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The Destruction And Transformation Of Indian Societies
The various Indian peoples responded in many ways to the invasion of America and the transformation of their societies. All of them suffered a severe decline of population. This was a demographic catastrophe of incredible proportions. On the main islands of the Caribbean, the Indian population had virtually disappeared by 1540, a result of slaving, mistreatment, and disease. In central Mexico, war, destruction, and above all disease brought the population from an estimated 25 million in 1519 to less than two million in 1580. In Peru, a similar process brought a loss from 10 million to 1.5 million between 1530 and 1590. Elsewhere in the Americas a similar but less well-documented process took place. Smallpox, influenza, and even measles wreaked havoc on the Indian population, which had developed no immunities against these diseases.
While epidemic disease was the major cause of depopulation, the destruction of the conquest and the weakening of indigenous societies contributed to the mortality and made the Indian populations more susceptible to disease. Population losses of this size disrupted Indian societies in many ways. For example, in central Mexico the contraction of the Indian population led the Spanish to concentrate the remaining population in fewer towns, and this led in turn to the seizure of former communal farming lands by Spanish landowners. Demographic collapse made the maintenance of traditional social and economic structures very difficult.
The case of Mexico is particularly stark. The tremendous decline of the Indian population was matched by the rapid increase in European livestock. Cattle, sheep, and horses flourished on the newly created Spanish farms or on unclaimed lands. In a way, the Indian population of Mexico was replaced by European livestock.
Exploitation Of The Indians
Spanish desires to exploit the Indians as laborers or to extract a tribute from them led to Spanish attempts to maintain those aspects of Indian life that served colonial goals or at least did not openly conflict with Spanish authority or religion. Thus, in Mexico and Peru, while the old Indian religion and its priestly class were eliminated, the traditional Indian nobility remained in place, supported by Spanish authority, as middlemen between the tax and labor demands of the new rulers and the majority of the population.
The enslavement of Indians, except those taken in war, was prohibited by the mid-16th century in most of Spanish America. Instead, different forms of labor or taxation were imposed. At first, encomiendas were given to the individual conquerors of a region. The holders of these grants, or encomenderos, were able to use their Indians as workers and servants or to tax them. While in the Inca and Aztec empires commoners had owed tribute or labor to the state, the new demands were arbitrary, often excessive, and usually devoid of the reciprocity of obligation and protection characteristic of the Indian societies. Encomiendas were introduced after the initial conquest of a region from New Mexico in the north to Chile in the south. In general, the encomiendas proved to be destructive to Indian societies, and as depopulation continued, the holders of the grants became dissatisfied. Finally, the Spanish crown, unwilling to see a new nobility arise in the New World among the conquerors with their grants of Indian serfs, moved to end the institution in the 1540s. The crown limited the inheritability of encomiendas and prohibited the right to demand certain kinds of labor from the Indians. While encomiendas continued to exist in marginal regions at the fringes of the empire, in the central areas of Mexico and Peru they were all but gone by the 1620s. With the disappearance of the encomienda, the colonists and descendants of the conquerors increasingly sought grants of land rather than Indians as the basis of wealth.
Meanwhile, the colonial government increasingly extracted Indian labor and tax through local royal officials. In many places, communities were required to send groups of laborers to work on state projects, such as church construction or road building, or in labor gangs for mining or agriculture. This forced labor, called the mita in Peru, mobilized thousands of Indians to work in the mines and on other projects. While the Indians were paid a wage for this work, there were many abuses of the system by the local officials, and community labor requirements were often disruptive and destructive to Indian life. By the 17th century, many Indians left their villages to avoid the labor and tax obligations, preferring instead to work for Spanish landowners or to seek employment in the cities. This process eventually led to the growth of a wage labor system in which Indians, no longer resident in their villages, worked for wages on Spanish-owned mines and farms or in the cities.
In the wake of this disruption, Indian culture also demonstrated considerable resiliency in the face of Spanish institutions and forms, adapting and modifying them to Indian ways. In New Spain, the Spanish municipal councils established in Indian towns were staffed by the Indian elite, and their operations reflected pre-conquest patterns within European forms. In Peru and Mexico, Indians learned to use the legal system and the law courts so that litigation became a way of life. At the local level, many aspects of Indian life remained, and Indians proved to be selective in their adaptation of European foods, technology, and culture. Main page
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