The Corporate City: The American City as a Political Entity, 1800-1850: American City as a Political

"Curry ably documents the contribution of the earlyth-century city to the development of a private mercantile economy. Those interested in formal.
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The Portuguese, on the other hand, partly because of Italian influence and partly because of their own geographic situation, had gone over thoroughly to the commercial-maritime tradition, emphasizing exploration, commerce, tropical crops, and coastal trading posts rather than full-scale occupation. It is no accident, then, that Christopher Columbus was a Genoese who had long been in Portugal and had visited the Atlantic islands.

His projects were entirely within the Italian tradition. The Spaniards were not only the first of the Europeans to reach the Americas in early modern times, but they also quickly located and occupied the areas of greatest indigenous population and mineral resources. They immigrated in force and created a far-flung, permanent network of new settlements. The islands of the Caribbean would soon become a backwater, but during the first years of Spanish occupation they were the arena of the development of many practices and structures that would long be central to Spanish-American life.


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When Columbus returned to Spain from his voyage of , having hit upon the island of Hispaniola now divided between the Dominican Republic and Haiti as his base, his concept of what should be done thereafter was in the Italian-Portuguese maritime tradition. He wanted to explore further for trading partners, and he considered all who came along with him to be employees of an enterprise headed by himself. The Spaniards, however, immediately started moving in the direction of their own traditions. A conflict of purpose between the Spaniards on the one hand and Columbus with his Italian relatives and associates on the other soon ensued.

By the royal government was intervening directly, naming Spaniards to the governorship and sending further large parties of settlers. Spanish ways soon gained the upper hand. Santo Domingo , founded on the southeastern coast of Hispaniola in , became a real city, with a rash of ephemeral secondary Spanish cities spread over the island.

These were oriented to gold-mining sites, which were soon at the base of the Spanish economy. Indigenous demographic loss in this hot, humid area was quick and catastrophic, and placer mines primarily in streams, where unconsolidated deposits of heavy, valuable minerals settled also soon began to run out. In the second decade of the 16th century the Spaniards pushed on to the other large islands, where the cycle began to repeat itself, although more quickly; around the same time, expeditions to the mainland began, partly to seek for new assets and partly to try to replace the lost population on the islands.

Santo Domingo became a type of entity that would reappear in every major area of Spanish occupation. The central city formed a stable headquarters for the Spaniards in the midst of a chaos of population loss and economic shifts in the countryside.

The American City as a Political Entity, 1800-1850

The majority of all the Spaniards in the country lived there, at least when they could. Everyone of importance was there, with only underlings doing essential tasks located in the country. The urban core was well laid out and well built up. Here were the ranchos, impermanent structures inhabited mainly by Indians temporarily in town for work purposes. The Spanish-American city remained like this for centuries—Spanish in the centre, Indian on the edges, growing indefinitely without changing at the core, the site of an enormous process of cultural change. In the Caribbean phase several mechanisms developed, combining indigenous and Spanish elements, that long formed the main structural ties between Indians and Spaniards on the mainland as well.

The primary form through which Spaniards attempted to take advantage of the functioning of the indigenous world was what came to be known as the encomienda , a governmental grant of an indigenous sociopolitical unit to an individual Spaniard for him to use in various ways. On the Spanish side, the institution grew out of the Reconquest tradition. Pressure among the Spaniards on the scene led to the arrangement; Columbus, while governor, had opposed it, and Spanish royal authorities tried to restrict it as much as they could. On the indigenous side, the encomienda rested on an already existing unit and the powers of its ruler.

The size and benefits of the encomienda thus depended on the local indigenous situation: The larger islands were inhabited by the Arawak , a sedentary if modestly developed people with kingdoms, rulers, nobles, and obligatory labour mechanisms. Their ruler was called a cacique , and the Spaniards adopted the word and carried it with them wherever they went in the Americas. The cacique received labour but not tribute in kind, and the encomendero, in practice, followed suit. The encomendero used the indigenous labour in various ways: The encomienda set up most of the main forms of Spanish-Indian contact.

Although based on traditional mechanisms, it involved major movements of people and new types of activity. Through these dislocations and the exposure of the Indians to new diseases, the encomienda was instrumental in the quick virtual disappearance of the indigenous population on the large islands. The encomienda was primarily a transaction between the encomendero, the cacique, and his people, but it could not stop there. Auxiliaries with European skills were needed to run mining operations and supervise the growing of European crops and livestock.

The encomendero would hire some Spaniards in supervisory capacities, augmented by African slaves when possible, but the limits of his resources were soon reached. He needed permanent indigenous employees who could learn needed skills and act as a cadre. On the mainland the permanent indigenous worker was to become an ever-growing element of the equation, the locus of the greatest cultural change, and a channel between the Spanish and indigenous worlds. In the Reconquest tradition, the Spaniards believed that non-Christians taken in battle could properly be enslaved.

Nevertheless, the bulk of the sedentary population in the Caribbean and on the mainland was not enslaved.


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Only as the population declined seriously did slave-raiding around the edges of the Caribbean become a major factor, the Spaniards attempting in vain to replace the losses. All over Spanish America, Indian slavery was to be a secondary factor, brought into play mainly with less-than-sedentary peoples and under economic pressures—that is, the lack of other assets. The slaves were always, as in this case, employed far from their place and culture of origin.

Cacique was not the only word and concept incorporated into local Spanish culture in the Caribbean and spread from there wherever the Spaniards went. Still others came out of the Portuguese Atlantic tradition, like rescate literally rescue or redemption , a word for informal trading with indigenous people often involving force and taking place in a setting where conquest had not yet taken place. This whole new overlay on Hispanic culture maintained itself partly because it was adjusted to the new situation but above all because each set of new arrivals from Spain readily adopted it from the old hands already there.

The Spanish occupation of the larger Caribbean islands did not entail spectacular episodes of military conflict. Yet force was involved, and the Spaniards developed many of the techniques they would use on the mainland. One of the most important was the device of seizing the cacique in a parley, then using his authority as the entering wedge. The Spaniards also learned that the indigenous people were not a solid unit but would often cooperate with the intruders in order to gain advantage against a local enemy. Also during the Caribbean phase an expeditionary form evolved that was to carry the Spaniards to the far reaches of the hemisphere.

Spanish expansion occurred under royal auspices , but expeditions were conceived, financed, manned, and organized locally. The leaders, who invested most, were senior people with local wealth and a following; the ordinary members were men without encomiendas, often recently arrived. The primary leader of an important expedition was often the second-ranking man in the base area, just behind the governor, ambitious to be governor himself but blocked by the incumbent. There was no permanent organization and no sense of rank. On flat, open ground, two or three hundred Spaniards often defeated indigenous armies of many thousands, suffering few casualties themselves.

The conquering groups showed a surprising diversity, coming from many different regions of Spain plus some foreign countries and representing a broad cross section of Spanish pursuits. It was they who founded and settled in the new cities, and the later stream of immigration initially consisted primarily of their relatives and compatriots. Conquest and settlement were a single process. Having in about one generation largely exhausted the demographic and mineral potential of the Greater Antilles , the Spaniards began a serious push toward the mainland in two approximately contemporary streams, one from Cuba to central Mexico and surrounding regions and the other from Hispaniola to the Isthmus of Panama region and on to Peru and associated areas.

The Peruvian thrust started first, in Tierra Firme the area of Panama and present northwestern Colombia in the years — The results were appreciable, but the Panamanian occupation was thrown somewhat in the shadow for a time by the spectacular conquest of central Mexico in — The coastal peoples among whom the Spaniards landed, however, had only recently been incorporated in the Aztec tribute system, and they offered the Spaniards no open resistance.

Moving inland, the invaders encountered the second power of the region, the Tlaxcalans. Tlaxcala briefly engaged the Spaniards in battle but, suffering heavy losses, soon decided to ally with them against their traditional enemy, the Aztec. The expected secondary reaction was not long in coming, and fighting broke out in the capital. Here the Spaniards lost much of their usual advantage. After four months the Spaniards captured the Aztec capital and began turning it into their own headquarters as Mexico City.

Other parts of central Mexico came under Spanish control more easily, and several Spanish cities were established in the region. Those to the north led to little in the short run because that area was inhabited by less-sedentary peoples. The Spanish thrust toward Peru through Panama was diverted for some years by the attractions of nearby Nicaragua. No one knew what lay along the southern coast, which because of contrary winds was very difficult to navigate; the coastal climate was hostile, and little wealth was discovered among the people dwelling there.

Attempts in this direction were led by Francisco Pizarro , who despite being illegitimate and illiterate had all the other familiar characteristics of the leader; not only was he the illegitimate son of a prominent family but he also was one of the first captains on the American mainland, by the s a wealthy encomendero and town council member of Panama.

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Acquiring from the crown the governorship of the new region, which now began to be called Peru, Pizarro, in , led an expedition that proceeded into Inca territory. In , at the north-central site of Cajamarca, the Inca emperor Atahuallpa was captured in the usual fashion, a parley and surprise attack. In , after much treasure had been collected, the Spaniards had Atahuallpa executed. The process of conquest and occupation was much as in Mexico, though Pizarro was not thinking of Mexican precedents.

Again, once the Spaniards were in the fully sedentary lands of the Inca, the local people hardly attacked them, allowing them to proceed unhindered into the very presence of the imperial ruler. In addition to a localism similar to that of Mexico, the situation was defined by a large-scale Inca civil war that was just ending as the Spaniards arrived. A faction based in Quito , headed by Atahuallpa, had defeated a faction based in Cuzco , the traditional Inca capital, but the victory had not been entirely consummated , and the parties were still very bitter.

After the events at Cajamarca, the Spaniards faced a certain amount of fighting as they advanced to Cuzco, especially from adherents of Atahuallpa, but his enemies, who seem to have been the majority on the ground, tended to acquiesce for the time being. Deterred by the rigours and inaccessibility of the southern Peruvian highlands, after a bit of experimentation they established the new settlement of Lima , on the central coast, as capital of Peru. The move was of vast significance.

In Mexico the bulk of the Spanish population concentrated in the area of highest indigenous population density, favouring contact, cultural change, and merging. In Peru, the highland centre of indigenous population was separate from the centre of Spanish population on the coast, which, in addition, quickly lost most of its indigenous inhabitants to disease. In consequence, the two peoples and cultures underwent an overall slower and less thorough process of amalgamation.

As in Mexico, conquering expeditions soon went out from central Peru, in all directions: Peru proper seemed to be securely conquered, but a countrywide uprising took place in , centring in Cuzco, where the Spaniards were kept surrounded for more than one year, until an expedition returning from Chile lifted the siege.

After that, the conquest was definitive, although the successor to the Inca ruler and a group of followers took refuge in a remote region, where they held out for more than a generation. Peru was much harder to reach from Spain, and travel within the country was extremely difficult. In the conquest period and long after, Peru was far richer in precious metals than Mexico, since the Spaniards profited from the silver mining already developed by the Inca. Spaniards flooded into the country, eager for encomiendas and ready to rebel in order to get them.

Four large-scale civil wars among the Spaniards rocked the country in the time between the late s and early s. In , however, he was assassinated, brought low by the second of the Almagrist rebellions. A royally appointed governor from outside took over, followed in by a viceroy and audiencia based in Lima; the first viceroy was in turn killed in a civil conflict, but his successors became more firmly established.

In the generation or two subsequent to the military phase of the conquest, Spanish immigrants poured by the thousands into Mexico and Peru. Although still a small minority compared with the indigenous population, they constituted the great majority of all Europeans in the hemisphere, so that these two regions could now be doubly called central areas.

They combined the largest European and indigenous populations with the liveliest economies, for they proved to be the sites of the richest deposits of precious metals then known. The immigrants continued to come from all parts of Spain, constituting an even broader cross section than had the conquerors, for women were now a standard part of the stream.

Already crucial in the Caribbean, the encomienda now developed even further. The Mexican and Andean indigenous units on which it was based were much larger, with stronger authorities who could collect tribute in kind as well as labour. Moreover, the products could circulate in an economy with a great deal more liquid wealth, and there were now many more non-encomenderos, who soon formed the great majority of all Spaniards. The encomenderos greatly enlarged their staffs and followings, with various levels of stewards and many more African slaves, whom they could now afford.

The ecclesiastics who now began serious work with the indigenous people of the countryside operated within the framework of the encomienda and received their remuneration from it. The encomenderos went not only into mining and local agrarian activity on a larger scale than before but also into a large variety of ancillary enterprises.

Their establishments in the city centre were often palatial, including shops rented to merchants and artisans, of whom they were the best customers. They married Spanish women, ideally relatives of other encomenderos or of high local officials, if only to have legitimate heirs to inherit the encomienda.

They became an interlocking group dominating local Hispanic society and virtually monopolizing the municipal councils of the Spanish cities. The process whereby Hispanic society penetrated into the hinterland was begun by their usually humble rural employees, who combined tax collecting, labour supervision, farming, and livestock growing. They, too, frequently married Spanish women and acquired urban and rural property.

To increase their productivity, they bought African slaves, whom they trained in their own trades; the Africans in turn helped train the larger number of Indian apprentices to be found in many shops. In this way the artisans were important in the gradual creation of an ever-growing African, indigenous, and mixed group in the cities, able to speak Spanish and practice the Spanish trades. Spanish women were an important element in the sedentary urban society growing up in the central areas.

The women were above all relatives of Spanish men already present, brought from Spain explicitly to marry some local associate. As wives of encomenderos and artisans, they managed households that included many Spanish guests and employees and even larger numbers of Africans and Indians, whom they attempted to mold to their purposes. They also brought up both their own fully Spanish children and the racially mixed children they often took or were given to raise. Women were at first a small minority of the Spanish population, but their relative numbers steadily increased, reaching effective parity with men by the second or third generation after conquest.

Africans also were important to the society. As stated, encomenderos and artisans acquired African slaves , and any Spaniard of means would try to own at least one or two. Thus Africans were soon a significant group numerically; on the Peruvian coast, at least, it is thought that after several decades they equaled the Spaniards in numbers. Spaniards needed auxiliaries serving as intermediaries between themselves and the much larger indigenous population. The gender ratio strongly favoured males, but females were present too, usually in household service, food trades, and petty commerce.

The women were frequently mistresses of their owners, to whom they bore mulatto children, with the result that mother and children were sometimes freed. Other African slaves bought their freedom, and a mainly urban class of free blacks began to emerge. Their roles were similar to those of the slaves, except for being exercised more independently.

In this society, the slave, or at least the African slave, was not at the bottom of society but ranked in Spanish terms higher than the general Indian population. Africans were more closely associated with the Spaniards than Indians, culturally more like them, given more skilled and responsible tasks, and in cross-ethnic hierarchies were normally in charge of indigenous people.

Spanish cities, from the very beginning, were full of Indians working for Spaniards in a great number of capacities, sometimes temporarily, sometimes for long periods, but usually at a low level. One of the most important features of life in the first postconquest decades was the prevalence of Indian servant-mistresses of Spaniards, the result of the fact that Spanish women were still much less numerous than men, not to speak of the pattern of men waiting for full success before marrying.

These indigenous women retained many aspects of their traditional culture, but they had to learn good Spanish and master skills of Spanish home and family life. They bore the Spaniards mestizo children, who were to become a very important feature of postconquest society. Merchants were present in force and vital to the existence of the overall complex. But as members of a far-flung network that required high geographic mobility, they were at first less a part of local society.

Once the wealth of the central areas became apparent, Sevilla -based firms began to dominate the import-export trade—the exchange of American precious metals for European cloth, iron, manufactures, and other goods. The representatives at American ports and capitals were junior partners in transatlantic firms and in time expected to move on; hence they seldom married or bought property locally.

The aim was to get silver back to Sevilla in order to pay debts and reinvest in merchandise. Second-rank merchants, however, without direct ties to Sevilla, were more likely to develop local roots. Commerce in local goods, often but not always of indigenous origin, was carried on by members of a well-defined social type, sometimes called tratantes , with a profile sharply distinct from that of the long-distance merchants.

Often illiterate, and furthermore without capital, they were recruited from among the most marginal members of local Hispanic society. They, too, were relatively unstable; they were prone to move to another area or into other kinds of activity because their status was so precarious. The mining sector drove the economy of the Spanish world and was an indispensable component of it, yet in several ways it stood apart.

It employed only a relatively small proportion of the total Spanish population.

Curry, Leonard P.

Mining complexes were often remote from the main centres of indigenous settlement and hence also from the network of Spanish cities. Turnover was quick, whether in terms of sites, mining enterprises, or individuals. Gold mining was often virtually an expeditionary activity; a gang of Indians, joined perhaps by some blacks and led by one or two Spanish miners, might spend only days or weeks at a given river site.

An encomendero, not himself physically involved, would likely supply the finances and take most of the profit. In many regions gold mining was seasonal, with miners having neither special training nor a full commitment to the industry. In most regions placer gold was soon exhausted, though Mexico relied on it for a generation, and it eventually became the principal export of New Granada present-day Colombia. Silver mining was the successor, and it became the main export asset of the central areas until the time of independence.

Here too the encomenderos were the greatest investors and mine owners in the beginning, but their dominance was short-lived. Silver mining was the type of technically demanding, capital-intensive enterprise that called for close attention and much expertise on the part of owners. Very soon true silver mining experts began not only to operate the mines but to become the owners as well. Spanish law granted the crown residual ownership of mineral deposits, giving it the right to levy substantial taxes on the industry.

Silver mining camps began to resemble ordinary Spanish municipalities, with councils dominated by local mining entrepreneurs and strong contingents of merchants, craftspeople, and professionals. By strong differences had developed between the Mexican and the Peruvian silver mining industries. Thus indigenous labour obligations, channeled first through the encomienda and later through other arrangements, could supply a large stream of temporary workers.

In addition, there were a number of permanent indigenous workers, some of whom possessed skills inherited from the preconquest period, and, in an industry as technical as mining, this group was constantly growing. Even so, the Peruvian mines used large numbers of temporary labourers under governmental obligation, and their presence greatly slowed down cultural change among the indigenous mine workers. In Mexico, most of the largest silver mining sites were discovered well to the north of the zone of sedentary population. The Mexican mines also used far fewer people, so that the Hispanic element predominated more than in Peru, and the north of Mexico was soon on its way to having a Hispanized, mobile population very different from that in the central part of the country.

In fact, it soon became a customs and emigration office, involved also in the organization of Atlantic convoys. Direction of the governmental aspect of overseas life went to a royal council constituted much like others, the Council of the Indies as the Spaniards continued to call America , which issued decrees, heard appeals, and above all made appointments to high offices.

Distances were such that almost everything governmental depended on the officials actually in America. During the conquest and immediately thereafter, royal government was nominal in the sense that the governor was invariably merely the leader of the conquering expedition. But in the central areas, with the rivalries and wars among the conquerors and continued strong Spanish immigration, the royal government was soon able to install its own institutional network, with the support of many local Spaniards. A host of lawyers and notaries assembled in the capitals around these nuclei and their branches in the secondary Spanish cities.

The viceroys brought with them retinues including an element of high nobility.

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Marriage alliances and business deals soon brought the officials into connection with the more important encomenderos. Church organizations, which in the Spanish scheme of things were part of the overall governmental framework the crown appointed bishops and many other high officials of the church , also came into the central areas in force on the heels of the conquest. Few clerics of any kind were with the actual conquering expeditions, but soon parties of friars arrived. They were followed by bishops and cathedral chapters, established first in the capitals and then in secondary cities; the culmination of the process was the seating of archbishops in Lima and Mexico City.

Both the friars and the priests began to penetrate the countryside, operating through the encomiendas, with the ideal long unrealized of having one cleric for each encomienda. Like the governmental officials, ecclesiastics were closely connected with the civil society; some were appointed in the first place because of family connections, and many tried to marry female relatives to encomenderos.

These institutions were an important part of the general scheme, but they depended on local Hispanic civil society and reflected its relative strength or weakness. Governmental and ecclesiastical hierarchies were as urban-oriented as all other aspects of Spanish society; they were based in the cities, above all the largest cities, where one could find not only the largest concentrations of personnel but all those of high rank. The religious orders were a partial exception, rotating their members frequently; nevertheless, the most famous figures spent the bulk of their lives in larger centres.

As for the government, it hardly existed outside the cities; the local magistrates who gradually came to be appointed in the Indian areas were mainly laymen, often unsuccessful candidates for encomiendas. In the aftermath of the conquests, as they became integrated into the local situation, some ecclesiastics began to criticize Spanish institutions, especially the encomienda. However, the various representatives of the church were not entirely unified.

At the same time, the Spanish royal government was seeking to find ways to increase its authority and in alliance with the Dominicans passed antiencomienda legislation. Resistance among the settlers and conquerors was fierce the greatest of the Peruvian civil wars was in direct reaction to the strongest legislation, the New Laws of But in combination with other factors of which indigenous population loss and the presence in the central areas of many non-encomenderos were the most essential , in the course of the 16th century the encomienda lost its labour monopoly and had its tribute in kind curtailed, while many encomiendas without legal successors reverted to direct crown administration.

The conquerors and early settlers produced a large number of histories describing and praising their exploits. The ecclesiastics, as they came in, began to write similar documents about their own activities, but they also went much further. Some, with the Franciscans most prominent, showed a strong interest in the study of indigenous history, language, and culture; others, especially the Dominicans, wrote in a more polemical spirit; and sometimes the two currents converged.

The arts of literacy were much prized by the upper levels of the Spanish population, and universities, mainly for professional training, were soon established in the viceregal capitals. Not only were the central areas different from the fringes in early Latin America, but important distinctions existed within the central areas themselves. In some ways the centre was more a line than a region—that is, a line from Atlantic port to capital to mines, along which European people and products flowed in and silver flowed out.

For Mexico, the line went from Veracruz to Mexico City and on to Zacatecas and other mines of the north. It was along these routes that the Spanish and African populations concentrated, that social, economic, and governmental institutions were first created, then gelled and thickened, and that cultural and social change proceeded most quickly. Although the majority of the indigenous population continued to live in their traditional units across the countryside, their lives were nonetheless profoundly affected by the conquest and its aftermath.

The most obvious development was drastic demographic loss; in a process marked by periodic large epidemics, the population declined through the 16th century and on into the 17th century to a small fraction impossible to determine with precision of its precontact size. Only in hot, low-lying areas, such as the Peruvian and Mexican coastal regions, however, were losses as disastrous as those of the Caribbean islands. The peoples of the temperate highlands, however much they may have diminished in numbers, survived in the sense of retaining their local units, their language, much of their cultural heritage, and the essence of their social organization.

The Nahuas of central Mexico are the people whose postconquest experience is best understood because of the voluminous records they produced in their own language. These records reveal that the Nahuas were not overly concerned with the Spaniards or the conquest, which seemed to them at first much like earlier conquests; they remained preoccupied to a large extent with their internal rivalries. The local state, the altepetl , with its rotating constituent parts, remained viable as a functioning autonomous unit and as bearer of all major Spanish structural innovations, not only the encomienda but also the parish and the indigenous municipality.

The Nahuas accepted Christianity and built large churches for themselves, but those churches had the same function as preconquest temples, acting as the symbolic centre of the altepetl , and the saints installed in them had the same function as preconquest ethnic gods. The status and duties of the commoners remained distinct from those of the nobles, who manned the local Hispanic-style government of the altepetl as they had filled offices in preconquest times.

The household and land regime remained much the same in its organization despite reductions and losses. Household complexes, for example, continued to be divided into separate dwellings for the constituent nuclear families. The greatest internal social change was a result of the end of warfare, which had been endemic in preconquest times.

Performance in war had provided degrees of social differentiation, avenues of mobility, and a large supply of slaves. Formal slavery among Indians soon disappeared, while internal social mobility tended to take the form of commoners claiming to be nobles or denying specific rights to specific lords. However, the categories themselves were not challenged: The peoples from central Mexico to Guatemala had forms of recordkeeping on paper in preconquest times, and after the arrival of the Spaniards a remarkable cooperation between Spanish ecclesiastics and indigenous aides led to the adaptation of the Latin alphabet to indigenous languages and subsequently to regular record production.

In the case of Nahuatl , the main language of central Mexico, the records have allowed the tracing of some basic lines of cultural and linguistic evolution in three stages. During the first generation, although cataclysmic change was occurring, Nahua concepts changed very little, and their language could hardly be said to have changed at all, using its own resources to describe anything new. In a second stage, beginning about or and lasting for nearly years, Nahuatl borrowed many hundreds of Spanish words, each representing a cultural loan as well. But all were grammatically nouns; other innovations in the language were minimal.

This was a time of change in a familiar corporate framework, centring on areas of close convergence between the two cultures. A third stage began about the middle of the 17th century, when Spaniards and Nahuas had come into closer contact, and many Nahuas were bilingual. Now there were no limitations on the kinds of things introduced into the language, and change increasingly took place at the level of the individual, with mediation no longer necessary. The Nahuas had structures perhaps more similar to those of the Spaniards than any other indigenous group, and nowhere else was there such massive interaction of Spanish and indigenous populations, but broadly similar processes were at work across the central areas.

The Yucatec Maya language stayed in something comparable to the second stage of Nahuatl for the entire time up to independence. In the Andes too the indigenous social configuration was sufficiently close to the Spanish that it could serve as the basis for institutions such as the encomienda and parish. But Andean sociopolitical units were less contiguous territorially than those of central Mexico or Spain, and the population engaged in more seasonal migration. Thus the local ethnic states of the Andes, comparable to the altepetl of the Nahuas though far less well understood as the framework of social continuity , may have come under greater challenge of their essential character and identity.

The Spaniards tended to reassign noncontiguous parts of one entity to other entities geographically closer, thereby mutilating the original entity. As far back as can be traced, the postconquest Andeans were inclined to migrate permanently from their home entity to another, whether to avoid taxes and labour duties or for other reasons.

Such movement occurred in Mexico too, but there the new arrivals tended to melt into the existing entity, whereas in the Andes they remained a large separate group without local land rights or tribute duties, known in Spanish as forasteros. Another challenge to indigenous society came in the later 16th century in the form of attempts by the Spanish government to reorganize sociopolitical units, nucleating the population in so-called reducciones , with consequent social upheaval. Still another apparent disruptive force was the Spanish use of obligatory rotary labour of large groups for relatively long periods at great distances.

Yet given the mobility of the Andean peoples from preconquest times, strong continuities may have been involved. The Andeans had sophisticated recordkeeping systems in preconquest times but did not put records on paper with ink, and after the conquest they did not engage in alphabetic writing on the same scale as the indigenous people of Mesoamerica. Some indigenous-language records are now beginning to come to light, however, and so far cultural-linguistic evolution appears far more similar to that of central Mexico in nature, staging, and timing than one would have expected.

Among the new institutions were those formalizing functions that had long been evolving, including the consulados , or merchant guilds, of Mexico City and Lima and tribunals of the Inquisition in the same places plus Cartagena on the Colombian coast. Entirely new was the Jesuit order, which entered in force at the beginning of this time, quickly becoming strong in urban areas.

During these decades nunneries inhabited by daughters of substantial Spanish families came to be a normal feature in any thriving city. Intellectual production began to include not only narrow chronicles but also broad surveys of the entire Spanish-American scene, whether religious, legal, or general in focus. The late 16th and early 17th centuries saw much significant writing by indigenous authors, affected by both Spanish and indigenous traditions. A large corpus appeared in the Nahuatl language of central Mexico. In Peru the indigenous historian and social commentator don Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala produced a vast work in Spanish.

An elaborate ecclesiastical art and architecture flourished in the main centres, much of it with a special regional style of its own. Religious devotion became more localized, with the appearance of locally born saints and near-saints, notably St. The Hispanic sector continued to grow, still centred in the same cities founded in the conquest period. These cities maintained their dominance because they attracted to them anyone from the countryside who was fully successful in any endeavour. They were usually filled to overflowing, and consequently they ejected large numbers of lower-ranking Hispanics into the surrounding countryside.

As a result, new nuclei of Spanish society began to form outside the cities. The process of urban formation repeated itself; a new entity came into being, Spanish at the centre, Indian at the edges, very much a replica of the original city, except that none of the Hispanics rose above a certain rank, and the whole settlement remained dependent on its parent. In time, under the right conditions, tertiary Hispanic-Indian satellites would arise around the secondary centres in turn, until the entire area was honeycombed, and the original pattern of Spanish city and Indian countryside was obscured.

Racial and cultural mixture complicated and blurred society greatly after the conquest period, but many social criteria were still the same under the surface. The intermediary functions were still the province of those ranking lowest in Hispanic society, but that stratum now contained not only the least senior members new immigrants from Spain and other European countries and Africans but also large numbers of mestizos as well as mulattoes and increasingly even Indians who had mastered Spanish language and culture.

To organize the diversity, the Spaniards resorted to an ethnic hierarchy , ranking each mixed type according to its physical and cultural closeness to a Spanish ideal. As mixture proceeded across the generations, the types proliferated until finally, at the time of independence, the system collapsed under its own weight.

The new categorizations were all at the intermediary level; despite them, all these people, often simply called castas , assimilated to each other and intermingled, occupying the lower edge of Hispanic society. The more successful and better connected among them were constantly being recognized as Spaniards, as a result of which the Spanish category grew far beyond simple biological increase and included many people with some recognizably non-European physical traits. Silver mining in Peru and Mexico continued along the same lines as before, reaching new heights of production in the early 17th century.

After that a series of problems reversed the trend for a time. The absolute value of transatlantic trade seems to have fallen during the same period. Scholarly controversies about the existence, nature, and extent of a general economic depression during the 17th century have not been entirely resolved, but it is certain that the expansion of the Hispanic sector of society did not halt.

The most profitable mercantile operations still involved the trade of silver for European products, but some structural changes were occurring. Most of the transatlantic firms of the conquest period had broken up by now. The merchants in the large Spanish-American centres were still mainly born in Spain, but, rather than being members of Spanish firms, they were likely to be agents working on a commission basis or to be operating independently, buying up goods from Spain that arrived in the annual fleets.

The change of company structure brought with it a localization of the merchant corps, who now stayed permanently in America, married locally, bought property, and even acted as governmental officials, especially in the treasury and the mint. This time saw the rise of forms of economic activity not present or not well developed in the conquest period, of which haciendas landed estates and obrajes textile shops are the most prominent.

The owner was usually Spanish, the middle levels poorer Spaniards or castas , and the temporary workers generally still Indians. A powerful trend, corresponding to the growth of city markets and ethnic-cultural changes, was an increase in the proportion of personnel in the middle levels and a decrease in those at the lowest, especially an increase in permanent workers at the expense of temporary ones though the latter were still very numerous. All these developments ultimately had an immense effect on society in the indigenous entities of the countryside.

In time, many rural Indians were absorbed within Hispanic society, while leading members of local indigenous society would ally and even intermarry with the humble Hispanics who were now beginning to dominate the local economy. Ties to specific local Spaniards and Spanish organizations gained ever greater importance in the lives of the indigenous people, compared with their own corporate society; one result was large-scale fragmentation of indigenous entities.

In central Mexico, many altepetl broke into their constituent parts, and in the Andes even many of these constituent parts ayllus went out of existence or changed their principles of organization. Most of the Hispanic territories in the Indies were occupied by groups coming precisely from the central areas. Conquering groups had always consisted largely of people of lesser position in the base area, and, as it grew clearer that the central areas were unequaled in their assets, the marginality of the personnel going elsewhere became even more pronounced.

Among them were a larger than average share of non-Spanish Europeans and free blacks. Since these movements were posterior to the initial conquests, the first Hispanics arriving often included some mulattoes and mestizos born in the centre. Even so, the first Spanish groups in the peripheral areas were comparable to the first conquerors of the central areas in being of varied origins and commanding a variety of necessary skills.

A greater difference showed itself later. The central-area conquerors, having struck it rich, sent out appeals to Spain that attracted huge numbers of people, especially male and female relatives, as well as fellow townspeople and others. Fringe-area conquerors had not struck it rich. They were less able to pay for the passage of relatives and less able to attract people in general. As a result, subsequent immigration to the periphery was a much thinner stream than to the centre and was sometimes nearly nonexistent for long periods of time, as in Paraguay, and many activities that were profitable in the centre were not viable.

Hispanic society on the fringe was characterized then by its relatively small size, slow growth, and lack of characteristic signs of the centre indicating vigorous development—the presence of Spanish women, practicing Spanish artisans, and transatlantic merchants. The institutional overlay was a mere shadow of the complex network of the centre. The silver-mining sector was entirely absent, though some areas maintained gold production as a second-best Chile for a substantial period and New Granada indefinitely and on quite a large scale.

From the above it is clear that society on the fringe was less differentiated than in the centre. Also, the encomenderos never rose very far above the rest. Here, the indigenous people hardly knew tribute, and their labour could not be turned into large revenue; moreover, there were far fewer of them. More Spanish intervention was needed, and yet there were not many Spaniards available.

Encomenderos on the fringe usually lacked a large staff of majordomos and estancieros. Since the Indians of these regions were organized in much smaller units than those of the centre, many more encomiendas had to be granted among a much smaller number of Spaniards, so that the proportion of encomenderos was greater. Encomenderos and others had to fulfill several functions simultaneously. When any of these societies began to prosper, however, sharper categorization reappeared, along with a general approximation of central-area patterns.

Areas that in one way or another were equipped to supply regions on the trunk line Guatemala, Venezuela, Chile, and northwestern Argentina moved most quickly in that direction. On the fringes, even in regions where it proved possible to establish some form of the encomienda, the relationship between Hispanic and indigenous societies was not the same as in the centre.

In extreme cases, as in Paraguay , one can hardly speak of two separate worlds at all; there, in order to take advantage of the largest effective structure the indigenous people possessed—the extended household—the Spaniards actually entered into those households as heads. This led to a permanent indigenous influence on Spanish Paraguayan family structure, customs, diet, and language in a way and on a scale without parallel in the centre. Something of the same effect is observable even in situations where indigenous society was somewhat more like that of the centre, as in the central valley of Chile.

Another effect of the nature of the more diffuse indigenous society was that in fringe areas the city, which in the centre was the stable bulwark of Hispanic society, was often notably unstable, shifting from one site to another because no location was predetermined by indigenous settlement. Similarly, rural church activity in the central areas was built squarely on existing territorial and sociopolitical units, using indigenous organization and customs.

On the fringe the church for Indians, which here can be called a mission , was founded on a site more arbitrarily chosen, to which indigenous people were attracted, changing their settlement pattern and way of life. The late-arriving Jesuits, who had missed out in the ecclesiastical occupation of the hinterland in the central areas, took a large part in this movement, with especially prominent theatres of activity in the north of Mexico and in Paraguay.

The fringe also saw of necessity the building of forts and the creation of standing military forces, paid, if poorly, by the royal government. Interpenetration of the two societies occurred mainly when the Indians were semisedentary; where they were truly nonsedentary, another pattern emerged.

Here the relationship between Spaniards and Indians was of long-standing hostility, with a minimum of social intercourse. Indigenous society remained quite radically separate from Hispanic as long as it survived, whereas the local Spanish societies, though often little developed, were more purely European than in any other kind of situation; the only indigenous people there were usually uprooted sedentary Indians from neighbouring regions. The far north of Mexico and the far south of Chile are two such areas.

In general, one notes a slow tempo on the fringe, with the result that eventually many forms on the periphery seem archaic. The fringe areas tended to maintain some form of the encomienda far into the 18th century, when it was forgotten in the centre; likewise Indian slavery, as well as parish activity among Indians by members of the religious orders, persisted indefinitely. The use of titles was conservative , and many of the social complexities evolving in the centre were slow to reach the periphery.

The Treaty of Tordesillas between Spain and Portugal , dividing the non-European world between them, gave the Portuguese a legal claim to a large part of the area to be called Brazil. The Portuguese came upon the Brazilian coast in on the way to India and would doubtless have acted much as they did with or without the treaty. For decades Brazil was doubly a fringe area. In the Portuguese scheme, it was far behind longer-established and more profitable overseas ventures in Africa and India. The Portuguese at first thought of Brazil as an area analogous to Africa—that is, an area on the route to India where they would stop for trade or barter in indigenous products and slaves but not establish permanent settlements beyond an occasional trading post.

The most commercially viable resource of Brazil in the first decades proved to be the item that gave the country its name, brazilwood , a tropical hardwood useful as a textile dye. As with Africa, the Portuguese government let out contracts for the trade to private individuals. The brazilwood industry did not bring about the founding of cities or other marks of full development, but its bulk was considerable for a time, and it was not a pure trade in natural products but involved some intervention on the part of the Portuguese.

Though indigenous men of the region were accustomed to cutting down forest trees to clear fields, they did not have a tradition of commerce in trees, nor were they able to cut them on a large scale. The Portuguese therefore had to provide European axes and saws as well as product specifications. A Portuguese factor, or trading agent, would acquire the logs and have them ready when the ships came.

Trading posts were often on islands, as in Africa, and a little later the first formal Portuguese settlements were also founded on islands. The only Portuguese who could be said to be actually settled in Brazil were some outcasts living among the Indians, who sometimes helped acquire useful Indian alliances. About the Portuguese began to feel pressures to intensify their involvement with Brazil.

Interlopers, especially the French, had begun to appear; the India trade was in a slump; and the great successes in Spanish America represented both an incentive and a threat. In response to such stimuli, the Portuguese sent an expedition to drive out the French and assert their authority. The Portuguese had thus far acted entirely within their maritime-commercial tradition, and they continued for some time to do so, adopting measures quite different from those of the Spaniards.

Whereas the Spaniards expanded from one area to the next in relay fashion, the Portuguese crown, in the mids, divided the entire Brazilian coast into strips of donatary captaincies, of which there were eventually The office was hereditary, with extensive judicial and administrative powers. The Portuguese had previously used this type of concession for their Atlantic island possessions.