Empires of the Atlantic World: Britain and Spain in America 1492-1830

by John H. Elliott

  The realization that the soil was suitable for the cultivation of tobacco and that the home country would pay a good price for the `weede' proved to be the salvation of the Jamestown colony. Extensive cultivation got under way in Virginia in the 1620s, and would spread in the 1630s and 1640s to the newly founded colony of Maryland. As tobacco exports grew, so also did the population - from 2,500 in Virginia in 1630 to a total of 23,000 for the two colonies in 1650, and up to 100,000 by the end of the century.53 Tobacco cultivation came to dominate the life of the Chesapeake region, shaping its dispersed settlement patterns along the waterways, and the character of its labour supply.

  Sugar had a comparable transforming effect on the economy and the prospects of the island of Barbados, which was annexed in 1625 by a passing British captain, and then colonized as a commercial venture sponsored by a London syndicate until Charles I granted its proprietorship, along with that of the Leeward Islands, to the Earl of Carlisle.54 The original sponsors had planned to develop the island as a tobacco colony, but the crop proved disappointing, and the struggling planters were saved by the discovery that the soil was ideal for the cultivation of sugar. In the 1640s and 1650s, as the techniques of cane production were imported from Portuguese Brazil, Barbados's sugar production shot up, with spectacular consequences for immigration rates and for the price of land and foodstuffs.55

  The export of sugar, supplemented by that of cotton, made Barbados easily the richest English possession in the Americas in the second half of the seventeenth century (fig. 10). While its population was little more than half that of Virginia, the value of its exports was almost 50 per cent more.56 Like the silver of Mexico and Peru, the sugar of Barbados created a febrile prosperity, encouraging those who benefited from the production and export of a commodity in high demand in Europe to make the most of their good fortune and indulge in a life-style consonant with their newly acquired affluence. But, as the relatively simple life-style of the Chesapeake tobacco planters in the later seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries makes clear, there were other possible reactions to the potential riches of a natural resource .57 A sense of the fragility created by dependence on a single export staple in fluctuating markets could provoke diametrically different responses, ranging from lavish spending and conspicuous consumption to a prudential approach in the face of an uncertain future in an impermanent world.

  Many considerations would enter into the fashioning of these diverse responses - inherited cultural traditions, the nature of the resource, and the relationship of the elite to its production and marketing. One way or another, however, the overwhelming dependence on a single resource inevitably shaped the perceptions, attitudes and behaviour of the emerging elites in colonial societies wherever it occurred. Their lives, and with them the character of their societies as a whole, would revolve around the fluctuations in the production of, and demand for, their staple commodity. These fluctuations would be dictated both by local and European conditions, and by the continuing provision of an adequate labour supply at a realistic cost.

  Labour supply

  The labour systems developed in Spanish and British America for the production of their staple commodities were heavily conditioned by the degree to which they were populated by Indians capable of being put to productive work by the colonists. The Spaniards were exceptionally fortunate in that their silverproducing regions lay either within, or relatively close to, densely populated regions of indigenous settlement. This made it possible, by one device or another, to recruit a native labour force for working in the mines. The first areas of English settlement lacked any such advantage. In the absence of a densely settled and usable local population, the settlers and their sponsors were forced to come up with other solutions to the problem of providing a continuing labour supply for growing and processing their staple crop.

  The challenge confronting the Spanish colonists and colonial authorities was how to mobilize the potentially vast indigenous labour force without infringing too blatantly the letter of the law. Ferdinand and Isabella had laid down the fundamental principle that the indigenous inhabitants in the new overseas territories of the Crown of Castile were vassals of the crown, and, as such, were not to be enslaved. `What power of mine does the admiral hold to give my vassals to anyone?' asked Isabella in 1498 on being told that Columbus had allowed every returning settler from Hispaniola to bring a slave back to Spain. All the slaves were forthwith to be freed.58 There were, however, exceptions, and the conquerors and early settlers were quick to exploit them. In 1503 Isabella permitted the enslavement of man-eating Caribs, `because of the crimes they have committed against my subjects'S9 - a provision that effectively gave carte blanche to the Hispaniola settlers to engage in slave-raids on the neighbouring islands. They could also resort to the rules of `just war', as developed in medieval Christendom, by which infidels who persisted in resisting Christian forces and fell into their hands could legitimately be enslaved. In the circumstances surrounding Spanish expansion into America, this provision was open to obvious abuse. It was in the hope of curbing this abuse, and laying down the ground rules for establishing whether the Spaniards were justified in launching an attack, that the device of reading aloud the requerimiento to bemused Indians had been devised.60

  As Las Casas and others were quick to point out, the conquerors and first settlers made a mockery of the requerimiento,61 which in effect became a sanction for committing illegalities under the guise of legitimacy. The Caribbean islands, and the heavily populated central American mainland region between Mexico and Panama, became a vast catchment area in which Spanish raiders seized Indians for enslavement, using specious arguments of `just war' as their pretext, and salving their consciences by pointing to the existence of slavery among the Indians themselves. The new slaves were then transported to regions where labour was needed - New Spain, Guatemala and, increasingly, Panama and Peru.62

  Under Charles V, the crown sought to limit the abuses by further legislation. This culminated in a decree of 1542, subsequently incorporated into the New Laws later that same year, ordering that nobody in future should enslave Indians, `even if they are taken in just war'. Indians were neither to be purchased nor otherwise acquired, but were to be treated, as the New Laws put it, `like our vassals of the crown of Castile, since that is what they are'.63 The founding in 1543 of a new court, the Audiencia de los Confines (later to become the Audiencia of Guatemala), brought some improvement, but the decline of Indian enslavement in central America after the middle years of the century was largely caused by the extinction of much of the potential slave population. Elsewhere, enslavement continued wherever royal authority was weak or officials were willing to turn a blind eye. This was particularly true of the lawless border areas on the fringes of empire, like Chile and New Mexico, whose conqueror and first governor, Juan de Orate, razed the village of Acoma in 1599 and sentenced adult captives to two decades of personal servitude. The leading families of seventeenth-century New Mexico would all have their Indian bondsmen and women, many of whom were in reality slaves.64

  In the principal regions of Spain's American empire, however, the prohibition of Indian slavery made it necessary to devise alternative methods of recruiting indigenous labour. Initially this was achieved through the encomienda system, which was supplemented, and in some regions gradually replaced as a source of labour, by the repartimiento, or short-term allocation of Indians by royal officials to non-encomenderos for different forms of compulsory service .6- In the middle years of the sixteenth century, when vast new reserves of labour were needed for working the newly discovered silver deposits, the sharp fall in the size of the indigenous population was already beginning to undermine the foundations of the encomienda system. In the eyes of the colonial authorities silver production came to take precedence over all other requirements, including those of the encomenderos. As an early viceroy of Peru put it, `if there are no mines, there is no Peru.'66 Although the crown remained reluctant to reverse its policies and
sanction a system of forced Indian labour, its local officials were driven by necessity to devise their own strategies, which they tailored to meet local circumstances.

  In Peru, Don Francisco de Toledo, who arrived as viceroy in 1569, oversaw the elaboration of a forced labour system based on a combination of Inca precedent and recently developed Spanish practice. Using as their model the mita employed by the Incas for public works, the Spaniards arranged for the provision of a continuous labour supply for the Potosi mines by means of a rota system, under which one-seventh of the adult male Indians from a wide catchment area in the Andean highlands were drafted for a year's labour in Potosi. The mitayos, although miserably remunerated, were accorded basic rates of pay. Towards the end of the sixteenth century their labour was increasingly supplemented by that of voluntary workers, known as mingas, who were drawn to Potosi by the prospect of the wages that were offered.67 Their presence brought the system closer to that employed in New Spain, where the mines were located too far away from the large sedentary population of central Mexico to make a forced labour system feasible. Instead, Zacatecas and the other mines made use of migrant Indians who were lured to the north by the offer of salaried labour. Gradually but inexorably, in both New Spain and Peru, the indigenous population, considered to be congenitally idle by the Spaniards - themselves generally regarded as something of an authority on the subject - was being sucked into a European-style wage economy.

  The prime solution to the labour problem in Spanish America, therefore, was found in a combination of forced and `voluntary' indigenous labour. As the indigenous population shrank, however, it was increasingly incapable of meeting the numerous demands imposed upon it. Since it was unthinkable that settlers and their descendants should engage in menial labour, the only remaining option - unless the Spanish crown was prepared, as it was not, to open its American territories to immigrants from other European states - was to import a coerced labour force from overseas. The richest and most accessible source of supply was black Africa.61

  Precedents were well established. At the beginning of the sixteenth century the Iberian peninsula - especially Andalusia and Portugal - possessed a substantial population of Moorish and African slaves, working both in the fields and in domestic service. It was therefore a logical extension of current Iberian practice for Ferdinand to authorize the despatch in 1510 of fifty slaves to work in the Hispaniola gold mines. In 1518 his successor, Charles, not yet elected to the Imperial title, granted one of the members of his Flemish entourage, Laurent de Gorrevod, an eight-year licence, which he then sold for 25,000 ducats to the Genoese bankers, to import black slaves into the Indies.69 Hitherto, the slaves sent to the New World had mostly been drawn from the peninsula, and were therefore Spanish-speaking, as were the black servants or slaves who crossed the Atlantic with the conquistadores, and made a valuable contribution to expeditions of discovery and conquest.70 They were also Christian converts, since the crown was not prepared to run the risk of having its overseas territories infiltrated by Islam.71 Following the grant to Gorrevod, the traffic in slaves to the Indies acquired a new dimension. The prohibition on the introduction of Muslims into America remained at least nominally in place, but with the granting of the first of the asientos or contracts issued under a monopoly system for the regulation of the Atlantic slave trade, the way was open for slaves to be transported direct from Africa to the Indies, without necessarily experiencing a period of acculturation on Iberian soil.

  In the years up to 1550, some 15,000 African slaves were officially recorded as arriving in the Spanish Indies, and a further 36,300 between 1550 and 1595,72 but the real numbers, swollen by a growing contraband trade, must have been substantially larger. In the six years following the introduction in 1595 of a new monopoly contract between the Spanish crown and a Portuguese merchant, Pedro Gomes Reinel, who ran the Angola slave trade, there was a sudden massive upsurge in the number of Africans shipped to Spanish America. The 80,500 transported in those five years may have pushed the total for the sixteenth century to 150,000, excluding the further 50,000 taken to Brazil.73

  The dominance of the Atlantic slave trade achieved by Portuguese merchants in the last quarter of the sixteenth century at the expense of their Genoese rivals followed logically from the establishment of Portuguese trading bases down the coast of West Africa during the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, and the rise to pre-eminence of Lisbon as the slave trade capital of the western world.74 The Portuguese acquired a further advantage following the union of the crowns of Castile and Portugal in 1580. As the subjects of Philip II they were now well positioned to negotiate profitable deals in Madrid, and they seized their opportunity. In the years during which they held the monopoly contract, between 1595 and 1640, Portuguese merchants shipped between 250,000 and 300,000 Africans into Spanish America, thousands of them clandestinely through the port city of Buenos Aires, refounded by the Spaniards in 1580.75 From here they were sent on to Peru, where their labour was needed to supplement that of the Indians in the mines and the fields. Other ports of entry were Santo Domingo, Havana, Vera Cruz and, above all, Cartagena, which received more than half the total number of slaves legally shipped to Spanish America between 1549 and 1640.76

  By the early seventeenth century, therefore, the mechanisms of an international Atlantic slave trade had been firmly established. Sir William Alexander, in his An Encouragement to Colonies of 1624, would castigate the shipping of slaves from Angola and other parts of Africa to the Spanish Indies as `an unnatural mer- chandise',77 but in principle the way was open for the English in America to follow suit. Whether they did so would depend on their own labour requirements and the consideration of relative costs.

  Spain's empire of the Indies offered numerous examples of the large variety of ways in which African slaves could be employed. Once on the mainland, they were first established in substantial numbers in the capitals of the two viceroyalties, Mexico City and Lima. Although slavery would soon spread to the countryside, urban slavery was to be a continuing feature of life in a society in which African slaves would come to constitute anything between 10 and 25 per cent of the populations of major cities like Lima, Mexico City, Quito, Cartagena and Santa Fe de Bogota.78 Large numbers of Africans, both slave and free, were employed as household servants; others became skilled craftsmen, at a time when artisans of Spanish origin proved unable to keep pace with the growth in demand.79 Many arrived from Spain in the entourage of officials and other Spanish dignitaries.80 Once in the Indies, the presence of such retainers enhanced the prestige of their masters, both Spanish and creole, as they travelled by coach through the streets or took the evening air. `The gentlemen', wrote the English renegade, Thomas Gage, when describing Mexico City in 1625, `have their train of blackamoor slaves, some a dozen, some half a dozen, waiting on them, in brave and gallant liveries, heavy with gold and silver lace, with silk stockings on their black legs, and roses on their feet, and swords by their sides."'

  In the Caribbean islands, and later in New Spain, slaves were employed in the cultivation of sugar cane. The five hundred contracted by Cortes in 1542 to work on his Mexican sugar estates82 were the harbingers of the thousands upon thousands whose backs would bear the burden of working the plantation economies of the Caribbean islands and mainland America in a later age. While extensively employed on the haciendas of encomenderos, African slaves were also drafted into the textile workshops of New Spain and Peru to supplement the native workforce of sweated Indian labour. In the lowlands of New Granada, they replaced a dwindling indigenous population as members of labour gangs panning for gold in the rivers and creeks.83

  There was also a growing and unsatisfied demand for enslaved or free black labour in the mines of northern Mexico as Indian workers succumbed to European diseases. By the end of the sixteenth century, blacks and mulattoes (the offspring of Spanish men and African women) had become indispensable to the mining economy of New Spain: as the saying went in Zacatecas, `bad to have them, but muc
h worse not to have them.'84 But expense remained a problem. It was more costly to employ imported African labour than indigenous Indian labour in the mines. In the silver workings of Potosi, for which an indigenous work-force, habituated to working at such an altitude, could be mobilized from the surrounding regions, the relative labour costs proved an overwhelming deterrent to royal officials anxious to relieve the exploitation of Indians by abandoning the mita.85 In other areas of economic activity in Peru, however, black slaves and their descendants came to play a vital role, especially in Lima and the coastal zone, where the Indian population decreased faster than it did in the highlands. They not only supplied a large part of the urban artisan labour force, but they also worked on the irrigated plots that sprang up round the towns. They tended the livestock on the large estates and drove the ox and mule carts on which the transportation system introduced by the Spaniards into America depended.86

  African labour, therefore, whether slave or free, made a decisive contribution to economic activity in Spanish America, although it varied in scale and character from region to region. The greatest concentrations of Africans were to be found in the tropical and sub-tropical zones - the Antilles, the coastal regions of the two viceroyalties, and in New Granada and Venezuela.87 The sheer numbers of those of African descent in the two viceroyalties as a whole - in 1640 some 150,000 in New Spain and 30,000 in Peru, of whom 20,000 lived in Lima88 - suggest something of their indispensability to the functioning of the colonial economy, although the silver production on which the fortunes of Spain's empire of the Indies ultimately turned would have been impossible without the toil of the Indians working in the mines of New Spain and Peru.