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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Alan Taylor
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January 26 - February 6, 2020
Measured as an average yield in calories per hectare (a hectare is ten thousand square meters, the equivalent of 2.5 acres), cassava (9.9 million), maize (7.3 million), and potatoes (7.5 million) all trump the traditional European crops: wheat (4.2 million), barley (5.1 million), and oats (5.5 million). By introducing the New World crops to the Old World, the colonizers dramatically expanded the food supply and their population.
In effect, the post-Columbian exchange depleted people on the American side of the Atlantic while swelling those on the European and African shores. Eventually, the surplus population flowed westward to refill the demographic vacuum created on the American side of the Atlantic world.
Ranging cattle and pigs wreaked havoc on an American environment that the Indians depended upon. In the Caribbean islands, Spanish pigs consumed the manioc tubers, sweet potatoes, guavas, and pineapples that the Taino Indians cultivated. In New England, the rooting swine thrived on the intertidal shellfish that the Indians gathered for their own subsistence. The pigs and cattle also invaded native crop fields to consume the precious maize, beans, and squash.
Prior to the colonial invasion, Indian farmers certainly had to cope with their own weeds, such as ragweed, goldenrod, and milkweed. But the indigenous weeds were not as tough as those that came from Europe, which included dandelions, thistles, plantain, nettles, nightshade, and sedge.
Today botanists estimate that 258 of the approximately 500 weed species in the United States originated in the Old World.
When in the most isolated and least developed pockets of North America today, we like to think that we have rediscovered a timeless “wilderness” and that we experience there the nature known by Native Americans before 1492. In fact, everywhere we see an altered nature profoundly affected by all the plants and animals that tagged along with the colonists to remake this continent.
In extent and population (and cultural diversity), the Spanish empire in the Americas exceeded even the ancient Roman, previously the standard of imperial power.
By his death in 1547, Cortés ranked as the wealthiest man in Spain, thanks to the revenues from his Mexican estates. As a New World conqueror, he had enjoyed the most spectacular social mobility of his century.
“The most essential thing in new lands is horses,” observed a conquistador. “They instill the greatest fear in the enemy and make the Indians respect the leaders of the army.”
Although important advantages, the technology and animals of European war were not sufficient to overcome the far larger numbers of proud and defiant Indian warriors. But the Spanish evened the odds by finding local allies in subordinated Indian peoples who resented the dominant native people in each region.
Grants known as encomiendas endowed the holder, the encomendero, with a share in the forced labor and annual produce of the inhabitants of several Indian pueblos (villages).
The conquistadores regarded plunder, slaves, and tribute as the just deserts for men who forced pagans to accept Christianity and Spanish rule.
Priests oversaw the destruction of native temples, prohibited most traditional dances, and obliged natives to build new churches and adopt the rituals of the Catholic faith. Many Indians adopted the new faith with apparent enthusiasm but continued to venerate their old idols in secret.
During the 1530s the leading conquistadores either died fighting one another over the spoils of conquest, as did Pizarro in Peru, or were forced into retirement by the crown, which was the fate of Cortés in 1535.
Responding to the missionaries’ complaints, the Spanish crown also enacted reform legislation meant to protect the Indians from the most extreme forms of encomendero exploitation. But these reforms were indifferently enforced by colonial officials, who balked at angering the encomendero class.
By the 1570s the number of emigrant women had increased but remained less than a third of the total. As a result, the male emigrants usually took wives and concubines among the Indians, producing mixed offspring known as mestizos.
Of all the European empires in the Americas, the Spanish developed the largest number of urban centers and the greatest density of cosmopolitan institutions. By 1574 the Spanish had chartered 121 towns in the Americas, and another 210 followed by 1628.
Unlike the later English colonies, the viceroyalties had no elective assemblies; the Spanish permitted none in their New World.
Although fatal to administrative efficiency, the frictions perpetuated the ultimate control of the monarchy in distant Madrid. Competing vigorously for the crown’s favor, all three sets of leaders reported (or invented) the malfeasance of their rivals. The empire became clogged with paperwork as the clashing interests generated reams of reports and counter-reports that encouraged almost endless dispute and indecision. Multiple appeals and counterappeals from rival officials delayed action for years, often till long after the protagonists had died.
The immense size of the American empire, its distance from Spain, and the crown’s obsession with control combined to render Spanish colonial administration highly bureaucratic, inefficient, and slow.
By 1585 American bullion amounted to 25 percent of the crown’s total revenue.
But the gold and silver sent homeward was a mixed blessing. The infusion expanded the money supply faster than the growth of goods and services, contributing to a dramatic inflation of prices that spilled over into the rest of Europe.
Europeans experienced a fivefold rise in prices during the sixteenth century.
In Spain, the real value of wages, relative to prices, declined by a fifth. The American bullion may have made the Spanish nation rich, in the aggregate, but it worsened the already hard lot of the peasants and laborers—together the great majority of the population.
American bullion also weakened manufacturing in Spain, by inflating the prices of Spanish-made goods. This encouraged cheaper imports from the rest of Europe while rendering Spanish manufactures too expensive to compete in export markets. The Spanish loss benefited manufacturers elsewhere in Europe, especially the Dutch, who increased their exports to Spain. Offering little attraction to investors, Spanish manufacturing lagged behind the rest of western Europe in quantity, quality, and technological innovation. That lag would, in turn, greatly weaken the Spanish empire in the Americas, as
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Drained by foreign wars, the Spanish military and economy decayed dramatically during the seventeenth century. Before that unexpected decline, however, neither the Spanish nor their many enemies could see the ruinous consequences of the American gold and silver.
In 1523 much of the gold stolen by Cortés from the Aztecs and shipped homeward was restolen by French pirates in the Atlantic. During the 1550s, French pirates extended their raids into the Caribbean, capturing, plundering, and burning Havana, the great port of Cuba.
The expense of the official convoy trade—and the long intervals between the arrivals of shipments in the New World—put Spanish merchants at a disadvantage. They faced increasing competition from foreign interlopers who, as smugglers, garnered a growing share of the Hispanic market in the Americas.
In 1620, Spanish crown receipts of American silver fell to less than a third of their 1590s level, producing a financial crisis.
The horticultural Indians of the core were the foundation of the Hispanic empire, but the nomadic Indians of the peripheries were formidable obstacles to further expansion.
Cabeza de Vaca helped shift official Spanish policy away from unregulated conquest toward a greater emphasis on winning a measure of native consent. The Spanish continued, ultimately, to rely on their military might for expansion, but the crown insisted that commanders minimize Indian casualties and avoid enslaving natives. The monarchy also paid for missionary friars to accompany and advise the conquistadores. This shift in emphasis from conquest to “pacification,” however, was slow and incomplete, especially in the expeditions immediately inspired by Cabeza de Vaca’s return.
Although officially instructed to practice restraint, Soto and Coronado instead unleashed waves of violence, destruction, and disease that devastated the native peoples in their way. And all to no avail, for neither found another Tenochtitlán. Instead, their expensive failures set northern limits to the Spanish empire by limiting further expeditions.
In May of 1542, Soto sickened and died on the banks of the Mississippi, leaving the command to Luis de Moscoso. When the local Indians suspiciously asked where Soto had gone, Moscoso replied that he had ascended into the sky. In fact, with a ballast of sand, Soto had been surreptitiously cast into the Mississippi River to hide his mortality from the Indians. The humanitarian friar Bartolomé de Las Casas observed, “We do not doubt but that he was buried in hell … for such wickedness.”
Far from timeless, the southeastern forest of the eighteenth century was wrought by the destructive power of a sixteenth-century European expedition. Soto had created an illusion of a perpetual wilderness where once there had been a populous and complex civilization.
Scholars used to assume that nineteenth-century Indian nations were direct and intact survivors from time immemorial in their homelands. In fact, after 1700 most North American Indian “tribes” were relatively new composite groups formed by diverse refugees coping with the massive epidemics and collective violence introduced by colonization.
During the late 1550s, predation by French pirates cut in half the Spanish royal revenue from the New World. The pirates concentrated their attacks on the most vulnerable run for Spanish shipping bound from the Caribbean to Spain: the relatively narrow channel between Florida and the Bahamas.
In an ironic reversal of the usual colonial process, the wrecks endowed a native people with gold, silver, and slaves, for the Calusa Indians scavenged the hulks for the shiny metals and enslaved the castaway sailors.
A few days later the remaining French in the vicinity surrendered to the Spanish, expecting to save their lives. Menéndez promised only “that I should deal with them as Our Lord should command me.” His God commanded Menéndez to tie their hands “and put them to the knife.” Nearly three hundred French died in the two massacres.
Generating virtually no revenue, San Agustín drained the Spanish crown, which paid and supplied the demoralized garrison that kept the town barely alive. In 1673 the governor of Cuba confessed, “It is hard to get anyone to go to San Agustín because of the horror with which Florida is painted. Only hoodlums and the mischievous go there from Cuba.”
Caught in a double squeeze of high costs and small income, the New Mexicans had the lowest standard of living of any colonists in North America.
Backsliding or resistant converts suffered whipping with the lash, sometimes followed by a smearing dose of burning turpentine over the bloody back, which could prove fatal.
Although the Franciscans were demanding and punitive, most Pueblo peoples decided that it was best to receive and heed them. In part, the Pueblo acted from fear of the Hispanic soldiers, who backed up the priests with their firearms, dogs, horses, whips, and gallows. Far better to ally with than to oppose such formidable men. Indeed, many Pueblo hoped that a military alliance with the Spanish would protect both from the nomadic warrior bands—Apache and Ute—of the nearby mountains and Great Plains.
The Pueblo peoples also saw material advantages in an alliance with the Hispanics and their priests. They introduced appealing new crops, including watermelons, grapes, apples, and wheat, and metal tools superior to the traditional stone implements of the Pueblo, as well as domesticated sheep, goats, cattle, pigs, and mules, which enlarged the supply of meat and cloth or provided power for plowing and hauling.
The priests also stood out among the other Hispanics because they rarely raped Indian women and preferred their vow of poverty to the accumulation of gold.
The friars also dazzled the natives with elaborate and novel displays of vestments, music, paintings, and sacred images all combined into the performance of elaborate processions and the ceremony of the mass.
In fact, most Pueblo compartmentalized their beliefs, old and new. They accepted features of Hispanic culture and the Catholic faith that they found useful or unavoidable, while covertly maintaining their traditional spiritual beliefs. While adopting elements of Hispanic culture that would help them adjust to a transformed world, most Pueblo peoples also tried to preserve a distinct identity and core culture derived from their ancestors.
By stealing horses and some guns from Hispanic missions and ranches, the nomads gradually became faster and more dangerous raiders, quickly striking and retreating.
As the Spanish divided, the disparate Pueblo peoples became more unified, in response to the Hispanic presence. Previously lacking any common language and identity, the Pueblo peoples obtained both—as Spanish became a common second language and as they developed shared grievances against a set of exploiters.
the Pueblo population fell from 40,000 in 1638 to 17,000 by 1680. Nonetheless, the Pueblo remained collectively responsible for the same level of tribute, so the amount of maize and blankets that every Indian had to pay more than doubled.
The Pueblo Revolt of 1680 was the greatest setback that natives ever inflicted on European expansion in North America.
