The discovery of the Americas for Europeans opened up large amounts of fertile and productive land that required mass amounts of laborers to work the open lands in Mexico, the Andean region, and Brazil. As time progressed and labor populations changed labor systems changed and evolved these labor systems included the encomienda, repartimiento, hacienda, and Indian as well as African slavery. These labor systems had many qualities that were very similar to the other labor systems that were employed in Colonial Latin America however they also had characteristics that made them unique. Even through all the similarities and differences that these labor systems had one thing is undeniable is the economic impact and the impact on economic development …show more content…
These New Laws gave control of the encomienda from the hands of the encomenderos to the colonial governments. The Native Americans were still required to produce cash tribute for the colonial government this system did not work so a new system was devised this labor system was repartimiento. Repartimiento was a system of rotational labor drafts in which “Indian communities filled a quota of laborers for a prescribed time”. Unlike encomienda workers participating in repartimiento received a wage for their labor although the wage was very small. Indians were employed to work in Spanish mines and plantations along with maintaining and repairing colonial roads. The work that Native Americans completed under repartimiento was still labor-intensive work that yielded little economic benefit to the Native who completed most if not all of the exhaustive labor. Repartimiento continued to allow the colonial aristocracy to grow their wealth and profits along with expanding their estates in the New World. While many Native Americans especially those in the Andean region had already taken part in similar labor systems during the time of the Inka empire under the Spanish the system had become “the forced transfer of wealth from poor Indians to rich Spaniards.” While a wage was offered to Native Americans within this system of labor organization the wage they …show more content…
However, instead of working for a temporarily on a hacienda the Natives would work more on more of a long-term basis. In order to sustain themselves and their families Natives needed land, tools, and seeds. In this case hacendados would sell the Indians they goods and lands they needed to so they could “hold workers in debt in order to prevent them from moving to another job.” Indians were provided with lands and the means to cultivate and make those land productive in return they would provide some form of tribute to the hacendero to pay off the debt they accumulated. This system kept many Native Americans trapped within it because the constantly accumulated more debt as they required new and better land, tools, and seeds to cultivate their lands. This work performed continued to be exhausting for the Natives and continued to yield very little reward for them. This labor system operated essentially the same as the labor systems that preceded it with Natives doing all the strenuous work and the Spaniards receiving large amounts of profit and wealth off of that labor with little to no gain for the Native
Encomiendas: An encomienda was a grant of Native American labor given to prominent European men in the Americas by the Spanish king. This grant allowed European men to extract tribute from natives in the form of labor and goods. The value of the grants was dramatically increased with the discovery of gold and silver in the Americas. The significance of this term is that although this system was eventually repartitioned, it initiated the tradition of prominent men controlling vast resources and monopolizing native labor.
The noblemen who made the journey to the Americas often came with their respective titles, but no wealth, because of the British custom of primogeniture. These second born sons intended to create their wealth through exploitation of the Native American population and the many indentured servants who came to work for them. However in the early colonial years, these nobles became great burdens on the society, due to their refusal and laziness to participate in the cultivation of the land. Instead of farming to produce food, these nobles came with the intention of feeding themselves by conquering nearby tribes and looting the precious stones, as the Spanish had previously done. “…the colonists were not growing enough to feed themselves and were still begging, bullying, and buying corn from the Indians whose land they scorched so deliberately”(Morgan 50).
...ything and everyone that were there. At times they would work with the Natives at other times they would be at war with the natives. The Spanish had been engaged with the natives longer and over time felt the best way to control them would be to convert them or put them into same locations where they could “keep an eye on them”. The Pueblo Revolt of 1680 was proof that no matter what they tried, when one man, country, or society tries to oppress another, war is almost always inevitable.
Document 4 explains how the system was to work, “the Indians should work on the Christians’ building, mind the gold, till the fields, and produce food for the Christian’s.” This system benefited the Europeans immensely. On the other hand, many Native’s working were treated very poorly and faced brutal punishment and labor. The enslavement of Native people was another cause of the great decrease in population. The disappearance of Native people leads to the disappearance of their customs, beliefs, and way of life.
This book is complete with some facts, unfounded assumptions, explores Native American gifts to the World and gives that information credence that really happened yet was covered up and even lied about by Euro-centric historians who have never given the Indians credit for any great cultural achievement. From silver and money capitalism to piracy, slavery and the birth of corporations, the food revolution, agricultural technology, the culinary revolution, drugs, architecture and urban planning, our debt to the indigenous peoples of America is tremendous. With indigenous populations, mining the gold and silver made capitalism possible. Working in the mines and mints and in the plantations with the African slaves, they started the industrial revolution that then spread to Europe and around the world. They supplied the cotton, rubber, dyes, and related chemicals that fed this new system of production.
The early years of colonial Mexico were a time of great change, as the native Indian populations were decimated by disease and increasingly dominated by the Spanish social and economic structure. Under the encomienda system, the initial flood of Spanish immigrants were provided with a support structure in New Spain, as the Indians’ land and labor were put at their disposal in exchange for moral guidance.[3] As Spain sought to reap the benefits of its new colony, the need for dependable labor in Mexico’s agr...
The trans-Atlantic interactions from 1600 to 1763 significantly contributed to maintaining continuity and fostering changes in the labor systems in the British North American colonies. When the colonies were founded, plantations played an important role. The Europeans maintained continuity of labor systems since the demand for labor was high in the colonies. By using African slave labor, they endorsed change to the labor systems.
Following the success of Christopher Columbus’ voyage to the Americas in the early16th century, the Spaniards, French and Europeans alike made it their number one priority to sail the open seas of the Atlantic with hopes of catching a glimpse of the new territory. Once there, they immediately fell in love the land, the Americas would be the one place in the world where a poor man would be able to come and create a wealthy living for himself despite his upbringing. Its rich grounds were perfect for farming popular crops such as tobacco, sugarcane, and cotton. However, there was only one problem; it would require an abundant amount of manpower to work these vast lands but the funding for these farming projects was very scarce in fact it was just about nonexistent. In order to combat this issue commoners back in Europe developed a system of trade, the Triangle Trade, a trade route that began in Europe and ended in the Americas. Ships leaving Europe first stopped in West Africa where they traded weapons, metal, liquor, and cloth in exchange for captives that were imprisoned as a result of war. The ships then traveled to America, where the slaves themselves were exchanged for goods such as, sugar, rum and salt. The ships returned home loaded with products popular with the European people, and ready to begin their journey again.
The gold and silver mines offered quick wealth to the Spaniards, and the native population was given out freely because of the repartimiento system. The Indians were given as a reward to the Conquistadors for helping the Spanish king in conquering Latin American.
...ditions were terrible and the superintendents’ disregard for their welfare did not help any. According to footnote 2, a peso was worth 8 reals. So, they were paid for their work, but the compensation amounted to almost nothing. The “Potosí” section mentions that the “mingados”, volunteer workers, were paid more, and were paid based on experience. The section also mentions a provision of food rations, so the Spanish must have had some concern for the welfare of these workers, if only pragmatic in nature. I think that the greatest indicator of the Spanish disregard for native life lies in the sentence “This works out very badly, with great losses and gaps in the quotas of the Indians […]”. (The Human Record, 144) It implies that many died due to work in the mines, and because of the disparity of the population and natural lifestyle of the natives, more suffered.
Labor shortage and certainly did make room for immigrant newcomers. Combinations of indigenous, European and African people created a new society in the Americas. Europeans and Africans brought not only germs and their people but also their plants and animals. They also changed the environment. Even more innovative were their animals: horses, pigs, cattle, goat, and sheep. New domesticated animals made possible the ranching economy and cowboy cultures, hunting bison by horseback. American food crops spread widely in the Eastern Hemisphere. The American crops later provided cheap and reasonably nutritious food for millions of industrial workers. Exchange with the Americas reshaped the world economy because of the silver mines of Mexico and Peru and the millions of African slaves to the Americas. The plantation owners of the tropical lowland regions needed workers and found them by millions in Africa. The slave trade which bought these workers to the colonies, and the sugar, and cotton trade, which spread the fruits of their labor abroad, created a lasting link among Africa. The Columbian was enormous network of communication, migration, trade, disease, and the transfer of plants and animals, all made by European colonial empires in the
They gave the least power and human rights to the Native Americans to show dominance over them, and prove who of them had the power. The purpose of the church building was to convert Native Americans to Christianity, many converted to avoid bloodshed and damage to their people. The Spanish forced the Native Americans to work; Encomienda, which means to have Native American labor. The Native Americans labored on haciendas/plantations, which means farms. They forced Native Americans to work
Mexico which was the colony of New Spain was put in existence for the advantage of their mother country. After the tumble of the Aztec Empire, Spain retitled the captured lands as the “viceroyalty” of New Spain and governed Mexico for three hundred years. Tenochtitlan was the prior capital of the territory and turned into what is known as Mexico City. After studying and obtaining power over some of the lands in Central Mexico, the Spanish government established a colonial mining technique wherein gold, silver, and additional metals were obtained and taken to Spain. Shadowing the techniques that was started in Spain, the colonial authorities granted the new arrivals and warriors the power to make haciendas near the country. The laborers most times were native people that were paid poorly which made them rely on the hacienda proprietor to maintain a living. Some of the workers
At the heart of Anglo-American trade lay the highly profitable commerce in cash crops, from tobacco in the Chesapeake colonies to rice and indigo in South Carolina, wheat from the middle colonies to cotton in the South; an extensive textile industry in the North, Insurance companies that insured slaves as property, to many wall street firms that got their start as middle men in the cotton trade, I think it would be logical to conclude that the foundation of American economy lay in the back breaking toil and sweat of Slave labor.
In discussing the Labor system that existed during the time of Spanish rule it is important to understand what labor systems that were used, why the Spanish used them, how they justified using indigenous people in such a way, how the indigenous as well as black slaves were treated in these systems, and the effects the Labor Systems had on the indigenous population. As soon as the first Spanish entradas arrived in the New World they realized the vast resources that had been virtually untapped. They saw incredible wealth in the sugar cane crops and the wood dyes in Brazil, and the silver mines in Potosi and other northern areas, plus many other raw resources. At first the Labor systems were very underdeveloped in Colonial America, the indigenous people had produced just enough to use what they needed and in some cses a little extra for some trade with neighboring peoples