Chapter 13: Political Transformations

Empires and Encounters 1450-1750

European Empires in the Americas
● Among modern empires, those of Western Europe were distinctive because they conquered territories
that lay an ocean away from the imperial heartland.
● After the voyages of Columbus, Spain focused their empire-building efforts in the Caribbean and then, in
the early 16th century, conquered the Aztec and Inca empires
● The Portuguese established themselves along the coast of Brazil.
● In the early 17th century, the British, French, and Dutch launched colonial settlements along the eastern
coast of North America.

The European Advantage

● Countries in the Atlantic rim of Europe (Portugal, Spain, Brittan, and France) were closer to the Americas
than any potential Asian competitors.
● The fixed winds of the Atlantic blew steadily in the same direction which once understood, provided a
different maritime environment than the alternating monsoon winds of the Indian Ocean.
● European innovations in mapmaking, navigation, sailing techniques, and ship design enabled their
penetration of the Atlantic Ocean.
● After 1200, European elites were aware of the region’s marginal position in the rich world and were
determined to gain access to that world.
● The growing desire in Europe for grain, sugar, meat, and fish meant that “Europe needed a larger land
base to support the expansion of its economy.”
● Beyond economic motivation, rulers were driven by the enduring rivalries of competing states.
● One Spanish conquistador declared: “We came here to serve God and the King, and also to get rich.”
● Their states and trading companies enabled the effective mobilization of both human and material
resources.
● Their seafaring technology allowed them to cross the Atlantic with growing ease, transporting people and
supplies across great distances.
● Their iron working technology, gunpowder weapons, and horses initially had no parallel in the Americas.
● Various subject peoples of the Aztec empire resented Mexica domination and willingly joined Hernán
Cortéz in the Spanish assault.
● Much of the Inca elite “actually welcomed the Spanish invaders as liberators and willingly settled down
with them to share rule of Andean farmers and miners”
● The most significant of European advantages lay in their germs and diseases which Native Americans had
no immunities.

The Great Dying

● The European acquisition of their empires in the Americas had a global significance. Chief among those
consequences was the demographic collapse of Native American societies.
● The greatest concentrations of people lived in Mesoamerican and Andean zones which were dominated by
the Aztec and Incan Empires.
● Isolation from the Afro-Eurasian world and the lack of domesticated animals meant the absence of
acquired immunities to Old World diseases.
● When they came into contact with these European and African diseases, Native American people died in
rates up to 90 percent of the population.
● Central Mexico, with a population estimated at some 10 to 20 million, declined to 1 million by 1650.
 ● “A great many died from this plague, and many others died from hunger. They could not get up to search
for food, and everyone else was too sick to care for them, so they starved to death in their beds.” – Native
Nahuatl
● Dutch observer in New Netherland – “the Indians…affirm that before the arrival of Christians, and before
the small pox broke out amongst them, they were ten times as numerous as they are now, and their
populations had been melted down by this disease, whereof nine-tenths of them have died.”
● Governor Bradford of Plymouth – Conditions represented “good hand of God” at work “sweeping away
great magnitudes of the natives…that he might make room for us.”

The Columbian Exchange

● Wheat, rice, sugarcane, grapes, and many garden vegetables and fruits, as well as numerous weeds, took
hold in the Americas, where they transformed the landscape.
● Even more revolutionary were the animals – horses, pigs, cattle, goats, sheep – all of which were new to
the Americas multiplied in an environment mostly free of natural predators.
● Horses transformed many Native American societies as settled farming people abandoned their fields to
hunt bison from horseback.
● In Europe, calories derived from corn and potatoes helped push human umbers from 60 million in 1400 to
390 million in 1900.
● Potatoes allowed Ireland’s population to grow enormously and then condemned many of them to
starvation or emigration when an airborne fungus, also from the Americas, destroyed the crop in the
mid-nineteenth century.
● By the early 20th century, food plants of American origin represented about 20 percent of total Chinese
food production. In Africa, corn was used as a cheap food for the human cargoes of the transatlantic trade.
● American stimulants such as tobacco and chocolate were soon used around the world
● “the gentleman’s companion, it warms my heart and leaves my mouth feeling like a divine furnace.” –
some Chinese poet.
● Tea from China and coffee from the Islamic world also spread globally.
● The silver mines of Mexico and Peru fueled transatlantic and transpacific commerce, encouraged Spain’s
unsuccessful effort to dominate Europe, and enabled Europeans to buy the Chinese tea.
● The plantation owners of the tropical lowland regions needed workers and found them in Africa.
● The slave trade, created a lasting link between Africa, Europe, and the Americas.
● This network of communication, migration, trade, disease, and the transfer of plants and animals has been
dubbed the “Columbian Exchange.”
● It gave rise to an interacting Atlantic world connecting four continents.
● Western Europeans were clearly the dominant players in the Atlantic World and their societies reaped the
greatest rewards.
● Mountains of new information flooded into Europe and contributed to a new way of thinking called the
Scientific Revolution.
● The wealth of the colonies provided one of the foundations on which Europe’s Industrial Revolution was
built.

Comparing Colonial Societies in the Americas

● The European colonial empires did not simply conquer and govern established societies, but rather
generated wholly new societies.
● Mercantilism held that European governments served their countries’ economic interests by encouraging
exports and accumulating bullion which were believed to be the source of national prosperity.
● Mercantilist thinking thus fueled European wars and colonial rivalries around the world in the early
modern era.
 ● In Spanish America, the theory was largely ignored as Spain had few manufactured goods to sell, and
piracy and smuggling allowed Spanish colonists to exchange goods with Spain’s rivals.
● Some differences grew out of the societies of the colonizing power such as the contrast between
semi-feudal and Catholic Spain and a more rapidly changing Protestant England.
● The kind of established economy established in particular regions likewise influenced their development.
● So too did the character of the Native American cultures – the more densely populated and urbanized vs
sparsely populated rural villages.
● Native American and enslaved African women had to cope with additional demands made on them as
females.
● Cortés marked his alliance with the city of Tlaxcala against the Aztecs by an exchange of gifts in which he
received hundreds of female slaves and eight daughters of elite Tlaxcala families.
● And from the Aztec ruler, “You are to deliver women with light skin, corn, chicken, eggs, and tortillas.
● Soon after conquest, many Spanish men married elite native women, a practice that was encouraged as a
means to cement their new relationship.
● It was advantageous to some women such as one of Moctezuma’s daughters who eventually wound up as
with the largest landed estate in the Mexico Valley.
● Below this elite level, far more women experienced sexual violence and abuse.

In the lands of the Aztecs and the Incas

● The Spanish conquest of the Aztec and Inca empires in the early 16th century gave Spain access to the
most wealthy, urbanized, and densely populated regions of the Western Hemisphere.
● Before the British even began colonizing, the Spanish in Mexico and Peru had established nearly a dozen
major cities, hundreds of churches, an elaborate administrative bureaucracy, and a network of regulated
international commerce.
● In a legal system known as encomienda, the Spanish crown to particular Spanish settlers a number of local
native people from whom they could require labor, gold, or agricultural produce and to whom they owed
“protection” and instruction to the Christian faith.
● It was later replaced with repartimiento, with slightly more control from the crown and Spanish officials.
● By the 17th century, the hacienda system took place where the owners of large estates directly employed
native workers.
● A distinctive social order grew up, replicating something of the Spanish class and gender hierarchy while
accommodating racially and culturally different Indians and Africans. At the top of the society were male
Spanish settlers.
● “The Spaniards, from the able and rich to the humble and poor, all hold themselves to be lords and will
not serve [do manual labor].” - Spanish official 1619
● “I obey but I do not enforce.” - slogan that reflected local authorities’ resistance to orders from Spain.
● The Spanish minority, never more than 20% of the population, was a divided community. Spaniards born
in the Americas, (creoles) resented those that were born in Spain (peninsulares).
● Spanish missionaries and church authorities were often critical of how these settlers treated native
peoples.
● Spanish women were unable to hold public office and viewed as weak and needed protection, but they
were also viewed as “bearers of civilization”. This required strict control of their sexuality and “purity of
blood”
● From a male standpoint, the problem with Spanish women was that they were very few of them.
● mestizo - mixed-race population.
● Over 300 years, they grew and eventually became the majority of the population. They were divided into
castas (castes) based on their racial heritage and skin color.
● Mestizos were largely Hispanic in culture but Spaniards looked them down as illegitimate.
● Mestizas, women of mixed racial background, worked as domestic servants or in their husbands’ shops.
 ● Particularly in Mexico, mestizo identity blurred the sense of sharp racial difference between Spanish and
Indian people.
● At the bottom of Mexican and Peruvian colonial societies were the indigenous peoples, known to
Europeans as “Indians”
● Many Indians gravitated toward the world of their conquerors by learning Spanish, converting to
Christianity, etc.
● Spanish legal codes defined Indian women as minors rather than responsible adults.
● However, much that was native persisted.
● Christian saints blended easily with specialized indigenous gods.
● The Tupac Amaru revolt was made in the name of the last independent Inca emperor where the wife of
the leader, evoked the parallel hierarchies of male and female officials who had earlier governed the Inca
Empire
● Spaniards, mestizos, and Indians represented the social categories while slaves and freemen were less
numerous.
● Some movement was possible as Indians who acquired education, wealth, and European culture might
pass as mestizo and mestizo families could eventually be accepted as Spaniards.

Colonial Sugars
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