Chapter 12: Spaniards and Portuguese: From Reconquest to Conquest (PDF)

12.1 Spaniards and Portuguese: From Reconquest to Conquest The peoples who inhabited the Iberian peninsula in the Middle Ages had long lived at the frontier of Mediterranean Europe on a cultural frontier between Christianity and Islam. Conflicts created a strong tradition of military conquest and r...

12.1 Spaniards and Portuguese: From Reconquest to Conquest The peoples who inhabited the Iberian peninsula in the Middle Ages had long lived at the frontier of Mediterranean Europe on a cultural frontier between Christianity and Islam. Conflicts created a strong tradition of military conquest and rule over peoples of other beliefs and customs. A number of Christian kingdoms emerged, such as Portugal on the Atlantic coast, Aragon in Eastern Spain, and in the center of the peninsula, Castile, the largest of all. By the mid-fifteenth century, the rulers Ferdinand of Aragon and his wife, Isabella of Castile, carried out a program of unification that sought to eliminate the religious and eventually the ethnic divisions in their kingdoms. With the fall in 1492 of Granada, the last Muslim kingdom, the cross triumphed throughout the peninsula. Moved by political savvy and religious fervor, Isabella ordered the Jews of her realm to convert or leave the country. As many as 200,000 people may have left, severely disrupting some aspects of the Castilian economy. It was also in 1492, with the Granada war at an end and religious unification established, that Isabella and Ferdinand were willing to support the project of a Genoese mariner named Christopher Columbus, who hoped to reach the East Indies by sailing westward around the globe. The Spaniards and Portuguese came from societies long in contact with peoples of other faiths and cultures in which warfare and conquest were well-established activities. American realities and the resistance of indigenous peoples modified these traditions, but by the 1570s, much of the Americas had been brought under Iberian control. 12.1.1 Iberian Society and Tradition Like many Mediterranean peoples, the Spanish and Portuguese were heavily urban, with many peasants living in small towns and villages. That pattern was also established in America, where Europeans lived in cities and towns surrounded by a rural native population. Many commoners who came to America as conquerors sought to recreate themselves as a new nobility, with native peoples as their serfs. The patriarchal family was readily adapted to Latin America, where large estates and grants of American Indian laborers provided the framework for relations based on economic dominance. The Iberian peninsula had maintained a tradition of holding slaves—part of its experience as an ethnic frontier—in contrast to most of medieval Europe, and African slaves had been imported from the trans-Sahara trade. The extension of slavery to America built on this tradition. The political centralization of both Portugal and Castile depended on a professional bureaucracy, usually made up of men trained as lawyers and judges. This system is worthy of comparison with the systems in China and other great empires. Religion and the church served as the other pillar of Iberian politics; close links between church and state resulted from the reconquest of the Iberian peninsula from the Muslims, and these links, including royal nomination of church officials, were also extended to the New World. Spanish and particularly Portuguese merchants also shaped traditions that became relevant in the American colonies. Portugal had been moving down the African coast since 1415, establishing trading posts rather than outright colonies. In the Atlantic islands, however, more extensive estates were established, leading to a slave trade with Africa and a highly commercial agricultural system based on sugar. Brazil would extend this pattern, starting out as a trade factory but then shifting, as in the Atlantic islands, to plantation agriculture. 12.1.2 The Chronology of Conquest The Spanish and Portuguese conquest and colonization of the Americas falls roughly into three periods during the Early Modern era. First came an era of conquest from 1492 to about 1570 (Map 12.1), during which the main lines of administration and economy were set out. The second phase was one of consolidation and maturity from 1570 to about 1700, in which the colonial institutions and societies took their definite form. Finally, during the eighteenth century, a period of reform and reorganization in both Spanish America and Portuguese Brazil (Map 12.2) intensified the colonial relationship and planted the seeds of dissatisfaction and revolt. The details of the major Spanish expeditions depicted in the map are as follows: The map depicting Brazil established by 1777 treaty includes the State of Maranhao, the State of Brazil. The period from 1492 to about 1570 witnessed a remarkable spurt of human destruction and creation. During roughly a century, vast areas of two continents and millions of people were brought under European control. Immigration, commerce, and exploitation of native populations linked these areas to an emerging Atlantic economy. These processes were accompanied and made possible by the conquest and destruction of many American Indian societies and the transformation of others, as well as by the introduction in some places of African slaves. Mexico and Peru, with their large sedentary populations and mineral resources, attracted the Spaniards and became the focus of immigration and institution building. Other conquests radiated outward from the Peruvian and Mexican centers. 12.1.3 The Caribbean Crucible The Caribbean experience served Spain as a model for its actions elsewhere in the Americas. After Columbus’s first transatlantic voyage in 1492, a return expedition in the next year established a colony on the island of Santo Domingo, or Hispaniola. In the Caribbean, the agricultural Taino people of the islands provided enough surplus labor to make their distribution to individual Spaniards feasible, and thus began what would become the encomienda, or grant of indigenous people to individual Spaniards in a kind of serfdom. The holder of an encomienda, an encomendero, was able to use the people as workers or to tax them. Gold hunting, slaving, and European diseases rapidly depopulated the islands, and within two decades little was left there to hold Spanish attention. The Spaniards occupied the larger islands like Cuba, Hispaniola, and Puerto Rico but did not settle the islands of the lesser Antilles. A few strongly fortified ports on the larger islands, such as Havana, San Juan, and Santo Domingo, guarded Spain’s commercial lifeline, but on the whole the Caribbean became a colonial backwater for the next two centuries, until sugar and slaves became the basis of its resurgence. During the seventeenth century, the English, French, and Dutch began to settle the smaller islands and to compete with Spain by creating their own plantation colonies. In the 40 years between the first voyage of Columbus and the conquest of Mexico, the Caribbean served as a testing ground. It was here that the Columbian Exchange (see Chapter 10) of peoples, crops, domesticated animals, diseases, and cultures began in earnest. The Spaniards established Iberian-style cities but had to adapt them to American realities. Hurricanes and the native peoples’ resistance caused many towns to be moved or abandoned, but the New World also provided opportunities to implant new ideas and forms. Unlike cities in Europe, Spanish American cities usually were laid out according to a grid plan or checkerboard form, with the town hall, major church, and governor’s palace in the central plaza (Figure 12.2). Spaniards applied Roman models and rational town planning ideas to the new situation. Conquest came to imply settlement. To rule, Spain created administrative institutions: the governorship, the treasury office, and the royal court of appeals staffed by professional magistrates. Spanish legalism was part of the institutional transfer. Notaries accompanied new expeditions, and a body of laws was developed, based on those of Castile and augmented by American experience. The church, represented at first by individual priests and then by missionaries such as the Dominicans, participated in the enterprise. By 1530, a cathedral was being built on Hispaniola, and a university soon followed. Rumors and hopes stimulated immigration from Castile, which claimed control of the new lands, but also from the other Iberian kingdoms, and by the 1510s the immigrants included larger numbers of Spanish women. Also, Spanish and Italian merchants began to import African slaves to work on the few sugar plantations that operated on the islands. The arrival of both Spanish women and African slaves marked a shift from an area of conquest to one of settlement. The gold-hunting phase had given out in the islands by the 1520s and was replaced by the establishment of ranches and sugar plantations. The adventurous, the disappointed, and the greedy repeated the pattern as expeditions spun off in new directions. Depopulation of the Tainos led to slaving on other islands, and in 30 years or so, most of the indigenous population had died or been killed. The people of the Lesser Antilles, or “Caribs,” whom the Spaniards accused of cannibalism and who were thus always subject to enslavement, held out longer because their islands were less attractive to European settlement. To meet the labor needs of the islands, African slaves were imported. As early as 1510, the mistreatment and destruction of the American Indians led to attempts by clerics and royal administrators to end the worst abuses. The activities of men such as Dominican friar Bartolomé de Las Casas (Figure 12.3), a conquistador turned priest, initiated the struggle for justice. Expeditions leaped from island to island. Where the native peoples and cultures were more resilient, their impact on the societies that emerged was greater than in the Caribbean, but the process of contact was similar. By the time of the conquest of Mexico in the 1520s and Peru in the 1530s, all the elements of the colonial system of Latin America were in place. Even in Brazil, which the Portuguese began to exploit after 1500, a period of bartering with the Native Americans was slowly replaced by increasing royal control and development of a sugar plantation economy. There, as in the Caribbean, resistance and subsequent depopulation of the native peoples led to the importation of African laborers. 12.1.4 The Paths of Conquest In less than a century, the Spaniards brought a large portion of two continents and islands in an inland sea, inhabited by millions of people, under control. Expeditions, usually comprising 50 to 500 men, provided the spearhead of conquest, and in their wake followed the women, missionaries, administrators, and artisans who began to form civil society. The conquest was not a unified movement but rather a series of individual initiatives that usually operated with government approval. The conquest of the Americas was two pronged: One prong was directed toward Mexico; the other was aimed at South America. We can use the well-documented campaign in Mexico as an example of a conquest. In 1519 Hernán Cortés, an educated man with considerable ability as a leader, led an expedition of 600 men to the coast of Mexico. After hearing rumors of a great kingdom in the interior, he began to strike inland. Pitched battles were fought with towns subject to the Aztec Empire, but after gaining these victories, Cortés was able to enlist the defeated peoples’ support against their overlords. With the help of the Indian allies, Cortés eventually reached the great Aztec island capital of Tenochtitlan. By a combination of deception, boldness, ruthlessness, and luck, the Aztec emperor Moctezuma II was captured and killed (Figure 12.4). Cortés and his followers were forced to flee the Aztec capital and retreat toward the coast, but with the help of the Aztecs’ traditional enemies, they cut off and besieged Tenochtitlan. Although the Aztec confederacy put up a stiff resistance, disease, starvation, and battle brought the city down in 1521. Tenochtitlan was replaced by Mexico City. The Aztec poets later remembered, The details of the painting are as follows: Moctezuma is depicted with a beard, holding a golden sword, and wearing a ceremonial costume that includes a feather skirt. His left hand is slightly raised in front of him. The members of his court are also wearing a feather skirt with a few of them holding a throne platform. Cortés is standing next to a horse and approaches Moctezuma with his arms open in a gesture of embrace. Doña Maria and a few soldiers are standing next to Cortés. By 1535, most of Central Mexico, with its network of towns and its dense agricultural populations, had been brought under Spanish control. It became the core of the viceroyalty of New Spain, which eventually also included most of Central America, the islands of the Caribbean, and the Philippines and extended from the southwest of the present United States all the way to Panama. The second trajectory of conquests led from the Caribbean outposts to the coast of northern South America and Panama. From Panama, the Spaniards followed rumors of a rich kingdom to the south. In 1532, after a false start, Francisco Pizarro led his men to the conquest of the Inca Empire, which was already weakened by a long civil war. Once again, using guile and audacity, fewer than 200 Spaniards and their native Indian allies brought down a great empire. The Inca capital of Cuzco, high in the Andes, fell in 1533, but the Spanish decided to build their major city, Lima, closer to the coast. By 1540, most of Peru was under Spanish control, although an active resistance continued in remote areas for another 30 years. From the conquests of densely populated areas where there were surpluses of food and potential laborers, Spanish expeditions spread out in search of further riches and different peoples. They penetrated the zones of semi-sedentary and nomadic peoples, who often offered stiff resistance. From 1540 to 1542, in one of the most famous expeditions, Francisco Vázquez de Coronado, searching for mythical cities of gold, penetrated what is now the Southwestern United States as far as Kansas. At the other end of the Americas, Pedro de Valdivia conquered the tenacious Araucanians of Central Chile and set up the city of Santiago in 1541, although the Araucanians continued to fight long after. Buenos Aires, in the southern part of the continent, founded by an expedition from Spain in 1536, was abandoned because of resistance and was not refounded until 1580. Other expeditions penetrated the Amazon basin and explored the tropical forests of Central and South America during these years, but there was little there to attract permanent settlement to those areas. By 1570, there were 192 Spanish cities and towns throughout the Americas, one-third of which were in Mexico and Central America. 12.1.5 The Conquerors The Spanish captains led by force of will and personal power. “God in heaven the king in Spain, and me here” was the motto of one captain, and sometimes, absolute power could lead to tyranny. The crown received one-fifth of all treasure. Men signed up on a shares basis; those who brought horses or who had special skills might get double shares. Rewards were made according to the contract, and premiums were paid for special service and valor. There was a tendency for leaders to reward their friends, relatives, and men from their home province more liberally than others, so that after each conquest there was always a group of unhappy and dissatisfied conquerors ready to organize a new expedition. As one observer put it, “if each man was given the governorship, it would not be enough.” Few of the conquerors were professional soldiers; they represented all walks of Spanish life, including a scattering of gentlemen, and sometimes even former slaves and freedmen. Some of the later expeditions included a few Spanish women such as Inés Suárez, the heroine of the conquest of Chile, but such cases were rare. In general, the conquerors were men on the make, hoping to better themselves and serve God by converting the heathen at the same time. Always on the lookout for treasure, most conquerors were satisfied by encomiendas. These adventurous men, many of humble origins, came to see themselves as a new nobility entitled to dominion over a new peasantry: the American Indians. The reasons for Spanish success were varied. Horses, firearms, and more generally steel weapons gave them a great advantage over the stone technology of the native peoples. This technological edge, combined with effective and ruthless leadership, produced remarkable results. Epidemic disease also proved to be a silent ally of the Europeans. Finally, internal divisions and rivalries within American Indian empires, and their high levels of centralization, made the great civilizations particularly vulnerable, as the Spaniards gained Indian allies. The peoples who offered the stiffest and most continuous resistance were usually the mobile, tough, nomadic tribes rather than the centralized states of sedentary peasants. By about 1570, the age of the conquest was coming to a close. Bureaucrats, merchants, and colonists replaced the generation of the conquerors as institutions of government and economy were created. The transition was not easy. In Peru a civil war erupted in the 1540s, and in Mexico there were grumblings from the old followers of Cortés. But the establishment of viceroys in the two main colonies and the creation of law courts in the main centers signaled that Spanish America had become a colony rather than a conquest. 12.1.6 Conquest and Morality Conquest involved violence, domination, and theft. The Spanish conquest of the Americas created a series of important philosophical and moral questions for Europeans. Theologians and lawyers asked: Who were the Indians? Were they fully human? Was it proper to convert them to Christianity? Could conversion by force or the conquest of their lands be justified? Driven by greed, many of the conquistadors argued that conquest was necessary to spread the gospel and that control of Indian labor was essential for Spain’s rule. In 1548 Juan Gines de Sépulveda, a noted Spanish scholar, basing his arguments on Aristotle, published a book claiming that the conquest was fully justified. The Spaniards had come to free the Indians from their unjust lords and to bring the light of salvation. Most importantly, he argued, the Indians were not fully human, and some peoples “were born to serve.” In 1550 the Spanish king suspended all further conquests and convoked a special commission in Valladolid to hear arguments for and against this position. Father Bartolomé de Las Casas—former conqueror and encomendero, Dominican priest, bishop of Chiapas, untiring defender of the Indians, and critic of Spanish brutality—presented the contrary opinion against Sépulveda. Las Casas had long experience in the West Indies, and he believed that the inhabitants were rational people who, unlike the Muslims, had never done harm to Christians. Thus, the conquest of their lands was unjustified. The Indians had many admirable customs and accomplishments, he said. He argued that “the Indians are our brothers and Christ has given his life for them.” Spanish rule in order to spread the Christian faith was justified, but conversion should take place only by peaceful means. The results of the debate were mixed. The crown had reasons to back Las Casas against the dangerous ambitions of the Spanish conquerors. Sépulveda’s book was censored, but the conquests nevertheless continued. Although some of the worst abuses were moderated, in reality the great period of conquest was all over by the 1570s. It was too little, too late. Still, the Spanish government’s concern with the legality and morality of its actions and the willingness of Spaniards such as Las Casas to speak out against abuses are also part of the story. The interests of many other conquerors and officials, however, ran in the opposite direction. 12.2 The Destruction and Transformation of Indigenous Societies The various American peoples responded in many different ways to the invasion of their lands and the transformation of their societies. All of them suffered a severe decline of population—a demographic catastrophe. On the main islands of the Caribbean, the indigenous population had nearly disappeared by 1540 as the result of slaving, mistreatment, and disease. In Peru a similar process reduced the population from 10 million to 1.5 million between 1530 and 1590. Elsewhere in the Americas a similar but less well-documented process took place. Smallpox, influenza, and measles wreaked havoc on the American Indian population, which had developed no immunities against these diseases. In Central Mexico, war, destruction, and above all disease brought the population from an estimated 25 million in 1519 to less than 2 million in 1580. That decline was matched by the rapid increase in European livestock, cattle, sheep, and horses that flourished on newly created Spanish farms or in previously unusable lands. In a shocking way, European livestock were replacing an indigenous population on the land (Figure 12.5). The horizontal axis shows the years 1520, 1600, 1700, 1780, and 1820. The vertical axis shows the millions of persons from 1 to 22 in increments of 1. The approximate data depicted in the graph is as follows: To varying degrees, all indigenous societies suffered the effects of European conquest. Population loss was extreme in many areas. Although epidemic was the major cause of depopulation, the conquest and the weakening of indigenous societies contributed to the losses. Population declines of this size disrupted native societies in many ways. For example, in Central Mexico the contraction of the indigenous populations led the Spanish to concentrate the remaining population in fewer towns, and this led in turn to the seizure of former communal farming lands by Spanish landowners. Demographic collapse made maintaining traditional social and economic structures very difficult. 12.2.1 Exploitation of the Indians The Spaniards did not interfere with aspects of Native American life that served colonial goals—or at least did not openly conflict with Spanish authority or religion. Thus, in Mexico and Peru, while the old religions and the priestly class were eliminated, the traditional indigenous nobility remained in place, supported by Spanish authority, as middlemen between the tax and labor demands of the new rulers and the majority of the population. The enslavement of Indians (a term the Spaniards applied to all the native peoples of the Americas), except those taken in war, was prohibited by the mid-sixteenth century in most of Spanish America. Instead, different forms of labor or taxation were imposed. At first, encomiendas were given to the individual conquerors. The holders of these grants were able to use their dependents as workers and servants or to tax them. Whereas commoners had owed tribute or labor to the state in the Inca and Aztec empires, the new demands were arbitrary, often excessive. In general, the encomiendas were destructive. The Spanish crown, unwilling to see a new nobility arise in the New World among the conquerors, moved to end the encomienda system in the 1540s. The crown limited their inheritability and prohibited the right to demand certain kinds of labor from the Indians. Although encomiendas continued to exist in marginal regions, they were all but gone by the 1620s in the central areas of Mexico and Peru. Colonists increasingly sought grants of land rather than Indians as the basis of wealth. Meanwhile, the colonial government increasingly extracted labor and taxes from native peoples. In many places, communities were required to send groups of laborers to work on state projects, such as church construction, road building, or in labor gangs for mining or agriculture. This forced labor, called the mita in Peru where it was adapted from indigenous precedents, mobilized thousands of workers for the mines and on other projects. Although they were paid a wage for this work, there were many abuses of the system by the local officials, and community labor requirements often were disruptive and destructive. By the seventeenth century, many Indians left their villages to avoid the labor and tax obligations, preferring instead to work for Spanish landowners or to seek employment in the cities. This process eventually led to the growth of a wage labor system in which native peoples, no longer resident in their villages, worked for wages on mines and farms or in the cities. In the wake of this disruption, Native American culture also demonstrated great resiliency in the face of Spanish institutions and forms, adapting and modifying them in indigenous ways. In Peru and Mexico, native peoples learned to use the Spanish legal system and the law courts so that litigation became a way of life. At the local level, many aspects of indigenous life remained, and Native Americans proved to be selective in their adaptation of European foods, technology, and culture. 12.3 Colonial Economies and Governments Spanish America was an agrarian society in which perhaps 80 percent of the population lived and worked on the land. Yet in terms of America’s importance to Spain, mining was the essential activity and the basis of Spain’s rule in the Indies. It was precious metals that first began to fit Latin America into the developing world economy. Agriculture and mining were the basis of the Spanish colonial economy but they depended on Native Americans and Africans as laborers. Over this economy Spain built a bureaucratic empire in which the church was an essential element and a major cultural factor. Although the booty of conquest provided some wealth, most of the precious metal sent across the Atlantic came from the post-conquest mining industry. Gold was found in the Caribbean, Colombia, and Chile, but it was silver far more than gold that formed the basis of Spain’s wealth in America. 12.3.1 The Silver Heart of Empire The major silver discoveries were made in Mexico and Peru between 1545 and 1565. Great silver mining towns developed. Potosí in upper Peru (in what is now Bolivia) was the largest mine of all, producing about 80 percent of all the Peruvian silver. In the early seventeenth century, more than 160,000 people lived and worked in the town and its mine. Peru’s Potosí and Mexico’s Zacatecas became wealthy mining centers with opulent churches and a luxurious way of life for some. As one viceroy of Peru commented, it was not silver that was sent to Spain “but the blood and sweat of Indians.” Mining labor was provided by a variety of workers. The early use of Native American slaves and encomienda workers in the sixteenth century gradually was replaced by a system of labor drafts. By 1572 the mining mita in Peru was providing about 13,000 workers a year to Potosí alone. Similar labor drafts were used in Mexico, but by the seventeenth century the mines in both places also had large numbers of wage workers willing to brave the dangers of mining in return for the good wages. Although indigenous methods were used at first, most mining techniques were European in origin. After 1580, silver mining depended on a process of amalgamation with mercury to extract the silver from the ore-bearing rock. The Spanish discovery of a mountain of mercury at Huancavelica in Peru aided American silver production. Potosí and Huancavelica became the “great marriage of Peru” and the basis of silver production in South America. According to Spanish law, all subsoil rights belonged to the crown, but the mines and the processing plants were owned by individuals, who were permitted to extract the silver in return for paying one-fifth of production to the government, which also profited from its monopoly on the mercury needed to produce the silver (Figure 12.6). The horizontal axis shows the years from 1516 to 1656. The vertical axis shows the millions of pesos from 0 to 7 in increments of 1. The approximate data depicted in the graph for the two categories, royal and total, are as follows: Mining stimulated many other aspects of the economy, even in areas far removed from the mines. Workers had to be fed and the mines supplied. In Mexico, where most of the mines were located beyond the area of settled preconquest populations, large Spanish-style farms developed to raise cattle, sheep, and wheat. The Peruvian mines high in the Andes were supplied from distant regions with mercury, mules, food, clothing, and even coca leaves, used to deaden hunger and make the work at high altitudes less painful. From Spain’s perspective, mining was the heart of the colonial economy. 12.3.2 Haciendas and Villages Spanish America remained predominantly an agrarian economy, and wherever large sedentary populations lived, indigenous communal agriculture of traditional crops continued. As populations dwindled, Spanish ranches and farms began to emerge. Faced with declining indigenous populations, the colonists found land ownership more attractive. Family-owned rural estates, which produced grains, grapes, and livestock, developed throughout the central areas of Spanish America. Most of the labor force on these estates came from Native Americans who had left the communities and from people of mixed heritage. These rural estates, or haciendas, producing primarily for consumers in America, became the basis of wealth and power for the local aristocracy in many regions. Although some plantation crops, such as sugar and later cacao, were exported to Europe from Spanish America, they made up only a small fraction of the value of the exports in comparison with silver. In some regions where Native American communities continued to hold traditional farming lands, an endemic competition between haciendas and village communities emerged. 12.3.3 Industry and Commerce In areas such as Ecuador, New Spain, and Peru, sheep raising led to the development of small textile sweatshops, where common cloth was produced, usually by women. America became self-sufficient for its basic foods and material goods and looked to Europe only for luxury items not locally available. Still, from Spain’s perspective and that of the larger world economy taking shape in the early modern centuries, the American “kingdoms” had a silver heart, and the whole Spanish commercial system was organized around that fact. Spain allowed only Spaniards to trade with America and imposed tight restrictions. Almost all American trade from Spain after the mid-sixteenth century passed through the city of Seville and, after 1710, through the nearby port of Cadiz. A Board of Trade in Seville controlled all commerce with America, registered ships and passengers, kept charts, and collected taxes. It often worked in conjunction with a merchant guild, or consulado, in Seville that controlled goods shipped to America and handled much of the silver received in return. Linked to branches in Mexico City and Lima, the consulados kept tight control over the trade and were able to keep prices high in the colonies. Other Europeans looked on the West Indies trade with envy. To discourage foreign rivals and pirates, the Spanish eventually worked out a convoy system in which two fleets sailed annually from Spain, traded their goods for precious metals, and then met at Havana, Cuba, before returning to Spain. The fleet system was made possible by the large, heavily armed ships, called galleons, that were used to carry the silver belonging to the crown. Two great galleons a year also sailed from Manila in the Philippines to Mexico loaded with Chinese silks, porcelain, and lacquer. These goods were then shipped on the convoy to Spain along with the American silver. In the Caribbean, heavily fortified ports, such as Havana and Cartagena (Colombia), provided shelter for the treasure ships, while coast guard fleets cleared the waters of potential raiders. Although cumbersome, the convoys (which continued until the 1730s) were successful. Pirates and enemies sometimes captured individual ships, and some ships were lost to storms and other disasters, but only one fleet was lost—to the Dutch in 1627. While the convoy system was relatively effective, Spanish colonists in the Americas still wanted more freedom to trade, and contraband with foreigners flourished despite Spanish efforts to stop it. In general, the supply of American silver to Spain was continuous and made the colonies seem worth the effort, but the reality of American treasure was more complicated. Much of the wealth flowed out of Spain to pay for Spain’s European wars, its long-term debts, and the purchase of manufactured goods to be sent back to the West Indies and Latin America. Probably less than half of the silver remained in Spain itself. The arrival of American treasure also contributed to a sharp rise in prices and a general inflation, first in Spain and then throughout Western Europe, during the sixteenth century. At no time did the American treasure make up more than one-fourth of Spain’s state revenues; the wealth of Spain depended more on the taxes levied on its own population than it did on the exploitation of its Native American subjects. However, the seemingly endless supply of silver stimulated bankers to continue to lend money to Spain because the prospect of the great silver fleet was always enough to offset the falling credit of the Spanish rulers and the sometimes bankrupt government. As early as 1619, Sancho de Moncada wrote that “the poverty of Spain resulted from the discovery of the Indies.” But there were few who could see the long-term costs of empire. 12.3.4 Ruling an Empire: State and Church Spain controlled its American empire through a carefully regulated bureaucratic system. Sovereignty rested with the crown, based not on the right of conquest but on a papal grant that awarded the West Indies to Castile in return for its services in bringing those lands and peoples into the Christian community, but Spain was careful to bolster its rule in other ways. The Treaty of Tordesillas (1494) between Castile and Portugal clarified the spheres of influence and right of possession of the two kingdoms by drawing a hypothetical north–south line around the globe and reserving to Portugal the newly discovered lands (and their route to India) to the east of the line and to Castile all lands to the west. Thus, Brazil fell within the Portuguese sphere. Other European nations later raised their own objections to the Spanish and Portuguese claims. The Spanish Empire became a great bureaucratic system built on a juridical core and staffed to a large extent by letrados, university-trained lawyers from Spain. The modern division of powers was not clearly defined in the Spanish system, so that judicial officers also exercised legislative and administrative authority. Laws were many and contradictory at times, but the Recopilación (1681) codified the laws into the basis for government in the colonies. The king ruled through the Council of the Indies in Spain, which issued the laws and advised him. Within the West Indies, Spain created two viceroyalties in the sixteenth century, one based in Mexico City and the other in Lima. Viceroys, high-ranking nobles who were direct representatives of the king, and thus wielded broad military, legislative, and, when they had legal training, judicial powers. The viceroyalties of New Spain and Peru were then subdivided into 10 judicial divisions controlled by superior courts, or audiencias, staffed by professional royal magistrates who helped to make law as well as apply it. At the local level, royally appointed magistrates applied the laws, collected taxes, and assigned the work required of American Indian communities. It is little wonder that they often were highly criticized for bending the law and taking advantage of the native peoples under their control. Below them were many minor officials who made bureaucracy both a living and a way of life. To some extent, the clergy formed another branch of the state apparatus, although it had other functions and goals as well. Catholic religious orders such as the Franciscans, Dominicans, and Jesuits carried out the widespread conversion of the Indians, establishing churches in the towns and villages of sedentary Indians and setting up missions in frontier areas where nomadic peoples were forced to settle. Taking seriously the pope’s admonition to Christianize the peoples of the new lands as the primary justification for Spain’s rule, some of the early missionaries became ardent defenders of Indian rights and even admirers of aspects of indigenous culture. For example, Franciscan priest Fray Bernardino de Sahagún (1499–1590) became an expert in the Nahuatl language and composed a bilingual encyclopedia of Aztec culture, which was based on methods very similar to those used by modern anthropologists. Other clerics wrote histories, grammars, and studies of native language and culture. Some were like Diego de Landa, bishop of Yucatán (1547), who admired much about the culture of the Maya but who so detested their religion that he burned all their ancient books and tortured many Maya suspected of backsliding from Christianity. The recording and analysis of Native American cultures were designed primarily to provide tools for conversion. In the core areas of Peru and New Spain, the missionary church eventually was replaced by an institutional structure of parishes and bishoprics. Archbishops sat in the major capitals, and a complicated church hierarchy developed. Because the Spanish crown nominated the holders of all such positions, the clergy tended to be major supporters of state policy as well as a primary influence on it. The Catholic church profoundly influenced the cultural and intellectual life of the colonies in many ways. The construction of churches, especially the great baroque cathedrals of the capitals, stimulated the work of architects and artists, usually reflecting European models but sometimes taking up local themes and subjects. The printing presses, introduced to America in the early sixteenth century, always published a high percentage of religious books as well as works of history, poetry, natural sciences, philosophy, law, and language. Much intellectual life was organized around religion. Schools—such as those of Mexico City and Lima, founded in the 1550s—were run by the clergy, and universities were created to provide training primarily in law and theology, the foundations of state and society. Eventually, more than 70 universities flourished in Spanish America. A stunning example of colonial intellectual life was the nun Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz (Figure 12.7), author, poet, musician, and perceptive commentator on her society. Sor Juana was welcomed at the court of the viceroy in Mexico City, where her beauty and intelligence were celebrated. She eventually gave up secular concerns and her library, at the urging of her superiors, to concentrate on purely spiritual matters, but despite attempts at control, intellectual interests from theology to linguistics and cartography flourished in the Indies. To control the morality and orthodoxy of the population, the tribunal of the Inquisition set up offices in the major capitals. Although American Indians were exempt from its jurisdiction, converted Jews, Protestants, and other religious dissenters were prosecuted and sometimes executed in an attempt to impose orthodoxy. Overall, church and state combined to create an ideological and political framework for the society of Spanish America. At the same time, although local populations were deprived of their traditional leadership, many managed to combine some prior beliefs with the new Christian teachings. Some, for example, accepted worship of the Christian Mary, mother of Jesus, because it blended with worship of the Aztec goddess of fertility. And while Spanish officials sometimes worried about native “heresy,” their resources were stretched too thin to enforce orthodoxy on the whole society. A new Latin American culture thus emerged from a mixture of ingredients, not just impulses from Europe. 12.4 Brazil: The First Plantation Colony In Brazil the Portuguese gradually created the first great plantation colony of the Americas. Then in the eighteenth century, the discovery of gold opened up the interior of Brazil to settlement and a further expansion of slavery. In 1500 Pedro Álvares Cabral, leader of an expedition to India, made a brief and perhaps accidental landfall on the tropical Brazilian shore. There was little at first to attract European interest except for the dyewood trees that grew in the forests, and thus the Portuguese crown paid little attention to Brazil for 30 years, preferring instead to grant licenses to merchants who agreed to exploit the dyewood. Pressure from French competitors finally moved the Portuguese crown to military action. The coast was cleared of rivals and a new system of settlement was established in 1532. Minor Portuguese nobles were given strips of land along the coast to colonize and develop. The nobles who held these captaincies combined broad, seemingly feudal powers with a strong desire for commercial development. Most of them lacked the capital needed to carry out the colonization, and some had problems with the indigenous population. In a few places, towns were established, colonists were brought over, relations with the Native Americans were peaceful, and, most importantly, sugar plantations were established using first Native American, then African slaves. In 1549 the Portuguese king sent a governor general and other officials to create a royal capital at Salvador. The first Jesuit missionaries also arrived. By 1600, indigenous resistance had been broken in many places by military action, missionary activity, or epidemic disease. A string of settlements extended along the coast, centered on port cities such as Salvador and Rio de Janeiro. These served roughly 150 sugar plantations, a number that doubled by 1630. The plantations were increasingly worked by African slaves. By 1600, the Brazilian colony had about 100,000 inhabitants: 30,000 Europeans, 15,000 black slaves, and the rest Native Americans and people of mixed origin. 12.4.1 Sugar and Slavery During most of the next century, Brazil held its position as the world’s leading sugar producer. Sugar cane had to be processed in the field. It was cut and pressed in large mills, and the juice was then heated to crystallize into sugar. This combination of agriculture and industry in the field demanded large amounts of capital for machinery and large quantities of labor for the backbreaking work (Figure 12.8). Although there were always some free workers who had skilled occupations, slaves did most of the work. During the seventeenth century, about 7,000 slaves a year were imported from Africa. By the end of the century, Brazil had about 150,000 slaves—about half its total population. On the basis of a single crop produced by slave labor, Brazil became the first great plantation colony and a model that later was followed by other European nations in their own Caribbean colonies. Even after the Brazilian economy became more diverse, Brazil’s social hierarchy still reflected its plantation and slave origins. The white planter families became an aristocracy linked by marriage to resident merchants and to the few Portuguese bureaucrats and officials, and they dominated local institutions. At the bottom of society were the slaves, distinguished by their color and their status as property. However, a growing segment of the population was composed of people of mixed origins, the result of miscegenation between whites, Indians, and Africans who—alongside poorer whites, freed blacks, and free Indians—served as artisans, small farmers, herders, and free laborers. In many ways, society as a whole reflected the hierarchy of the plantation. Like Spain, Portugal created a bureaucratic structure that integrated this colony within an imperial system. Two colonies were created: the State of Maranhão, the very large but sparsely populated Amazonian region in the north, and the State of Brazil, comprising the rest of the territory. A governor general ruled from Salvador, but the governors in each captaincy often acted independently and reported directly to the overseas council in Lisbon. The missionary orders were particularly important in Brazil, especially the Jesuits. Their extensive cattle ranches and sugar mills supported the construction of churches and schools as well as a network of missions with thousands of Native American residents. As in Spanish America, royal officials trained in the law formed the core of the bureaucracy. Unlike the Spanish Empire, which except for the Philippines was almost exclusively American, the Portuguese Empire included colonies and outposts in Asia, Africa, and Brazil. Only gradually, in the seventeenth century, did Brazil become the predominant Portuguese colony. Even then, Brazil’s ties to Portugal were in some ways stronger and more dependent than those between Spanish America and Spain. Unlike Spanish America, Brazil had neither universities nor printing presses. Thus, intellectual life was always an extension of Portugal, and Brazilians seeking higher education and government offices or hoping to publish their works always had to turn to the mother country. The general economic dependency of Latin America was matched by an intellectual subordination more intense in Brazil than in Spanish America. 12.4.2 Brazil’s Age of Gold For 60 years (1580–1640), the Habsburg kings of Spain also ruled Portugal, a situation that promoted their cooperation and gave these rulers a truly worldwide empire. From 1630 to 1654, as part of a global struggle against Spain, the Dutch seized a portion of Northeastern Brazil and controlled its sugar production. Although the Dutch were expelled from Brazil in 1654, by the 1680s the Dutch, English, and French had established their own plantation colonies in the Caribbean and were producing sugar with slave laborers. This competition, which led to a rising price for slaves and a falling world price for sugar, undercut the Brazilian sugar industry, and the colony entered into hard times. Eventually, each European nation tried to establish an integrated set of colonies that included plantations (the Caribbean, Brazil), slaving ports (Africa), and food-producing areas (New England, Southern Brazil). Although Brazil’s domination of the world sugar market was lost, throughout the seventeenth century Paulistas, hardy backwoodsmen from São Paulo (an area with few sugar plantations), had been exploring the interior, capturing Indians, and searching for precious metals. These expeditions not only established Portuguese claims to much of the interior of the continent but eventually were successful in their quest for wealth. In 1695, gold strikes were made in the mountainous interior in a region that came to be called Minas Gerais (General Mines), and the Brazilian colony experienced a new boom. A great gold rush began. People deserted coastal towns and plantations to head for the gold washings, and they were soon joined by waves of about 5,000 immigrants a year who came directly from Portugal. Slaves provided labor in the mines, as in the plantations. By 1775, there were over 150,000 slaves (out of a total population of 300,000 for the region) in Minas Gerais. Wild mining camps and a wide-open society eventually coalesced into a network of towns such as the administrative center of Ouro Prêto, and the government, anxious to control the newfound wealth, imposed a heavy hand to collect taxes and rein in the unruly population. Gold production reached its height between 1735 and 1760 and averaged about 3 tons a year in that period, making Brazil the greatest source of gold in the Western world. The discovery of gold—and later of diamonds—was a mixed blessing in the long run. It opened the interior to settlement, once again with disastrous effects on the indigenous population and with the expansion of slavery. The early disruption of coastal agriculture caused by the gold strikes was overcome by government control of the slave trade, and exports of sugar and tobacco continued to be important to the colony. Mining did stimulate the opening of new areas to ranching and farming, to supply the new markets in the mining zone. Rio de Janeiro, the port closest to the mines, grew in size and importance. It became capital of the colony in 1763. In Minas Gerais, a distinctive society developed. The local wealth was used to sponsor the building of churches, which in turn stimulated the work of artists, architects, and composers. As they did in the rest of Brazil, however, the hierarchy of color and the legal distinctions of slavery marked life in the mining zones, which were populated by large numbers of slaves and free persons of color. Finally, gold allowed Portugal to continue economic policies that were detrimental in the long run. With access to gold, Portugal could buy the manufactured goods it needed for itself and its colonies, as few industries were developed in the mother country. Much of the Brazilian gold flowed from Portugal to England to pay for manufactured goods and to compensate for a trade imbalance. After 1760, as the supply of gold began to dwindle, Portugal was again in a difficult position—it had become in some ways an economic dependency of England. 12.5 Multiracial Societies The conquest and settlement of Latin America created the conditions for the formation of multiethnic societies on a large scale. The three major groups—Indians, Europeans, and Africans—had been brought together under very different conditions: the Europeans as conquerors and voluntary immigrants, the Indians as conquered peoples, and the Africans as slaves. This situation created hierarchies of masters and servants, Christians and pagans, that reflected the relationships of power and the colonial condition. In Central Mexico, where an Indian nobility had existed, aspects of preconquest social organization were maintained because they served the ends of Spanish government. In theory, there was a separation between the “republic of the Spaniards,” which included all non-Indians, and the “republic of the Indians,” which was supposed to have its own social rankings and its own rules and laws. This separation was never a reality, however, and the “republic of the Indians” always formed the base on which all society rested. Indians paid tribute, something not required of others in society, except the mulattos in some places. The mixture of whites, Africans, and Indians created the basis of multiracial societies in which hierarchies of color, status, and occupation all operated. By the eighteenth century, the castas, people of mixed origin, began to increase rapidly and had become a major segment of the population. 12.5.1 The Society of Castas Spaniards had an idea of society drawn from their own medieval experience, but American realities soon altered that concept. The key was miscegenation. The conquest had involved the sexual exploitation of Indian women, and occasional alliances formed by the giving of concubines and female servants. Marriages with indigenous women, especially of the Indian nobility, were not unknown. With few European women available, especially in frontier regions, mixed marriages and informal unions were common. The result was the growth of a large population of mixed background, the so-called mestizos. Although they were always suspected of illegitimacy, their status, especially in the early years, was higher than that of Indians. More acculturated than the Indians and able to operate in two worlds, mestizos became members of an intermediate category, not fully accepted as equals to Spaniards and yet expected to live according to the standards of Spanish society and often acting as auxiliaries to it. A similar process took place in areas such as Brazil and the Caribbean coasts, where large numbers of African slaves were imported. Slave owners exploited their female slaves or took slave women as mistresses, and then sometimes freed their mulatto children. The result was the growth of a large population of mixed background. Throughout the Spanish Indies, European categories of noble, priest, and commoner continued, as did hierarchies based on wealth and occupation. But American realities created new distinctions in which race and place of birth also played a crucial role. This was the sociedad de castas, based on racial origins, in which Europeans or whites were at the top, black slaves or Native Americans were at the bottom, and the many kinds of mixes filled the intermediate categories. This accompanied the great cultural fusion in the formation of Latin America (Figure 12.9). The details of 12 panels depicted in the painting are as follows: From the three original ethnic categories, many combinations and crosses were possible: mestizo, mulatto, and so on. By the eighteenth century, this segment of the population had grown rapidly, and there was much confusion and local variation in terminology. A whole genre of painting developed simply to identify and classify the various combinations. Together, the people of mixed origins were called the castas, and they tended to be shopkeepers and small farmers. In 1650 the castas made up perhaps 5 percent to 10 percent of the population of Spanish America, but by 1750 they made up 35 percent to 40 percent (see Visualizing the Past). In Brazil, still dominated by slavery, free people of color made up about 28 percent of the population—a proportion equal to that of whites. Together, however, free and slave blacks and mulattos made up two-thirds of the inhabitants of Brazil in the late eighteenth century. As the mixed population grew in Spanish America, increasing restrictions were placed on them, but their social mobility could not be halted. A successful Indian might call himself a mestizo; a mestizo who married a Spanish woman might be called white. The ranks of the castas were also swelled by former slaves who had been given or had bought their freedom and by Indians who left their communities, spoke Spanish, and lived within the orbit of the Hispanic world. Thus, physical characteristics were only one criterion of rank and status, but color and ethnicity mattered, and they created a pseudo-racial hierarchy. European or white status was a great social advantage. Not every person of European background was wealthy, but most of the wealthy merchants, landowners, bureaucrats, and miners were white. As one visitor wrote, “In America, every white is a gentleman.” Originally, all whites had shared the privileged status of Spaniards regardless of the continent of their birth, but over time distinctions developed between peninsulares, or those actually born in Spain, and Creoles, or those born in the New World. Creoles thought of themselves as loyal American Spaniards, but with so many mestizos around, the shadow of a possible Indian ancestor and illegitimacy always made their status suspect as far as the Europeans were concerned. Still, Creoles dominated the local economies, held sway over large numbers of dependents at their haciendas and mines, and stood at the top of society, second only to the peninsulares. Increasingly, they developed a sense of identity and pride in their accomplishments, and they were sensitive to any suggestion of inferiority or to any discrimination because of their American birth. That growing sense of self-identity eventually contributed to the movements for independence in Latin America. The hierarchy of race intersected with traditional Iberian distinctions based on gender, age, and class. The father of a family had legal authority over his children until they were 25. Women were in a subordinate position; they could not serve in government and were expected to assume the duties of motherhood and household (Figure 12.10). After marriage, women came under the authority of their husbands, but many a widow assumed the direction of her family’s activities. Lower-class women often controlled small-scale commerce in towns and villages, worked in the fields, and labored at the looms of small factories. Marriages often were arranged and accompanied by the payment of a dowry, which remained the property of the woman throughout the marriage. Women also had full rights to inheritance. Some upper-class women who did not marry at a young age were placed in convents to prevent contacts or marriages with partners of unsuitable backgrounds. 12.6 The Eighteenth-Century Reforms No less than in the rest of Europe, the eighteenth century was a period of intellectual ferment in Spain and Portugal, as well as in their empires. In Spain and its colonies, small clubs and associations, calling themselves amigos del país, or friends of the country, met in many cities to discuss and plan all kinds of reforms. Their programs were for material benefits and improvements, not political changes. In Portugal, foreign influences and ideas created a group of progressive thinkers and bureaucrats open to new ideas in economy, education, and philosophy. Much of the change that came in both empires resulted as much from the changing European economic and demographic realities as from new ideas. The expansion of population and economy in Europe, and the increased demands for American products, along with the long series of wars in the eighteenth century, gave the American colonies a new importance. Both the Spanish and Portuguese empires revived, through the Bourbon reforms in Spanish America and the reforms of Pombal in Brazil. But the reforms had some longer-term results that eventually led to the fall of both empires. 12.6.1 The Shifting Balance of Politics and Trade By the eighteenth century, it was clear that the Spanish colonial system had become outmoded and that Spain’s exclusive hold on the Indies was no longer secure. To some extent the problem lay in Spain itself. Beset by foreign wars, increasing debt, declining population, and internal revolts, a weakened Spain was threatened by a powerful France and by the rising mercantile strength of England and Holland, whose Protestantism also made them natural rivals of Catholic Spain. Since the sixteenth century, French, Dutch, and English ship captains had combined contraband trade with raiding in the Spanish Empire, and although Spain’s European rivals could not seize Mexico or Peru, the sparsely populated islands and coasts of the Caribbean became likely targets. Buccaneers, owing allegiance to no nation, raided the Caribbean ports in the late seventeenth century. Meanwhile, the English took Jamaica in 1654, the French took control of Western Hispaniola (Haiti) by 1697, and other islands fell to the English, French, and Dutch. Many of the islands turned to slavery to produce sugar and tobacco and later to coffee and cotton, much like Brazil. In the Caribbean new plantation colonies on islands like Barbados, Jamaica, and Martinique and in Guiana and Surinam on the northern coast of South America challenged Spain’s territorial monopoly. Less apparent than the loss of territories, but equally important, was the failure of the Spanish mercantile and political system. The annual fleets became irregular. Silver payments from America declined, and most goods shipped to the West Indies and even the ships that carried them were non-Spanish in origin. The colonies became increasingly self-sufficient in basic commodities, and as central government became weaker, local aristocrats in the colonies exercised increasing control over the economy and government of their regions, often at the expense of the Native Americans and the lower-class populations. Graft and corruption were rampant in many branches of government. The empire seemed to be crumbling. What is most impressive is that Spain was able to retain its American possessions for another century. Even with Spain in decline, the West Indies still seemed an attractive prize coveted by other powers, and the opportunity to gain them was not long in coming. A final crisis was set in motion in 1701 when the Spanish king, Charles II, died without an heir. Other European nations backed various claimants to the Spanish throne, hoping to win the prize of the Spanish monarchy and its American colonies. Philip of Anjou, a Bourbon and thus a relative of the king of France, was named successor to the Spanish throne. The War of the Spanish Succession (1702–1713) ensued, and the result at the Treaty of Utrecht (1713) was recognition of a branch of the Bourbon family as rulers of Spain; the price was some commercial concessions that allowed French merchants to operate in Seville and permitted England to trade slaves in Spanish America (and even to send one ship per year to trade for silver in the Americas). Spain’s commercial monopoly was now being broken not just by contraband trade but by legal means as well. 12.6.2 The Bourbon Reforms The new and vigorous Bourbon dynasty in Spain launched a series of reforms aimed at strengthening the state and its economy. In this age of “enlightened despotism,” the Spanish Bourbon monarchs, especially Charles III (r. 1759–1788), were moved by economic nationalism and a desire for strong centralized government to institute economic, administrative, and military reforms in Spain and its empire. The goal of these rulers and their progressive ministers was to revive Spain within the framework of its traditional society. Their aim was to make government more effective, more powerful, and better able to direct the economy. Certain groups or institutions that opposed these measures or stood in the way might be punished or suppressed. The Jesuit order, with its special allegiance to Rome, its rumored wealth, and its missions in the New World (which controlled almost 100,000 Indians in Paraguay alone), was a prime target. The Jesuits were expelled from Spain and its empire in 1767, as they had been from the Portuguese Empire in 1759. In general, however, the interests of the church and the nobility were not frontally attacked as long as they did not conflict with the ruler’s authority. The reforms were aimed at material improvements and a more powerful state, not social or political upheaval. French bureaucratic models were introduced. The system of taxation was tightened. The navy was reformed, and new ships were built. The convoy fleet system was abandoned, and in 1778 new ports were opened in Spain and America for the West Indies trade, although trade still was restricted to Spaniards or to ships sailing under Spanish license. The Bourbons initiated a broad program of reform. New viceroyalties were created in New Granada (1739) and the Rio de la Plata (1778) to provide better administration and defense to the growing populations of these regions (Map 12.3). Royal investigators were sent to the Indies. The most important of them, José de Gálvez, spent six years in Mexico before returning to Spain to become minister of the Indies and a chief architect of reform. His investigations, as well as reports by others, revealed the worst abuses of graft and corruption, which implicated the local magistrates and the Creole landowners and aristocracy. Gálvez moved to eliminate the Creoles from the upper bureaucracy of the colonies. New offices were created. After 1780, local magistrates were removed from the Indian villages, and their duties were replaced by a new system of intendants, or provincial governors, based on French models. This intendancy system was introduced throughout the Indies. Such measures improved tax collection and made government more effective, but the reforms also disrupted the patterns of influence and power, especially among the Creole bureaucrats, miners, and landowners as their political power declined. The details of the Spanish and Portuguese South America depicted in the map are as follows: Many of the reforms in America were linked directly to defense and military matters. During the century, Spain often was allied with France, and the global struggle between England and France for world hegemony made Spain’s American possessions a logical target for English attack. During the Seven Years’ War (1756–1763), the loss of Florida and the English seizure of Havana shocked Spain into action, particularly because when England held Havana in 1762, Cuban trade boomed. Regular Spanish troops were sent to New Spain, and militia units, led by local Creoles who were given military rank, were created throughout the empire. Frontiers were expanded, and previously unoccupied or loosely controlled regions, such as California, were settled by a combination of missions and small frontier outposts. In the Rio de la Plata, foreign competitors were resisted by military means. Spain sought every means to strengthen itself and its colonies. During the Bourbon reforms, the government took an active role in the economy. State monopolies were established for items the government considered essential, such as tobacco and gunpowder. Whole new areas of Spanish America were opened to development. Monopoly companies were granted exclusive rights to develop certain colonial areas in return for developing the economies of those regions. The trade of the Caribbean greatly expanded under the more liberal regulations. Cuba became another full-scale plantation and slave colony, exporting sugar, coffee, and tobacco and importing large numbers of Africans to do the work. Buenos Aires, on the Rio de la Plata, proved to be a great success story. Its population had grown rapidly in the eighteenth century, and by 1790 it had a booming economy based on ranching and the export of hides and salted beef. A newly prosperous merchant community in Buenos Aires dominated the region’s trade. The commercial changes were a double-edged sword. As Spanish and English goods became cheaper and more accessible, they undercut locally produced goods so that some regions that had specialized in producing cloth or other goods were unable to compete with the European imports. Links to international trade tightened as the diversity of Latin America’s economy decreased. Later conflicts between those who favored free trade and those who wanted to limit imports and protect local industry often were as much about regional interests as about economic philosophy. Finally, and most importantly, the major centers of the Spanish Empire also experienced rapid growth in the second half of the eighteenth century. Mining inspectors and experts had been sent to Peru and New Spain to suggest reforms and introduce new techniques. These improvements, as well as the discovery of new veins, allowed production to expand, especially in New Spain, where silver output reached new heights. In fact, silver production in Mexico far outstripped that of Peru, which itself saw increased production. All in all, the Bourbon reforms must be seen from two vantage points: Spain and America. Undoubtedly, in the short run, the restructuring of government and economy revived the Spanish Empire. In the long run, the removal of Creoles from government, the creation of a militia with a Creole officer corps, the opening of commerce, and other such changes contributed to a growing sense of dissatisfaction among the elites, which only their relative well-being and the existing social tensions of the sociedad de castas kept in check. Slaves, peasants, and indigenous communities, however, were developing their own dissatisfactions with colonial government. 12.6.3 Pombal and Brazil The Bourbon reforms in Spain and Spanish America were paralleled in the Portuguese world during the administration of Sebastião José Carvalho e Mello, the Marquis of Pombal, Portugal’s authoritarian prime minister. Pombal had lived as ambassador in England and had observed the benefits of mercantilism firsthand. He hoped to use these same techniques, along with state intervention in the economy, to break England’s hold on the Portuguese economy, especially on the flow of Brazilian gold from Portugal to England. This became crucial as the production of Brazilian gold began to decline after 1760. In another example of “enlightened despotism,” Pombal brutally suppressed any group or institution that stood in the way of royal power and his programs. He developed a particular dislike for the Jesuits because of their allegiance to Rome and their semi-independent control of large areas in Brazil. Pombal expelled the Jesuits from the Portuguese Empire in 1759. Pombal made Brazil the centerpiece of his reforms. Vigorous administrators were sent to the colony to enforce the changes. He attacked contraband, gold smuggling, and tax evasion. Monopoly companies were formed to stimulate agriculture in older plantation zones and were given the right to import large numbers of slaves. New crops were introduced. Just as in Spanish America, new regions in Brazil began to flourish. Rio de Janeiro became the capital, and its hinterland was the scene of agricultural growth. The undeveloped Amazonian region, long dominated by Jesuit missionaries, received new attention. A monopoly company was created to develop the region’s economy, and it stimulated the development of cotton plantations and the export of wild cacao from the Amazonian forests. These new exports joined the traditional sugar, tobacco, and hides as Brazil’s main products. Pombal was willing to do some social tinkering as part of his project of reform. He abolished slavery in Portugal to stop the import of slaves there and to ensure a steady supply to Brazil. Because that colony was vast and needed to be both occupied and defended, he removed Indians from missionary control in the Amazon and encouraged whites to marry them. Immigrant couples from Portugal and the Azores were sent to colonize the Amazon basin and the plains of southern Brazil, which began to produce large quantities of wheat and cattle. Like the Bourbons in Spain, Pombal hoped to revitalize the colonies as a way of strengthening the mother country. Although new policies were instituted, little changed within the society. Brazil was just as profoundly based on slavery in the late eighteenth century as it had ever been: The levels of slave imports reached 20,000 a year. Even in the long run, Pombal’s policies were not fully effective. Although he reduced Portugal’s trade imbalance with England during this period, Brazilian trade suffered because the demand for its products on the world market remained low. This was a classic problem for the American colonies. Their economies were so tied to the sale of their products on the European market and so controlled by policies in the metropolis that the colonies’ range of action was always limited. Although Pombal’s policies were not immediately successful, they provided the structure for an economic boom in the last 20 years of the eighteenth century that set the stage for Brazilian independence. 12.6.4 Reforms, Reactions, and Revolts By the mid-eighteenth century, the American colonies of Spain and Portugal, like the rest of the world, were experiencing rapid growth in population and productive capacity. By the end of the century, Spanish America had a population of almost 13 million. Between 1740 and 1800, the population of Mexico, the most populous area, increased from 3.5 million to almost 6 million, about half of whom were Indians. In Brazil, the population reached about 2 million by the end of the century. This overall increase resulted from declining mortality rates, increasing fertility levels, increasing immigration from Europe, and the thriving slave trade. The opening of new areas to development and Europe’s increasing demand for American products accompanied the population growth. The American colonies were experiencing a boom in the last years of the eighteenth century. Reformist policies, tighter tax collection, and the presence of a more activist government in both Spanish America and Brazil disrupted old patterns of power and influence, raised expectations, and sometimes provoked violent colonial reactions. Urban riots, tax revolts, and Indian uprisings were not unknown before 1700, but serious and more protracted rebellions broke out after that date. In New Granada (present-day Colombia), popular complaints against the government’s control of tobacco and liquor consumption, and rising prices as well as new taxes, led to the widespread Comunero Revolt in 1781. A royal army was defeated, the viceroy fled from Bogota, and a rebel army almost took the capital. Only tensions between the various racial and social groups, and concessions by the government, brought an end to the rebellion. At the same time, in Peru, an even more threatening revolt erupted. A great Indian uprising took place under the leadership of Jose Gabriel Condorcanqui, known as Tupac Amaru II. A mestizo who claimed descent from the Incas, Tupac Amaru led a rebellion against “bad government.” For almost three years the whole viceroyalty was thrown into turmoil while more than 70,000 Indians, mestizos, and even a few Creoles joined in rebellion against the worst abuses of the colonial regime. Tupac Amaru was captured and brutally executed, but the rebellion smoldered until 1783. It failed mostly because the Creoles, although they had their own grievances against the government, feared that a real social upheaval might take place if they upset the political balance. This kind of social upheaval was not present in Brazil, where a government attempt to collect back taxes in the mining region led in 1788 to a plot against Portuguese control. A few bureaucrats, intellectuals, and miners planned an uprising for independence, but their conspiracy was discovered. The plotters were arrested, and one conspirator, a militia officer nicknamed Tiradentes, was hanged. Despite their various social bases, these movements indicated that activism by governments increased dissatisfaction in the American colonies. The new prosperity of the late eighteenth century contributed to a sense of self-confidence and economic interest among certain colonial classes, which made them sensitive to restrictions and control by Spain and Portugal. Different groups had different complaints, but the sharp social and ethnic divisions within the colonies acted as a barrier to cooperation for common goals and tended to undercut revolutionary movements. Only when the Spanish political system was disrupted by a crisis of legitimacy at the beginning of the nineteenth century did real separation and independence from the mother countries become a possibility.