the line. Thus Portugal gained territory 1along the northeastern part of the South American continent, a region known as Brazil from the many brazilwood trees that grew along the coast, while the remainder of the Western Hemisphere fell under Spanish control. Of course, this treaty completely disregarded pre existing indigenous claims to any of these lands—an indication of the conceit of both the Spanish and the Portuguese. In this illustration from Peru native Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala’s letter of complaint to the Spanish king—a record of grievances against Spanish overlords—conquistadores decapitate Atahualpa after executing him by strangulation in 1533. The Portuguese marine Pedro Alvares de Cabral stopped in Brazil briey in 1500 while making a tack through the Atlantic Ocean en route to India. His compatriots did not display much immediate interest in the land. When French and Dutch mariners began to visit Brazilian shores, however, the Portuguese king decided to consolidate his claim to the land. He made vast land grants to Portuguese nobles in the expectation that they would develop and colonize their holdings, and later he dispatched a governor to oversee aairs and implement royal policy. Portuguese interest in Brazil rose dramatically after mid-century when entrepreneurs established protable sugar plantations—based on slave labor—on the coast. Colonial American Society The cities of the Spanish and Portuguese empires became centers of European-style society in the Americas: the spires of churches and cathedrals dened their skylines, and Spanish and Portuguese were the languages of government, business, and society. Beyond the urban districts, however, indigenous ways of life persisted. In the Amazon basin and Paraguay, for example, indigenous peoples produced little agricultural surplus, and there were no mineral deposits to attract European migrants. The few Spanish and Portuguese colonists who ventured to those regions learned to adapt to indigenous societies and customs: they ate bread made of manioc pour, made use of native hammocks and canoes, and communicated in the Guaraní and Tupí languages. Indeed, indigenous languages ourish even today throughout much of Latin America: among the more prominent are Nahuatl in Mexico; K´iché in Guatemala; Guaraní in Paraguay; and Quechua in the Andean highlands of Peru, Ecuador, and Bolivia. Spanish and Portuguese peoples saw the Western Hemisphere more as a land to exploit and administer than as a place to settle and colonize. Nevertheless, sizable contingents of migrants settled permanently in the Americas. Between 1500 and 1800, upwards of hundred thousand Spanish migrants crossed the Atlantic, alongside one hundred thousand Portuguese. Their presence contributed to the making of a much more globalized world—a world characterized by meaningful encounters between the peoples of Europe, Africa, and the Americas—in the Western Hemisphere. What factors decided where settlements would be placed? Why are there so few settlements in the interior of either North or South America? Settler Colonies in North America Throughout the sixteenth century, Spanish explorers sought opportunities north of Mexico and the Caribbean. They established towns, forts, and missions from modern Florida as far north as Virginia on the east coast of North America, and they scouted shorelines of Maine and Newfoundland. On the west coast they ventured into modern Canada and established a fort on Vancouver Island. By mid-century, French, English, and Dutch mariners sailed the North Atlantic in search of sh and a northwest passage to Asia, and by the early seventeenth century they were dislodging Spanish colonists north of Florida. Their search for a northwest passage proved fruitless, but they harvested immense quantities of sh from the cod-lled banks of Labrador, Newfoundland, Nova Scotia, and New England. Foundation of Colonies In the early seventeenth century explorers began to establish permanent colonies on the North American mainland. French settlers established colonies at Port Royal (Nova Scotia) in 1604 and Quebec in 1608. During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, French migrants settled in eastern Canada, and French explorers and traders scouted the St. Lawrence, Ohio, and Mississippi Rivers, building forts all the way to the Gulf of Mexico. Meanwhile, English migrants founded Jamestown in 1607 and the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1630, and proceeded to establish colonies along the east coast of the present-day United States of America. Dutch entrepreneurs built a settlement at New Amsterdam in 1623, but the colony did not remain long in Dutch hands: an English eet seized it in 1664, rechristened it New York, and absorbed it into English colonial holdings. Life in those early settlements was extremely dicult. Most of the settlers did not expect to cultivate food crops but, rather, hoped to sustain their communities by producing valuable commodities such as fur, pitch, tar, or lumber, if not silver and gold. They relied heavily on provisions sent from Europe, and when supply ships did not arrive as expected, they sometimes avoided starvation only because indigenous peoples provided them with food. In Jamestown (located in present-day Virginia in the United States), food shortages and disease became so severe that only sixty of the colony's hundred inhabitants survived the winter of 1609–1610. Colonial Government The French and English colonies in North America diered in several ways from Spanish and Portuguese territories to the south. Whereas Iberian explorations had royal backing, private investors played larger roles in French and English colonial eorts. Individuals put up the money to finance expeditions to America, and they retained much more control over their colonies’ aairs than did their Iberian counterparts. Although English colonies were always subject to royal authority, for example, they also maintained their own assemblies and inuenced the choice of royal governors: there were no viceroys or audiencias in the North American colonies. At the conclusion of the Seven Years’ War in 1763, the French colony in Canada fell under British control, and it, too, soon acquired institutions of self-government. Relations with Indigenous Peoples French and English colonies diered from Iberian territories also in their relationships with indigenous peoples. French and English migrants did not need large, centralized states like the Aztec and Inca empires. Nor did they encounter agricultural peoples living in densely settled societies. Rather, the peoples of eastern North America had formed dozens of distinct societies, even though most spoke Algonquian, Iroquois, or Lakota languages. Many practiced agriculture, but most also relied on hunting and consequently moved their villages frequently in pursuit of game. They did not claim ownership of precisely bounded territories, but they regularly migrated between well-dened regions and utilized the resources of the land as they did so.But when European settlers saw forested lands not bearing crops or supporting villages, they viewed them as “empty” and unclaimed. Even when lands had been in use by multiple Native American groups over many hundreds of years, Europeans believed they had the right to claim such lands. Thus, they staked out farms and excluded the indigenous peoples who had, over many centuries, used the lands during the course of their migrations. The availability of fertile farmland soon attracted large numbers of European migrants. Upwards of 150,000 English migrants moved to North America during the seventeenth century alone, and sizable French, German, Dutch, and Irish contingents joined them in the search for land. European migrants took pains to justify their claims to American lands. English settlers in particular brought with them English legal structures such as treaties and property deeds that suggested land could be permanently transferred to individuals or groups. They fundamentally did not understand that the Native American way of life in the region depended on a very dierent way of using, and laying claim to, land. For Native American groups, using the land productively entailed keeping hunting grounds healthy, while for Europeans land could only be considered productive if under cultivation. Conict French and English settlers frequently clashed with indigenous peoples who resented intrusions on their hunting grounds and thus their means of survival, but the conicts diered from the campaigns of conquest carried out by the conquistadors in Mexico and Peru. Although English settlers negotiated rights to American lands by treaty, native peoples did not accept that land should be used exclusively for one owner. When Europeans tried to insist on their exclusive use of land, Native Americans resisted by mounting raids on farms and villages. During an assault of 1622, for example, they killed almost one-third of the English settlers in the Chesapeake region. Attacks on European communities brought equally severe reprisals on Native American communities, including the ruthless destruction of entire towns and villages. Edward Waterhouse, who survived the raid of 1622, went so far as to advocate annihilation of the indigenous population: “Victorie may be gained many waies: by force, by surprize, by [causing] famine [through] burning their Corne, by destroying and burning their Boats, Canoes, and Houses, by breaking their shing Weares [nets], by assailing them in their huntings, whereby they get the greatest part of their sustenance in Winter, by pursuing and chasing them with our horses, and blood-Hounds to draw after them, and Mastives [mastis] to tear them.” Indeed, a combination of epidemic disease and violent conict dramatically reduced the indigenous population of North America between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries. In 1492 the native population of the territory now embraced by the United States was greater than ve million, perhaps as high as ten million. By the mid-sixteenth century, however, smallpox and other diseases had begun to spread north from Mexico and ravage native societies in the plains and eastern woodlands of North America. Between 1600 and 1800 about one million English, French, German, Dutch, Irish, and Scottish migrants crossed the Atlantic and sought to displace indigenous peoples as they pursued economic opportunities in North America. By 1800, indigenous peoples in the territory of the present-day United States numbered only six hundred thousand, as against almost ve million settlers of European ancestry and about one million enslaved people of African ancestry. As with the Iberian incursions in the South, the European settlement of North America fundamentally transformed the Western Hemisphere.

COLONIAL SOCIETY IN THE AMERICAS The European migrants who ooded into the Western Hemisphere interacted both with the indigenous inhabitants and with African peoples whom they forcibly imported as enslaved laborers. Throughout the Americas, relations between individuals of American, European, and African ancestry soon led to the emergence of what were known at the time as mestizo populations. Notwithstanding such intercultural mixing, European peoples and their EuroAmerican ospring increasingly dominated political and economic aairs in the Americas. Using enslaved labor and Native American knowledge, they mined precious metals, cultivated cash crops such as sugar and tobacco, and trapped fur-bearing animals to supply capitalist markets that met the voracious demands of European and Asian consumers. Over time they also established their Christian religion as the dominant faith of the Western Hemisphere. The Formation of Multicultural Societies European migrants radically transformed the social order in the regions where they established imperial states or settler colonies, although it is important to remember that their inuence only reached the American interior gradually. All European territories became multicultural societies where peoples of varied ancestry lived together under European or Euro-American dominance. Spanish and Portuguese territories soon became not only multicultural but ethnically mixed as well, largely because of migration patterns. Migrants to the Iberian colonies were overwhelmingly men: about 85 percent of the Spanish migrants were men, and the Portuguese migration was even more male-dominated than the Spanish. Because of the small numbers of European women, Spanish and Portuguese migrants tended to enter into relationships with indigenous women, which soon gave rise to an increasingly mixed (“mestizo”) society. Mestizo Society Most Spanish migrants went to Mexico, where there was soon a growing population of mestizos—those of Spanish and native parentage, like the children of Doña Marina. Women were more prominent among the migrants to Peru than to Mexico, and Spanish colonists there lived mostly in cities, where they maintained a more distinct community than did their counterparts in Mexico. In the colonial cities, Spanish migrants married among themselves and re-created a European-style society. In less settled regions, however, Spanish men associated with indigenous women and gave rise to mestizo society. With few European women available in Brazil, Portuguese men readily entered into relations —some consensual and some forced—both with indigenous women and with enslaved African women. Brazil soon had large populations not only of mestizos but also of people known as mulattoes, who were born of Portuguese and African parents; those known as zambos, who were born of indigenous and African parents; and other combinations arising from these groups. Indeed, marriages between members of dierent racial and ethnic communities became common in colonial Brazil and generated a society even more thoroughly mixed than that of Mexico. INTERPRETING IMAGES Analyze Indigenous Zapotec painter Miguel Mateo Maldonado y Cabrera (1695–1768) created this domestic portrait of a multicultural family in the viceroyalty of New Spain, today’s Mexico. A Spanish man gazes at his Mexican Indian wife and their mestizo daughter. How does the portrait reect the social structure that evolved in Latin American after the Europeans polarized it? How and why did Latin American social structures dier from those of North America? The Social Hierarchy In both Spanish and Portuguese colonies, migrants born in the Iberian peninsula in Europe (known as peninsulares) stood at the top of the social hierarchy. They were followed by criollos, or creoles, those born in the Americas of Iberian parents. In the early days of the colonies, mestizos lived on the fringes of society. As time went on, however, the numbers of mestizos grew, and they became essential contributors to their societies, especially in Mexico and Brazil. Meanwhile, mulattoes, zambos, and others of mixed parentage became prominent groups in Brazilian society, although they were usually subordinate to European migrants, Euro-American creoles, and even mestizos. In all the Iberian colonies, enslaved and conquered peoples stood at the bottom of the social hierarchy. Over time, this highly unequal social order became codied into a system of classication known as the casta system. Taken from the Spanish word that means ‘lineage,’ the casta system reected Spanish understandings of themselves as superior to those of mixed (mestizo or mulatto), indigenous, or African heritage. Although the casta system was not xed and grew to incorporate various combinations of peoples, it helped maintain Spanish superiority by placing ‘pure’ Spaniards at the top, followed by mestizos, indigenous peoples and, at the very bottom, those of African heritage. Casta paintings that survive from this period depict numerous combinations of what we would now call ‘mixed race’ people. Sexual Hierarchies Race and ethnicity were crucial in shaping a person’s position and role in colonial society. But the dening factor in both Spanish and Portuguese America was the existence of a clear sexual hierarchy that privileged men. Women lived in a patriarchal world, where men occupied positions of power and delineated the boundaries of acceptable female behavior. Although there were exceptions to the rule, women’s power tended to be expressed informally through their inuence on relationships and in domestic duties. Only when it came to punishing disobedient slaves did society ignore gender—both male and female slaves could count on the same harsh punishment, which usually took the form of ogging. Gender alone, however, did not explain the diverse experiences of women in colonial society. Commonly, the ratio of men to women in a given community either enhanced or limited women’s choices. Women’s experiences also varied with the degree of prosperity and the nature of the local economy. As women moved from childhood through marriage and motherhood, to being widows or “spinsters,” their experiences and roles in society likewise underwent change. Race and class are usually gured as powerful forces shaping women’s lives. Women of European descent, though under strict patriarchal control and under pressure to conform to the stereotype of female dependence and passivity, sometimes used their elite position to their advantage. By necessity, women of color and those from the low class became part of the colonial labor force, performing tasks closely tied to the commercialization of traditional female work such as food preparation, laundering, and weaving. Although poor, these women were freer to move about in public and to interact with others than were their elite counterparts. The most disadvantaged women were black, mulatta, and zamba slaves, who were required to perform hard physical tasks such as planting and cutting cane or working as laundresses. Since they had few powerful protectors, such women were also frequently the targets of forced sexual relationships with European men. North American Societies The social structure of the French and English colonies in North America diered markedly from that of the Iberian colonies. Women were more numerous among the French and especially the English migrants than in Spanish and Portuguese communities, and settlers tended to marry within their own groups. Although French fur traders often associated with native women and generated métis (French for “mixed”) in regions around forts and trading posts, in French colonial cities such as Port Royal and Quebec, liaisons between French and native peoples were less common. Mingling between peoples of dierent ancestry was least common in the English colonies of North America. Colonists disdained the indigenous peoples they encountered and regarded them as heathens who did not recognize private property and did not exert themselves to cultivate the land. Later, they also scorned imported enslaved Africans as inferior beings. Those attitudes fueled a virulent racism, as English settlers attempted to maintain sharp boundaries between themselves and peoples of Native American and African ancestry. Yet English settlers nevertheless interacted with American and African peoples, and they readily borrowed useful cultural elements from other communities. They learned about American plants and animals, for example, and they used indigenous terms to refer to unfamiliar animals such as raccoons and opossums or trees such as hickory and pecan. They adapted moccasins and deerskin clothes, and they gave up European military customs of marching in massed ranks and announcing their presence with drums and ying colors. From enslaved peoples they borrowed African food crops and techniques for the cultivation of rice. Yet, unlike their Iberian neighbors to the south, the English settlers discouraged relationships between individuals of dierent ancestry and sometimes refused to accept or even acknowledge ospring of mixed parentage. Mining and Agriculture in the Spanish Empire From the Spanish perspective the greatest attractions of the Americas were precious metals, which drew thousands of migrants from all levels of Spanish society. The conquistadores thoroughly looted the easily accessible treasures of the Aztec and Inca empires. Ignoring the artistic or cultural value of artifacts, the conquerors simply melted down silver and gold treasures and fashioned them into ingots. Their followers opened mines to extract the mineral wealth of the Americas in more systematic fashion. Silver Mining Gold was not the most abundant American treasure. Silver far outweighed gold in quantity and value, and much of Spain’s American enterprise focused on its extraction. Silver production concentrated on two areas: the thinly populated Mexican north, particularly the region around Zacatecas, and the high, cold central Andes, particularly the stunningly rich mines of Potosí (present-day Bolivia). Both sites employed large numbers of indigenous laborers. Many laborers went to Zacatecas voluntarily as their home villages experienced the pressures of conquest and disease. Over time they became professional miners, spoke Spanish, and lost touch with the communities of their birth. Meanwhile, Spanish prospectors discovered a large vein of silver near Potosí in 1545 and began large-scale mining there in the 1580s. By 1600 Potosí was a boomtown with a population of 150,000. Rapid growth created an explosive demand for labor. As in the Mexican mines, Spanish administrators relied mostly on voluntary labor, but they also adapted the Inca practice of requisitioning draft labor, known as the mita system, to recruit workers for particularly dicult and dangerous chores that free laborers would not accept. Under the mita system, Spanish authorities annually required each village to send oneseventh of its male population to work for four months in the mines at Potosí. Draft laborers received payment for their work, but wages were very low, and the conditions of work were extremely harsh. Some mita laborers hauled heavy baskets of silver ore up steep mine shafts, while others worked with toxic mercury, which miners used to separate the silver from its ore. Death rates of draft laborers were high, and many indigenous men sought to evade mita obligations by eeing to cities or hiding in distant villages. Thus, even though at any given moment draft laborers represented only about 10 percent of the workforce at Potosí, the mita system touched a large portion of the indigenous population and inuenced settlement patterns throughout the Andean region. The Global Signicance of Silver The mining industries of Mexico and Peru powered the Spanish economy in the Americas and even stimulated the world economy of early modern times. Silver produced prots for private investors and revenues for the crown. The Spanish government reserved a fth of the silver production for itself. This share, known as the quinto, represented the principal revenue that the crown derived from its American possessions. American silver helped Spanish kings nance a powerful army and bureaucracy, but much of it also went well beyond Spain to lubricate the European and the larger world economies.Most American silver made its way across the Atlantic to Spain and markets throughout Europe, and from there European merchants traded it for silk, spices, and porcelain in the markets of Asia. Some silver went from Acapulco on the west coast of Mexico across the Pacic to the Philippines in the Manila galleons, and from Manila it also made its way to Asian markets, especially China. No matter which direction it went or which oceans it crossed, American silver quickly traveled throughout the world and powerfully stimulated global trade. The Hacienda Apart from mining, the principal occupations in Spanish America were farming, stock raising, and craft production. The organization of mining industries created opportunities for cultivators, herders, and artisans to provision mining towns with food, wine, textiles, tools, furniture, and craft items. By the seventeenth century the most prominent site of agricultural and craft production in Spanish America was the estate, or hacienda, which produced foodstus for its own use as well as for sale to local markets in nearby mining districts, towns, and cities. The products of the hacienda were mostly of European origin: wheat, grapes, and meat from pigs and cattle were the most prominent agricultural products. Long Description Mining operations at Potosí in South America gave rise to a large settlement that housed miners and others who supplied food, made charcoal, fashioned tools, and supported the enterprise. In this illustration from the mid-1580s, llamas laden with silver ore descend the mountain (background) while laborers work in the foreground to crush the ore and extract pure silver from it. Bordering the large estates were smaller properties owned by Spanish migrants or creoles as well as sizable tracts of land held by indigenous peoples who lived in native villages and practiced subsistence agriculture. Labor Systems The major source of labor for the haciendas was the indigenous population. Spanish conquerors organized native workforces under the encomienda system. As originally developed in Spain during the era of the reconquista (see chapter 7), the encomienda system rewarded Spanish conquerors by allowing them to exact both labor and tribute from defeated Moorish populations, while in theory requiring the encomenderos to look after the physical and spiritual welfare of their workers. Later, Spanish conquerors transferred the system to the Caribbean, Mexico, Central America, and Andean South America. From the 1520s to the 1540s, the encomienda system led to rampant abuse of indigenous peoples, as Spanish landowners overworked their laborers and skimped on their maintenance. After the mid-century, encomenderos in agriculturally productive regions increasingly required their subject populations to provide tribute but not labor. Populations living under indigenous leadership owned much of the land that they cultivated in villages. In some ways, their payments to Spanish colonists resembled the tributes their ancestors had provided to Aztec rulers. As the encomienda system gradually went out of use, Spanish landowners resorted to a system of debt peonage to recruit labor for their haciendas. Under this system, landowners advanced loans to native peoples so that they could buy seeds, tools, and supplies. The debtors then repaid the loans with labor, but wages were so low that they were never able to pay their debts. Because legal restrictions often prevented debtors from leaving their lands and escaping their obligations, landowners had in eect a captive labor force to work their estates. In eect, then, the line between debt peonage and slavery was not always clear, and indeed the system is sometimes referred to as “debt slavery.” Resistance to Spanish Rule The Spanish regimes in the Americas met considerable resistance from indigenous peoples. Resistance took various forms: rebellion, work slowdowns, and retreat into the mountains and forests where Spanish power did not reach. In 1680, for example, after experiencing nearly a century of forced labor on Spanish estates, several indigenous groups in northern Mexico (the modern-day American state of New Mexico) mounted a large uprising known as the Pueblo revolt. Led by an indigenous shaman named Popé, the rebels attacked missions, killed priests and colonists, and drove Spanish settlers out of the region for twelve years. Spanish forces in Peru faced an even larger rebellion in 1780, when a force of about sixty thousand native peoples revolted in the name of Túpac Amaru, the last of the Inca rulers, whom Spanish conquistadores had beheaded in 1572. This rebellion raged for almost two years before Spanish forces suppressed it and executed thousands of its participants. On some occasions, indigenous peoples turned also to Spanish law and administrators in search of aid against oppressive colonists. In 1615, for example, Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala, a native of Peru, read o a 1,200-page letter—accompanied by some four hundred hand-drawn illustrations—to King Philip III of Spain asking for protection for indigenous peoples against greedy colonists. Although Guaman Poma’s letter never made it to the king, it somehow made its way to Denmark, where it remained undiscovered in a library until 1908. Nevertheless, Guaman Poma’s complaint serves as a record of grievances against the Spanish. The author wrote passionately of men ruined by overtaxation and women driven to prostitution, of Spanish colonists who grabbed the lands of indigenous peoples and Spanish priests who preyed sexually upon the wives of indigenous men. Guaman Poma warned the king that the peoples of Peru were dying fast because of disease and abuse and that Philip Map was drawn in 1569 of Spanish settlement around the Hacienda de Santa Ines in New Spain. The map was intended to be a legal document between Spanish settlers and indigenous inhabitants of the area. wanted anything to remain of his Andean empire, he should intervene and protect the indigenous peoples of the land. Sugar and Slavery in Brazil Whereas the Spanish American empire concentrated on the extraction of silver, the Portuguese Empire in Brazil depended on the production and export of sugar. The dierent economic and social foundations of the Spanish and Portuguese empires led to dierent patterns of labor recruitment. Spanish conquistadores subjugated sedentary peoples with eective administrative systems and compelled them to provide labor in the mines and estates of Mexico and Peru. Portuguese nobles and entrepreneurs established sugar plantations in regions without the administrative machinery to recruit workers and relied instead on imported enslaved Africans as laborers. Indeed, Africans and their descendants became the majority of the population in Brazil, not simply an auxiliary labor force as in Spanish America. The Engenho Colonial Brazilian life revolved around the sugar mill, or engenho. Strictly speaking, the term engenho (related to the English word engine) referred only to the mill itself, but it came to represent a complex of land, labor, buildings, animals, capital, and technical skills related to the production of sugar. Unlike other crops, sugarcane required extensive processing to yield molasses or rened sugar as a protable export. Thus engenhos always combined agricultural and industrial enterprises. They depended both on heavy labor for the planting and harvesting of cane and on the specialized skills of individuals who understood the intricacies of the sugar-making process. As a result, engenhos were among the most complex business enterprises in the Americas. In a colonial economy where sugar gured as the most important export, the Portuguese planters and owners of sugar mills were a privileged class, exercising political, social, and economic power. As long as they contributed to the government’s revenues, they could usually count on strong royal support. The planters acted like landed nobility, but the nature of their enterprises required them to pay attention to aairs like businessmen. They operated on very small prot margins. Their exalted social position often disguised dicult nancial predicaments, and turnover in the business was always high. The Search for Labor Like their Spanish counterparts, Portuguese colonists rst tried to enlist local populations as laborers. Unlike the inhabitants of Mexico and Peru, however, the peoples of Brazil were not sedentary cultivators. They resisted eorts to commandeer their labor, evaded Portuguese forces by retreating to interior lands, and took every opportunity to escape captors who managed to force them into servitude. In addition, as elsewhere in the Americas, epidemic diseases devastated indigenous populations in Brazil. During the 1560s, smallpox and measles ravaged the whole Brazilian coast, making it dicult for Portuguese settlers even to nd potential laborers, let alone force them to work. Slavery Faced with those diculties, the colonists turned to another labor source: enslaved Africans. As we saw in chapter 10, Iberians had been using the labor of enslaved Africans on the Canary and Madeira islands since the late fteenth century. Using this experience as their guide, Portuguese plantation managers in Brazil imported enslaved people as early as the 1530s, but they began to rely on African labor on a large scale only in the 1580s. The labor demands of cane cultivation and sugar production exacted a heavy toll from enslaved communities, who faced arduous working conditions, physical and sexual abuse, tropical heat, poor nutrition, and inadequate housing. These conditions resulted in high rates of disease and mortality for enslaved Africans in Brazil. In any given year, 5 to 10 percent of slaves on engenhos died from such conditions. In Brazil, as in most other plantation societies, the number of deaths in the slave population usually exceeded the number of births, so there was a constant demand for more slaves. Although a few Portuguese criticized this brutal system, government ocials mostly left matters of labor management to slaveholders. To them the balance sheet of sugar production dictated practices that paid scant heed to the preservation of the lives of enslaved people, as long as the owners realized prots. Indeed, if an enslaved person lived ve to six years, the investment of the average slaveholder doubled and permitted him to purchase a new and healthy enslaved person without taking a monetary loss. As a result, slaveholders had little economic incentive to improve conditions for enslaved people or to increase their birthrates. Children required nancial outlays for at least twelve years, which from the perspective of the slaveholder represented a nancial loss. All told, the business of producing Brazilian sugar was so brutal that every ton of the sweet substance cost one human life. Fur Traders and Settlers in North America The Fur Trade European mariners frequented North American shores in search of sh. Although shing was a protable enterprise, trade in furs became far more lucrative. The North American fur trade began when shermen bartered for fur with local peoples. After explorers found a convenient entrance to rich fur-producing regions through the Hudson Strait and Hudson Bay, they began the systematic exploitation of the northern lands. Royal agents, adventurers, businessmen, and settlers began to connect large parts of the North American interior by a chain of forts and trading posts. Indigenous peoples trapped animals for Europeans and exchanged the pelts for manufactured goods such as wool blankets, iron pots, rearms, and distilled spirits. The hides went mostly to Europe, where capitalist markets experienced burgeoning demand for beaver skin hats and fur clothing. Eects of the Fur Trade The fur trade generated tremendous conict in North America. American beaver populations, which were the chief targets of the trade, declined so rapidly that trappers constantly had to push farther inland in search of untapped beaver grounds. When hunting grounds became depleted, indigenous peoples poached or invaded others’ territories, which sometimes led to war. Among the most brutal of those conicts were the French and Iroquois Wars (also called the Beaver Wars) of the seventeenth century, which pitted Iroquois against Hurons and their French allies. The Iroquois sought to expand their diminished An illustration from a nineteenth-century painting showing Native Americans trading pelts onboard Henry Hudson’s ship, in Nova Scotia in 1609. Hudson (born ca. 1560s/1570s) was an English explorer and navigator, who repeatedly searched for a northwest passage to Asia. hunting grounds into the territory of the Hurons (and others) to the north and thus maintain their livelihoods in the fur trade. Competition between Native American groups over the fur trade was complicated by rivalries between European groups. During the French and Iroquois Wars, the Iroquois were allied with the Dutch, while the Huron were allied with the French. The Iroquois used rearms supplied by the Dutch in their campaign to control the fur trade in Huron territory, and in the process tried to eliminate their enemies. Hurons survived the war, although in greatly diminished numbers, but the Iroquois vastly increased their strength and destroyed Huron power. Settler Society European settler-cultivators posed an even more serious challenge to native ways of life than did the fur traders because they displaced indigenous peoples from the land and turned hunting grounds into plantations. The earliest colonists experienced dicult times because European crops such as wheat did not grow well in their settlements. Indeed, many of the early colonies would have perished except for maize, game, and sh supplied by indigenous peoples. Over time, however, French and especially English migrants stabilized their societies and distinguished them sharply from those of indigenous peoples. Tobacco and Other Cash Crops As colonists’ numbers increased, they sought to integrate their American holdings into the larger capitalist economy of the Atlantic Ocean basin by producing cash crops that they could market in Europe. In the English colonies of Virginia and Carolina, settlers concentrated on the cultivation of tobacco, a plant they learned about from Native American societies. Christopher Columbus had observed Taíno people smoking the leaves of a local plant through a pipe called a tobago—the origin of the word tobacco. Later, European visitors frequently observed tobacco consumption among indigenous peoples, who had been using the plant for two thousand years for ritual, medicinal, and social purposes. Maya worshipers blew tobacco smoke from their mouths as oerings to the gods. Priests of the Aztec Empire both smoked tobacco and took it in the form of snu as an accompaniment to religious sacrices. The widespread popularity of this plant was due to the addictive nature of nicotine, an oily, toxic substance present in tobacco leaves. The word “nicotine” comes from the French diplomat, Jean Nicot, who introduced tobacco use to Paris in 1560. Spanish and English promoters rst touted the health benefits of tobacco to European consumers. Many physicians ascribed miraculous healing powers to tobacco, which they referred to as “the herb panacea,” “divine tobacco,” or the “holy herb nicotine.” Merchants and mariners soon spread the use of tobacco throughout Europe and beyond to all parts of the world that European ships visited. In 1612, English settlers cultivated the rst commercial crop of tobacco in Virginia. By 1616, Virginia colonists exported 2,300 pounds of tobacco. European demand for the addictive weed resulted in skyrocketing exports amounting to 200,000 pounds in 1624 and three million pounds in 1638. By the late seventeenth century, most consumers used tobacco socially and for pleasure because tobacco’s alleged health benets never lived up to expectations. By the eighteenth century settlers in the southern colonies had established plantation complexes that produced rice and indigo as well as tobacco, and by the nineteenth century cotton also had become a prominent plantation crop. 

COLONIAL SOCIETY IN THE AMERICAS Continued Fur Traders and Settlers in North America Continued Indentured Labor The plantations created high demand for inexpensive labor. Colonists in North America enslaved indigenous peoples in large numbers, but still the demand for labor grew. By the seventeenth century, colonists began to recruit indentured servants from Europe to increase the supply of labor. People who had little future in Europe—the chronically unemployed, orphans, political prisoners, and criminals—were often willing to sell a portion of their working lives in exchange for passage across the Atlantic and a new start in life. Throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, indentured servants came to the American colonies in hopes that after they had satised their obligation to provide four to seven years of labor they might become independent artisans or planters themselves. (The indentured labor trade in the Americas continued on a smaller scale even into the early twentieth century.) Some indentured servants went on to become prominent gures in colonial society, but many died of disease or overwork before completing their terms of labor, and others found only marginal employment. Slavery in North America Most indentured servants eventually gained their freedom, but other laborers remained in bondage all their lives. Like Iberian colonists, English settlers also used the labor of enslaved Africans in their colonial territories. In 1619 a group of about twenty Africans was brought to Virginia. While it took some time to determine the legal status of Africans, in 1661 Virginia law recognized all Africans as slaves. After 1680, planters increasingly replaced indigenous slaves and indentured servants with enslaved Africans. By 1750 about 120,000 enslaved Africans tilled Chesapeake tobacco, and 180,000 more cultivated Carolina rice. Plantation labor was not prominent in the agricultural production of the northern colonies, principally because the land and the climate were not suitable for the cultivation of laborintensive cash crops. But European settlers in the northern colonies also exploited both indigenous and African slave labor until slavery was outlawed in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. In addition, the economies of these colonies also proted handsomely from slavery. Many New England merchants traded in enslaved people destined for the West Indies: by the mid-eighteenth century, half the merchant eet of Newport carried human cargo. The economies of New York and Philadelphia beneted from the building and outtting of slave vessels, and the seaports of New England became protable centers for the distillation of rum. The chief ingredient of this rum was slave-produced sugar from the West Indies, and merchants traded much of the distilled spirits for enslaved people on the African coast. Thus, although the southern plantation societies became most directly identied with a system that exploited African labor, all the North American colonies participated in and proted from the slave trade. Christianity and Indigenous Religionsin the Americas Like Buddhists and Muslims in earlier centuries, Christian explorers, conquerors, merchants, and settlers took their religious traditions with them when they traveled overseas. Centuries of warfare against Muslims had convinced the Spanish monarchs that non-Christians should be converted to Christianity. In the aftermath of Christopher Columbus’s voyages, Queen Isabella of Spain asserted that the indigenous peoples of the Western Hemisphere were her subjects, and as such had to be converted to Christianity. Thus, when Spanish conquistadores, colonists, and priests came to the Americas, they came both as conquerors as well as evangelists. In the long term, their conversion eorts succeeded, but in the process Catholicism evolved into a religion that integrated Christian concepts with aspects of indigenous beliefs and traditions. Spanish Missionaries From the beginning of Spanish colonization in Mexico and Peru, Roman Catholic priests served as representatives of the crown and reinforced civil administrators. Franciscan, Dominican, Jesuit, and other missionaries campaigned to Christianize indigenous peoples. In Mexico, for example, a group of twelve Franciscan missionaries arrived in 1524. They founded a school in Tlatelolco, the bustling market district of the Aztec capital of Tenochtitlan, where they educated the sons of prominent noble families in Latin, Spanish, and Christian doctrine. The missionaries themselves learned native languages and sought to explain Christianity in terms their audiences could understand. They also compiled a vast amount of information about indigenous societies in hopes of learning how best to communicate their message. The work of the Franciscan Bernardino de Sahagún was especially important. Sahagún preserved volumes of information about the language, customs, beliefs, literature, and history of Mexico before the arrival of Spanish forces there (a tiny portion of which can be seen in the rst “Sources of the Past” selection in this chapter). His work remained largely unstudied until the twentieth century, but in recent times it has shed enormous light both on Aztec society and on the methods of early missionaries in Mexico. INTERPRETING IMAGES Analyze Consider this image and that of Sir Walter Raleigh on page 396. Compared to spices, gems, and even sugar, tobacco may be considered less desirable, and yet it became a major expert product. Why? Survival of Indigenous Religions Christian missionaries encountered considerable resistance in the Americas. In both Mexico and Peru, indigenous peoples continued to observe their inherited faiths into the seventeenth century and beyond, even though Spanish authorities sponsored the Roman Catholic faith and tried to eliminate the worship of indigenous gods. In the face of Spanish persecution, indigenous peoples often continued their religious practices in locations inaccessible to Catholic priests. Yet Christianity also won adherents in Spanish America. In the wake of conquest and epidemic disease, many indigenous leaders in Mexico concluded that their gods had abandoned them and looked to the missionaries for spiritual guidance. When indigenous peoples adopted Christianity, however, they blended their own interests and traditions with the faith taught by Spanish missionaries. When they learned about Roman Catholic saints, for example, they revered saints with qualities like those of their inherited gods or those whose feast days coincided with traditional celebrations. An eighteenth-century engraving depicts work on a tobacco plantation: several enslaved Africans prepare our and bread from manioc (left), while others hang tobacco leaves to dry in a shed (right). The illustration helps capture the labor intensity of plantation life for enslaved peoples. The Virgin of Guadalupe In Mexico, Roman Catholicism became especially popular after the mid-seventeenth century. One reason for this was the Virgin of Guadalupe, who came to be worshipped almost as a national symbol. According to legends, the Virgin Mary appeared before the devout peasant Juan Diego on a hill near Mexico City in 1531. The site of the apparition soon became a popular local shrine visited mostly by Spanish settlers. By the 1640s the shrine attracted pilgrims from all parts of Mexico, and the Virgin of Guadalupe gained a reputation for working miracles on behalf of individuals who visited her shrine. The Virgin of Guadalupe, with her darker, indigenous complexion, came to symbolize a distinctly Mexican faith, and in later years she became transformed as a result into a powerful symbol of Mexican nationalism. The popularity of the Virgin of Guadalupe helped to ensure not only that Roman Catholic Christianity would dominate cultural and religious matters in Mexico but also that Mexican religious faith would retain strong indigenous inuences. French and English Missions French and English missionaries did not attract nearly as many converts to Christianity in North America as their Spanish counterparts did in Mexico and Peru. In part this was because French and English colonists did not rule over conquered populations of sedentary cultivators: it was much more dicult to conduct missions among peoples who frequently moved about the countryside than among those who lived permanently in villages, towns, or cities. English colonists, moreover, displayed little interest in converting indigenous peoples to Protestantism. The colonists did not discourage converts, but they made little eort to seek them, nor did they welcome converted indigenous people into their agricultural and commercial society. In contrast, Catholic French missionaries worked actively among native communities in the St. Lawrence, Mississippi, and Ohio River valleys Their eorts, however, were only modestly successful. Yet even though native peoples did not embrace Christianity, the burgeoning settlements of French and especially English colonists guaranteed that European religious traditions would gure prominently in North American society. 

EUROPEANS IN THE PACIFIC Though geographically distant from the Americas, Australia and the Pacic Islands underwent experiences similar to those that transformed the Western Hemisphere in early modern times. Like their American counterparts, the peoples of Oceania had no inherited or acquired immunities to diseases that were common to peoples throughout the Eastern Hemisphere, and their numbers plunged when epidemic disease struck their populations. For the most part, however, the peoples of Australia and the Pacic Islands experienced epidemic disease and the arrival of European migrants later than did the peoples of the Americas. European mariners thoroughly explored the Pacic basin between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries, but only in Guam and the Mariana Islands did they establish permanent settlements before the late eighteenth century. Nevertheless, their scouting of the region laid a foundation for much more intense interactions between European, EuroAmerican, Asian, and Oceanic peoples during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Australia and the Larger World At least from the second century .., European geographers had speculated about terra australis incognita (“unknown southern land”) that they thought must exist in the world’s southern hemisphere to balance the huge landmasses north of the equator. As European mariners explored the Atlantic and Pacic Oceans during early modern times, they searched expectantly for a southern continent. Yet their principal interest was trade, and they rarely abandoned the pursuit of prot to sail out of their way in search of an unknown land. Dutch Exploration Europeans rst approached the Australian continent from the west in Southeast Asia. Portuguese mariners likely charted much of the western and northern coast of Australia as early as the 1520s, but Dutch sailors made the rst recorded European sighting of the southern continent in 1606. The Dutch VOC (see chapter 10) authorized exploratory voyages, but mariners found little to encourage further eorts. In 1623, after surveying the dry landscapes of western Australia, the Dutch mariner Jan Carstenzs reported that his party had not seen “one fruit-bearing tree, nor anything that man could make use of: there are no mountains or even hills, so that it may be safely concluded that the land contains no metals, nor yields any precious woods.” He went on to describe the land as “the most arid and barren region that could be found anywhere on earth.” Nevertheless, Dutch mariners continued to visit Australia. By the mid-seventeenth century, they had scouted the continent’s northern, western, and southern coasts, and they had ascertained that New Guinea and Tasmania were islands separate from Australia itself. Dutch explorers were so active in the reconnaissance of Australia that Europeans referred to the southern continent as “New Holland” throughout the seventeenth century. Yet neither Dutch nor any other European seamen visited the eastern coast until James Cook approached Australia from the southeast and charted the region in 1770, barely escaping destruction on the Great Barrier Reef. Why did Spanish mariners not explore the Hawaiian Islands and the more southerly Pacic Islands as they made their way to the Philippines? Although European mariners explored Australian coastlines in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, they made only brief landfalls and had only eeting encounters with indigenous peoples. The aboriginal peoples of Australia had formed many distinct foraging and shing societies, but European visitors did not linger long enough to become familiar with either the peoples or their societies. Because they were nomadic foragers rather than sedentary cultivators, Europeans did not hold them in high regard. In the absence of tempting opportunities to trade, European mariners made no eort to establish permanent settlements in Australia. British Colonists Only after Cook’s charting of the eastern coast in 1770 did European peoples become seriously interested in Australia. Cook dropped anchor for a week at Botany Bay (near modern Sydney) and reported that the region was suitable for settlement. In 1788 a British eet arrived at Sydney carrying about one thousand passengers, eight hundred of them convicts, who established the rst European settlement in Australia as a penal colony. For half a century Europeans in Australia numbered only a few thousand, most of them convicts who herded sheep. Free settlers did not outnumber convicted criminals until the 1830s. Thus exploratory voyages of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries led to eeting encounters Long Description MAP 12.2 Manila galleon route and the lands of Oceania, 1500–1800. Note the route taken by the Manila galleons in relation to the majority of the Pacic Islands. between European and aboriginal Australian peoples, but only in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries did a continuing stream of European settlers link Australia more directly to the larger world. The Pacic Islands and the Larger World The entry of European mariners into the Pacic Ocean basin did not bring immediate change to most of the Pacic Islands. In these islands, as in Australia, European merchants and settlers did not arrive in large numbers until the late eighteenth century. Guam and the Mariana Islands underwent dramatic change already in the sixteenth century, however, and the ventures of European merchants and explorers in the Pacic basin set the stage for profound upheavals in other island societies during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Spanish Voyages in the Pacic In 1521 Ferdinand Magellan and his crew became the rst Europeans to cross the Pacic Ocean. Before reaching the Philippines, they encountered only one inhabited island group— the Marianas, dominated by Guam. In 1565 Spanish mariners inaugurated the Manila galleon trade between Manila and Acapulco. Because their primary goal was to link New Spain to Asian markets, they rarely went out of their way to explore the Pacic Ocean or to search for other islands. Spanish vessels visited the Marquesas, Tuamotu, Cook, Solomon, and New Hebrides islands in the sixteenth century, and it is likely that one or more stray ships accidentally ended up in Hawai′i. Yet Spanish mariners found little to interest them in most of the Pacic islands and did not establish regular communications with island peoples. They usually sailed before the trade winds from Acapulco to Manila on a route that took them south of Hawai′i and north of other Polynesian islands. On the return trip they sailed before the westerlies on a route that took them well north of all the Pacic Islands. Guam The only Pacic Islands that attracted substantial Spanish interest in the sixteenth century were Guam and the northern Mariana Islands. Manila galleons called regularly at Guam, which lay directly on the route from Acapulco to Manila. For more than a century, they took on fresh provisions and engaged in mostly peaceful trade with the indigenous Chamorro people. During the 1670s and 1680s, Spanish authorities decided to consolidate their position in Guam and bring the Mariana Islands under the control of the viceroy of New Spain in Mexico. They dispatched military forces to the islands to impose Spanish rule and subject the Chamorro to the spiritual authority of the Roman Catholic church. The Chamorro strongly opposed those eorts, but a smallpox epidemic in 1688 severely reduced their numbers and crippled their resistance. By 1695 the Chamorro population had declined from about fty thousand at mid-century to ve thousand, partly because of Spanish campaigns but mostly because of smallpox. By the end of the seventeenth century, Spanish forces had established garrisons throughout the Mariana Islands and relocated surviving Chamorro into communities supervised by Spanish authorities. Visitors and Trade Like the aboriginal peoples of Australia, the indigenous peoples of the Pacic Islands had mostly eeting encounters with European visitors during early modern times. By the late eighteenth century, however, growing European and Euro-American interest in the Pacic Ocean basin led to sharply increased interactions between islanders and mariners. English and French mariners explored the Pacic basin in search of commercial opportunities and the elusive northwest passage from Europe to Asia. They frequently visited Tahiti after 1767, and they soon began to trade with the islanders, whose societies were complex and highly stratied by social class and by occupation (discussed in greater depth in chapter 8). European mariners received provisions and engaged in sexual relations with Tahitian women in exchange for nails, knives, iron tools, and textiles. Although trade was mostly peaceful, misunderstandings based on European ignorance about social practices often led to skirmishes and acts of violence, and European captains occasionally trained their cannons on eets of war canoes or villages in the Pacic Islands. Captain Cook and Hawai′i The experiences of Captain James Cook in Hawai′i illustrate a common pattern. In 1778, while sailing north from Tahiti in search of the northwest passage, Cook happened across the Hawaiian Islands. He immediately recognized Hawaiians as a people related to Tahitians and other Polynesians whose lands he had visited during his explorations of the Pacic Ocean since 1768, and he was able to communicate with Hawaiians on the basis of familiarity with Polynesian languages. Cook and his crew mostly got along well with Hawaiians, who readily traded pigs and provisions for ironwares. Sailors and island women avidly consorted with one another, resulting in the transmission of venereal diseases to Hawai′i, even though Cook had ordered infected crewmen to remain aboard ship. After a few weeks’ stay in the islands, Cook resumed his northern course to seek the northwest passage. When he revisited Hawai′i late in 1779, he faced a very dierent climate, one in which islanders were less accommodating than before. Indeed, he lost his life when disputes over petty thefts escalated into a bitter conict between his crew and islanders of Hawai′i. Long Description As depicted in 1816 by artist Ludwig Choris, the port of Honolulu in the Hawaiian Islands was home to European ships, horses, cattle, and warehouses as well as Hawaiians inhabiting traditional dwellings. Nevertheless, in the wake of Cook, whose reports soon became known Page 402 throughout Europe, whalers began to venture into Pacic waters in large numbers, followed by missionaries, merchants, and planters. By the early nineteenth century, European and Euro-American peoples had become prominent gures in all the major Pacic Islands groups. During the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, interactions among islanders, visitors, and migrants brought rapid and often unsettling change to Pacic Islands societies. 

CHAPTER 12 CONCLUSION The Americas underwent thorough transformation in early modern times. Smallpox and other diseases sparked ferocious epidemics that devastated indigenous populations and undermined their societies. In the wake of severe depopulation, European peoples toppled imperial states, established mining and agricultural enterprises, imported enslaved African laborers, and founded colonies throughout much of the Western Hemisphere. Some indigenous peoples disappeared entirely as distinct groups. Others maintained their communities, identities, and cultural traditions but fell increasingly under the inuence of European migrants and their Euro-American ospring. In Oceania only Guam and the Mariana Islands felt the full eects of epidemic disease and migration in the early modern era. By the late eighteenth century, however, European and Euro-American peoples with advanced technologies had thoroughly explored the Pacic Ocean basin, and epidemic diseases featured largely in their encounters with the peoples of Australia and the Pacic Islands. As a result, during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Oceania underwent a social transformation similar to the one experienced earlier by the Americas. These encounters in both regions profoundly shaped the course of their history into the modern era.

Chapter 12: The Integration of the Americas and Oceania with the Wider World

• Significant Figures: Doña Marina, also known as La Malinche, played a crucial role in the Spanish conquest of Mexico, serving as a translator and intermediary for Hernán Cortés.

• Atlantic World: The term describes the interconnections among Western Europe, West Africa, and the Americas, focusing on the exchange of silver and sugar.

• Colonial Impacts: Mesoamerican societies were transformed due to European technologies, diseases, and political machinations, leading to the rise of new societal structures in the Americas.

• European Empires: European exploration led to the establishment of maritime empires, with the Spanish and Portuguese focusing on resource extraction like silver and sugar.

• Labor Systems: Indigenous labor systems and enslavement of Africans reshaped colonial economies, particularly through systems like encomienda and plantation agriculture.

• Cultural Interactions: Indigenous peoples retained some traditional practices while adapting to new European religions, leading to diverse societal compositions.

• Colonial Society: Various social classes emerged, including mestizos, influenced by intermarriage and migration patterns, especially in Spanish territories.

• Resistance: Indigenous populations often resisted colonial rule through rebellions and alternative resistive strategies.

• Impact of Diseases: Epidemic diseases drastically reduced indigenous populations in both the Americas and Oceania.

• Oceania Exploration: European interest in the Pacific was heightened by explorations that followed earlier contact with the Americas and included trade and colonial aspirations.

Chapter 12: The Integration of the Americas and Oceania with the Wider World

Introduction to Doña Marina

• A remarkable figure in the Spanish conquest of Mexico, Doña Marina is also known as Malintzin and La Malinche.

• Born around 1500 in central Mexico, her mother tongue was Nahuatl, the principal language of the Aztec Empire.

• As a young girl, her family sold her into slavery, leading her to the Mexican coast and eventually the Yucatan peninsula.

• Through her journey, she not only retained her native language but also became fluent in Maya due to her interactions with various indigenous groups.

Role in the Spanish Conquest

• In 1519, when Hernán Cortés arrived on the Mexican coast, he found himself in need of a translator to communicate with Nahuatl-speaking peoples of central Mexico.

• A Maya chieftain introduced twelve young women, including Doña Marina, to Cortés, significantly bolstering his alliance against the Aztecs.

• Initially serving as a translator through a complex chain of Spanish to Maya to Nahuatl, she quickly learned Spanish and streamlined communication.

• Her linguistic capabilities allowed Cortés to gather vital intelligence about indigenous plans and negotiate with emissaries from key cities such as Tenochtitlan, the Aztec capital.

Controversial Legacy

• While Doña Marina aided Cortés significantly, her collaboration with the Spanish led to her being labeled a traitor, or La Malinche, in Mexican history, highlighting the complicated choices and lack of power faced by indigenous peoples under colonial rule.

• Social dynamics in Mesoamerica were multifaceted; many chose to ally with the Spanish due to dissatisfaction with Aztec rule.

Personal Life and Aftermath

• Doña Marina bore a son with Cortés in 1522 and later married a Spanish captain, giving birth to a daughter in 1526.

• Although the exact nature of her relationships remains unknown, her children symbolize the emerging mestizo population in Mexico.

• Doña Marina died around 1527, but her contributions were instrumental in the foundational transformation of Mexican society.

The Atlantic World

• The term "Atlantic World" describes the interconnectedness between Western Europe, West Africa, and the Americas during this transformative period.

• Initial explorations focused on silver and sugar, fueling economies worldwide, especially in Western Europe by the 17th century.

• The Spanish extraction of silver from the Inca Potosi mine triggered inflationary crises across Europe, while also establishing a trade network with China aided by silver shipments.

• The cultivation of sugar relied heavily on enslaved African labor, decimating families and communities in Africa and resulting in a massive importation of enslaved Africans to sugar plantations in the Caribbean.

Patterns of Settlement

• Historians categorize European settlements into non-settler and settler colonies, leading to the creation of new social classes as Europe, Africa, and indigenous populations mingled.

• Religions blended through conversion processes, with indigenous peoples and Africans adopting Christian elements while retaining traditional practices.

European Maritime Empires

• Driven by political, religious, and economic rivalries, several European nations established maritime empires: the Portuguese, Spanish, Dutch, French, and British, focused largely on agriculture and new labor systems such as chattel slavery.

Demographic Changes Post-Contact

• From 1492 onward, encounters between Eastern and Western Hemispheres led to major population declines due to introduced diseases and the violence of European conquests.

• European military advantages bolstered by horses and advanced weaponry facilitated the establishment of settlements and colonies throughout the Americas and the Pacific Islands.

Examining Indigenous Peoples and the Taíno

• The Taíno people were primarily affected at Spanish contact, eventually facing warfare, enslavement, and catastrophic population declines due to diseases like smallpox, which devastated their numbers and cultural identities.

Colonial Economy and Society

• The establishment of cities and colonial economies varied considerably, dependent on agricultural and labor systems.

• The demand for cash crops like sugar and tobacco became paramount in sustaining colonial administrations across Spain and its territories in the Americas.

Conclusion

• The Americas experienced dramatic transformations, with European colonization resulting in profound social, cultural, and demographic changes, creating multicultural societies that would shape the trajectory of history in both the Americas and Oceania for centuries to come.

Study Questions:

1. How did Doña Marina's linguistic skills affect the outcome of the Spanish conquest?

2. What were the economic foundations of the Atlantic World, and how did they influence global trade?

3. How did intermarriage and migration patterns contribute to the formation of mestizo societies in colonial Latin America?