III.

Spanish America

On his first voyage, Columbus sighted Cuba and landed on Española (now Hispaniola), the island now occupied by Haiti and the Dominican Republic. He returned to Spain with small quantities of gold, native plants and animals, and six men of the indigenous Taíno people. Columbus made three more voyages to the Americas between 1494 and 1502. At that time the area was called the Spanish Indies because Columbus continued to claim that he had reached India. For this reason, the inhabitants of the Caribbean area were all called Indians, despite their diverse cultures.

Many of the people who accompanied Columbus on his four voyages were veterans of the Spanish wars to take Granada from Muslim control. Others included peasant farmers, royal officials, a few priests and friars, some women, as well as a few Africans, most of whom were enslaved. On Columbus’s second voyage, he took 17 ships carrying about 1500 colonists, to establish a permanent settlement on Española. Most of those people were peasant farmers, but some early immigrants to the Caribbean neither farmed nor settled. Instead, they relied on plentiful Indian labor and sought to find gold and return home rich. These immigrants were soon in conflict with both the native peoples and Columbus. By late 1494 many colonists opposed Columbus’s policies, such as his handling of the native people’s hostilities. They even filed grievances to the Spanish monarchy against Columbus in his role as administrator of the new lands.

Spain’s royal government quickly imposed its own officials, first to collect taxes and then to administer the colony. Its goal was to assert royal control over both settlers and indigenous peoples. In Spain the government established a House of Trade to supervise colonial affairs and to oversee, license, and tax all trade and commerce. As the royal government asserted more authority over colonial activities, Columbus lost effective power, and was eventually replaced by other colonial governors.

Within a decade of Spanish settlement, only perhaps one-tenth of the original population of Española remained. Many Taínos died from European diseases and the disruption of their communities and daily lives; others were killed in battles with Spaniards or died from overwork.

A.

The Conquistadors

During the early 1500s, Spaniards used the major Caribbean islands as a base for expeditions to the mainland of Venezuela and Central America. Men called conquistadors recruited, equipped, and led these expeditions, often with the financial backing of merchants. Most hoped to find great riches or legendary places, such as the Seven Cities of Cíbola, which were supposed to have streets and houses adorned with gold and jewels, and the fountain of youth, a spring whose waters were said to have the power to restore youth.

The conquistadors came from areas of Spain where fighting was a way of life. The wars against Muslims in Spain had lasted for centuries, and clashes between rival clans were common. These men were accustomed to achieving their goals of fame and fortune through military endeavor. By taking treasure, territory, and subjects for their country, they won recognition from the king. Many explorers also felt it was their moral responsibility to convert people to Christianity.

With the blessing—but not the financial support—of the Spanish government, these conquistadors made their way through Central and South America claiming territory for Spain. The conquistadors’ expeditions increased Spain’s territory, wealth, and power. In 1513 Vasco Núñez de Balboa and his men crossed Central America and became the first Europeans to see the Pacific Ocean. Six years later Hernán Cortés led an expedition into Mexico and in 1521 captured Tenochtitlán, the capital of the Aztec Empire. In the early 1530s Francisco Pizarro conquered the Inca Empire in Peru. Even so, native resistance to Spanish rule continued for years.

From Peru, expeditions pushed north into Ecuador and Colombia and south into Chile. Conquistadors founded Buenos Aires, in what is now Argentina, in 1536 and Asunción, in what is now Paraguay, in 1537. Francisco de Orellana first explored the Amazon Basin in 1541 and 1542, searching for legendary chief El Dorado and his kingdom, which was rumored to abound in gold and precious stones. Other explorers ventured to the borderlands of northern Mexico and the Guiana Highlands, where they generally established only isolated and often temporary outposts. In the 16th century the major permanent settlements were in central Mexico and the Andes Mountains. By the 1550s Spain controlled the areas that are now Mexico, most of the South American continent, Central America, Florida, and Cuba.

The European explorers of Central and South America encountered native civilizations far richer and more sophisticated than the Caribbean cultures—for example, the Maya and Aztec peoples in Mexico and the Incas in Peru. They came upon technology allowing relatively abundant crops and encountered forms of empire where city-states dominated smaller satellite communities. Their conquests brought dramatic changes to both the Americas and Spain. The conquistadors and colonizers introduced European culture and religion to the Americas, while Spain gained enormous wealth from the spoils of its conquests and from silver and gold mines in the newly conquered lands.

B.

Spain’s New Leaders

Upon the death of Ferdinand in 1516, his grandson Charles of Ghent inherited Spain—which he ruled as Charles I—as well as its colonies and parts of Italy. Charles was also heir to the Habsburg possessions in what are now Belgium, the Netherlands, Germany, and Austria. In 1519 he became emperor of the Holy Roman Empire as Charles V, and he ruled the largest Western empire since the Roman Empire. By the time Charles abdicated in favor of his son, Philip II, in 1556, the empire also included the kingdoms of New Spain (now Mexico) and Peru. When Charles abdicated, however, he divided his empire between his brother, Ferdinand, and his son Philip. As king of Spain, Philip held Spain, the Italian possessions, the Netherlands, and the Spanish Indies. Despite the division of lands, the Spanish Empire remained too large to be governed effectively.

Spain tried to monopolize commerce within the empire. But by the 1520s the ships of the seafaring nations of northern Europe—England, France, and the emerging Netherlands—were intruding into the Caribbean Sea to pirate and trade. As the native peoples died, some of these European nations helped supply the Spanish colonies with African slaves. But for more than a century, other Europeans made few serious attempts to establish colonies of their own in the Americas.

C.

Life in the American Colonies

In America, relatively few Spaniards dominated a vast indigenous population. To gain control of Native American labor, the Spanish initially introduced the encomienda, an official grant giving a Spaniard jurisdiction over one or more native communities. They justified this practice as instructing Native Americans in Christianity, and they governed these communities by relying on existing native hierarchies and chiefs.

The Spanish colonists tended to settle where the native population was most plentiful. These tended to be urban areas and many were sites where the Spanish had built their own city on an existing native city or town. Cortés provided a model for this when he built Mexico City over the conquered Aztec capital of Tenochtitlán. He introduced to Mexico many crops and industries familiar to Spaniards, such as sugar, silk, cattle, wheat, and cotton, and he instituted gold and silver mining and the slave trade.

By the 1550s, Spanish settlements spread from Chile north to Mexico. Other Spaniards had ventured into Florida, California, and the present southwestern United States. Eventually, a chain of 250 Spanish towns spread through the Americas. About 2000 people a year sailed to Mexico and Peru from Sevilla, the only Spanish port allowed contact with the Americas.

By mid-century the area was governed as two large administrative regions called viceroyalties. The viceroyalty of New Spain encompassed Mexico, most of Central America, and Spanish territory in the Caribbean; the viceroyalty of Peru included what is now Panama and almost all of Spanish South America.

D.

Religion and the Church

Representatives of the king called viceroys governed the viceroyalties. However, outside the cities, priests and friars were the most direct Spanish authorities. These clergy had the most ongoing contact with Native Americans through instructing native peoples in Christianity and European ways. Some early friars, such as Bartolomé de Las Casas, were among the greatest defenders of and advocates for the native peoples. Although some argued against mistreatment of the indigenous peoples, the presence of the clergy, as well as their devotion to Christian faith and Spain’s king, strengthened imperial control over all segments of colonial society.

The church played a vital role in the Spanish colonies. It served as a bank, a social welfare agency, and as a center of education. Spanish clergy furthered study of natural science and natural history. They learned native languages, produced dictionaries, studied indigenous societies, and taught Native Americans to write in their native languages. They also preserved a record of native societies, of the Spanish cultural elements flooding into them, and of the ways in which the native peoples adapted to the Spanish.

The native peoples adapted the new European ways as they saw fit. Even after contact with Europeans, Native Americans continued to see their state as autonomous, with its own territory and traditions. As before, they viewed the ruler and the gods as embodiments of the people as a whole, but after the arrival of the Spanish, the emperor became a Spaniard and the gods had new names. Religion in the indigenous societies was inseparable from the culture, government, and social order. In addition, religion defined their understanding of the cosmos, human origins, destiny, social order, and their place in the universe. It also helped them to come to terms with the unknown. Catholic missionaries were most successful where they encountered practices or symbols similar to those in European Christianity.

E.

Economics in the Colonies

The colonial system of agriculture shifted in the mid-1500s as encomiendas were replaced by great estates called haciendas. These estates depended on a system of plantation slavery, which relied heavily on the labor of African slaves. Africans were brought into the colonies to replace the indigenous peoples who had died in large numbers following contact with the Europeans. In the Caribbean islands, these plantations produced mostly sugarcane.

At first, most of the Africans who were brought to America arrived by way of the Seville slave market. Eventually, slaves were imported directly from Africa, mostly to the Caribbean and the tropical coasts of the mainland. Many were taken to America on the ships of other Europeans. Foreigners imported slaves both legally, as licensed by the Spanish government, and illegally, through smuggling. Slaves did a variety of work. Some became overseers, skilled artisans, herders, farmers, teamsters, miners, or domestic workers. Slaves also cut sugarcane and built and worked sugar mills. Some even escaped to found their own communities. There were also non-African slaves, including Muslims and Jews from Spain, most of them women. Although there were many slaves in the Spanish colonies, many were also freed, and at one point in the 18th century there were more free blacks than slaves in Spanish America. (see Blacks in Latin America)

The American colonies also provided Spain with valuable gold and silver from mines worked by forced native labor. Together with agriculture, mining maintained Spain’s empire in the Americas. The most noted silver mines were in Mexico and Potosí, a boomtown in present-day Bolivia at the eastern edge of the Andes. There, Native Americans worked the mines suffering harsh conditions and under a system of forced labor.

America's precious metals (some gold but mostly silver) revolutionized European economies; banking prospered, commerce expanded, and prices soared. Spain, however, was unable to keep much of the silver. Large amounts of it left Spain to pay for costly wars, campaigns against heresy, luxuries for its kings and nobles, and administration of its global empire. In addition, a general European recession beginning in the 1620s hit Spain especially hard. Ultimately, much of the precious metals from Spain’s colonies ended up in Asia to pay for Asian goods bought by Europeans. Potosí silver streamed through the Philippines, Turkey, Sumatra, and China, where Spain’s ruler was known as the Silver King. Silver from the Americas sustained a global economy.

F.

Other Europeans

By the late 17th century, the Americas had become a focus of European rivalries for commerce and international balance of power. All ships trading between Spain and its American colonies stopped in the Caribbean, where they were targeted by English, Dutch, and French raiders. Notorious pirates waylaid treasure fleets, raided ports, smuggled merchandise, and sometimes settled on islands suitable for growing sugar—a highly profitable enterprise—and dealing in contraband. In this way, the English took over control of Jamaica, a center of Caribbean raiding, piracy, and bootlegging. Beginning in 1638 the English also occupied what is now Belize. In the 17th century the English, Dutch, and French all occupied the Guianas (now Suriname, French Guiana, and Guyana). Even so, at that point the other European powers preferred to profit indirectly from Spain's colonies in the Americas.

During the 17th century, Spain suffered from a general European recession and domestic crises, and after 1620 the nation lost much of its imperial economic and commercial control. Contact with the Americas decreased, and the colonies were left increasingly on their own. The Thirty Years' War (1618-1648) and other conflicts drained the budget, while famine and shortage of essential resources crippled the Spanish nation. As a result, the nation lost most of its wealth and was forced to reduce contact with the American colonies.

G.

Shifting Identities

With less interference from Spain, Spanish Americans increasingly developed their own new societies. Creoles, people of Spanish descent who were born in the Americas, developed a cultural identity shaped by both their Spanish roots and their American home. At the same time, the number of mestizos, people of mixed European and indigenous ancestry, increased. Art, architecture, and writing in the Americas reflected this cultural mixture. As Spain’s American colonies became more economically and politically independent, Spanish Americans felt less connected to Spain.

The population of Spanish America grew dramatically in the 18th century. Agricultural and mining production surged, and new towns were born. Spaniards founded settlements and missions in what are now California, Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas. More products and metals were sold abroad. In the late 18th century, Spanish Americans increasingly exported animal hides, sugar, tobacco, cocoa beans, cotton, and indigo, a purple dye. Most valuable, however, was the rising output of gold and silver.

H.

The Bourbon Reforms

In the 18th century, the Bourbon kings of Spain initiated economic reforms to stimulate manufactures and technological advances in order to modernize Spain. They also hoped Spain would profit from reforms designed to make the administration of Spanish America more efficient and to promote its economic, commercial, and fiscal development. Beginning in the 1760s, King Charles III reorganized imperial administration and defenses and introduced a comprehensive package of commercial reforms largely expected to benefit Spain. In order to pay for the reforms, Charles taxed Spanish Americans.

In 1776 Charles created a new viceroyalty, the Viceroyalty of the Río de La Plata, in the southern part of South America, with its capital at Buenos Aires. The new viceroyalty was made up of territory formerly governed under the Viceroyalty of Peru. It included the sparsely populated lands east of the Andes that now form Argentina, Bolivia, Uruguay, and Paraguay.

I.

Collapse of the Empire in the Americas

In the 1780s the Spanish presence extended over much of the continent, but growing British power threatened Spain's colonies in the Americas. In 1762 Spain entered the Seven Years' War (1756-1763) as an ally of France against Britain. When the British won, Spain gave up Florida but received the huge territory of Louisiana from France as compensation. France and Spain allied again in 1779 to support the American Revolution against Britain, and following Britain’s loss Spain recovered Florida.

Although trade between Spain and its American colonies increased, Spain was increasingly unable to prevent other nations from trading with them. Smuggling of foreign manufactured goods increased, and such goods were often carried on English ships or ships from Britain’s American colonies. In addition, many of the goods that Spain shipped to its colonies had originally been manufactured in other nations.

At the same time, Spanish reforms also introduced Creoles to ideas of enlightened development. For example, reformist viceroys encouraged Creoles to develop natural resources and to form groups to promote their regional economies, scientific advances, and commerce with Spain. This increase in decision making stimulated the Creole leaders of Spanish colonial society to desire yet more control. They wished to trade freely and to govern and develop their regions themselves. As the Spanish government increasingly drained American treasure and resources, the colonists’ resistance grew.

Revolutionary movements in other areas inspired Spanish Americans. Britain’s North American colonies gained their independence and formed their own nation in the American Revolution. In 1789 the French revolted against their king in the French Revolution. And in 1791 a group of black slaves led the Haitian slave revolt in the French colony of Hispaniola, which Spain had ceded to France in 1697.

Economic motives also increased the desire for independence. In 1796 the British blockaded shipping between Spain and America. With Spain completely unable to control its colonies’ trade, Spanish American products had many new markets. The colonies also had more sources for imports, which lowered import prices. The enormous population growth in the Americas also encouraged many to want autonomy from Spain. By 1800 the population of Spain's colonies was 17 million, dramatically more than Spain's domestic population of 10 million.

Spain’s power diminished further in the first decade of the 19th century, when the French army under Napoleon I invaded Spain, and Napoleon placed his brother, Joseph Bonaparte, on the Spanish throne. The Spanish people rebelled against French control, providing another example of revolution for Spanish Americans. The colonies first declared their opposition to the French government in Spain, but then they began to demand independence. In 1810 the people and town councils of Caracas, Venezuela, and Buenos Aires rose against the local Spanish authorities. Many other cities, including Cartagena and Bogota in Colombia, Santiago in Chile, and Quito in Ecuador, followed their example.

In South America, two leaders were particularly important in the movement for Latin American independence. Simón Bolívar fought against the Spanish in what are now Venezuela, Colombia, and Ecuador. He also assisted José de San Martín, who had liberated Chile from Spanish control, to secure Peru’s independence. Despite these successes, fighting among local and regional factions in what were essentially civil wars complicated the revolutions for independence. Creoles in Mexico City and Lima, for example, initially opposed independence, although they were motivated less by love of Spain than by fear of social upheaval.

By 1824 Spain had lost all of its mainland territories. Cuba and Puerto Rico were the only American colonies remaining under Spanish rule. However, the value of Cuban trade—based largely on sugar—was greater than that of all Spain's former American colonies combined. Yet, as the 19th century progressed, these island territories were increasingly drawn into the economic orbit of the neighboring United States.

Increasingly, Cubans perceived Spanish rule as repressive, and when Cuba revolted against Spain in 1895, the United States secretly aided the Cuban insurgents. In 1898 an American battleship, the USS Maine, mysteriously blew up in Havana Harbor. Many people in the United States blamed Spain, and the United States declared war. The Spanish-American War was brief but had huge consequences. The United States won the war, ending over 400 years of Spanish empire in the Americas. Under the peace agreement signed in December 1898, Cuba became independent, and the United States gained sovereignty over Puerto Rico. The Philippines and Guam, Spanish colonies in Asia and the Pacific, also became U.S. protectorates.