1.4 & 1.5: Spanish Exploration and Conquest

1.4: Explain causes of the Columbian Exchange and its effect on Europe and the Americas during the period after 1492.

1.5: Explain how the growth of the Spanish Empire in North America shaped the development of social and economic structures over time.

In the last set of notes, we considered the Columbian Exchange, and now, we’re going to go over the labor systems that sprung up as a result of the Spanish after the exchange began.

Slavery

While the selling of people into slavery had a long history in Africa, usually the status of being a slave was not permanent or passed on to one’s children. However, Europeans changed this when they started establishing forts along the African costs. They traded goods, especially guns, for enslaved people. African groups would use these guns to conquer other groups and enslave them to provide Europeans with the slaves.

To try to justify to themselves that slavery wasn’t as bad as it was, Europeans developed beliefs that deemed black people inferior. Initially, Africans were brought in as indentured servants, as seen in the colony of Virginia in 1619. But after indentured servitude stopped being feasible due to the servants having to be set free after a few years, the colonists switched to slavery.

Encomienda System

When Columbus departed from the Americas for the final time, he introduced a labor system that quickly spread throughout Spanish settlements in the Caribbean. Under this system, the Spanish king granted land and natives to people in exchange for their loyalty, and the natives had to work in mines or farms. In return, the natives’ masters were responsible for their "care”. Ferdinand and Isabella created the Requerimiento, a legal document that allowed them to claim land in the Americas and convert its inhabitants to Christianity. Priests were sent to carry out the conversions, and the natives were offered protection if they converted. If they resisted, they lost the protection and could be killed.

So now, we have three different groups in the Spanish-controlled Americas: the Spanish, the Africans, and the Native Americans. And because of this, the Spanish instituted a new social hierarchy to organize these groups of people and make it easy to impose taxes, where the people at the bottom were more taxed.

The Casta System: This was the social hierarchy that resulted and was based on racial ancestry. From top to bottom:

  • Peninsulares: People born in Spain

  • Criollos: Spanish people born in the Americas

  • Mestizoes: People of Spanish and Native American ancestry

  • Mulattos: People of Spanish and African ancestry

  • Native Americans

  • Africans

The Spanish wanted to switch from the encomienda system of labor because the Native Americans were dying from European diseases and could easily escape due to their knowledge of the land. To solve this problem, the Spanish began importing African slaves instead. This worked out better because Africans had better immunity to European diseases and were less familiar with the land than the Spanish. This rapid demographic and societal transformation led to the acquisition of vast amounts of gold and silver, making Spain wealthy.