Spain: explorations and colonization (for individual work)
Spain: explorations and colonization
In the meantime, the Spanish, distracted by anti-Muslim Reconquista in southern Spain, had fallen behind Portugal when it came to exploring. Prime goals were to find direct access to Asia for spices and gold and spread Catholicism. Blocked from following Portugal's African-Indian Ocean route to Asia, Spain’s monarchs —King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella—turned to the unusual proposal made in 1492 by the Italian captain Christopher Columbus: to sail west to reach the Far East.
The boldness of Columbus's plan lay not in the idea that the world was round (a fact known to educated Europeans), but in his erroneous belief that the globe was small enough that an expedition would be able to sail from Spain to Asia before running out of food or water, or without being barred by some other landmass. Columbus set sail in August 1492 and reached the islands of the Caribbean in October.
Columbus himself was convinced that he had found the Indies—hence the mistaken term "Indians" for Native Americans—but others quickly realized that he had found something completely unknown to them.
Spain and Portugal turned to the pope to determine who could claim which parts of this “New World." In lines of demarcation agreed to between 1494 (Tordesillas Treaty – Atlantic) and 1529 (Saragossa Treaty – Pacific), the pope gave most of South America and all of North America to the Spanish. The Portuguese received Brazil, which was discovered in 1500. The pope similarly defined Spanish and Portuguese spheres of influence in Asia.
In the 1520s, all of the two countries' earlier efforts were tied together by Ferdinand Magellan, a Portuguese mariner sailing on behalf of Spain. Leader of the first circumnavigation of the globe, Magellan left Europe in 1519, traversed the Atlantic, and rounded the tip of South America. His ships crossed the Pacific and returned to Europe in 1522, although he himself died along the way, in the Philippine islands.
The Spanish now established a commercial or colonial presence wherever they could.
In the New World, Spain built up power in the Caribbean, using islands such as Cuba, Puerto Rico, and Hispaniola (today Haiti and the Dominican Republic) as bases. The mainland fell to the conquistadors: generals who brought huge parts of North and South America under Spanish control. Florida fell to Juan Ponce de León in 1513. From 1519 to 1521, Hernán Cortés waged an effective and brutal campaign against the Aztecs, and the Aztec capital of Tenochtitlan became the headquarters for all of New Spain. Mesoamerica and most of what is now the U.S. Southwest, including California, fell to the Spanish, as did the Gulf Coast Farther to the south, in the 1530s, Francisco Pizarro destroyed the mighty Incan empire.
Such conquests were partly due to military advantages like iron weaponry, horses and gunpowder weapons. Europeans also proved adept at divide-and-conquer tactics, whereby they stirred up rivalries among native tribes and allied with some against others. (local women sometimes provided invaluable guidance here, the most notable example being Cortes's mistress Malinche.)
However, the most important reason for Spain’s and Portugal’s success in conquering the New World involved disease. In particular, smallpox and measles killed indigenous Americans in massive numbers. Anywhere from one-quarter to one-half of the Americas’ original population perished—some historians think even more may have died—and the survivors were left all the more vulnerable to European conquest.
The conquistador Cortes famously stated that he had come to the Americas for "God, gold, and glory.” Although the conversion of Native Americans to Catholicism was considered important, particularly to offset the loss of European worshippers to Protestant churches, economic exploitation was the highest priority for Spain and Portugal in the New World.
The most important activities here were mining (especially for silver near Mexico City and at Potosí, Bolivia's "mountain of silver") and plantation monoculture—with sugarcane the most prized and most labor-intensive cash crop.
At first, the conquistadors governed the territory they conquered, sending one-fifth (la quinta) of their profits back to Spain. Starting in 1535, New Spain was placed under government control as a viceroyalty ("in place of the king") and all colonial economic activity was run by the House of Trade in Seville. By the 1700s, three new viceroyalties—Peru, New Granada (northern South America), and La Plata (southern South America)—had been added.
A direct consequence of Spanish colonization in the New World was coerced labor. Initially, the Spanish attempted to enslave American natives by means of the encomienda system (granted colonists the right to demand labor of native peoples in the mines and fields), but this worked badly and was judged too inhumane by Catholic clergy, and so it was abolished in the 1540s. Spanish officials replaced the encomienda system with the repartimiento system. Repartimiento compelled native communities to supply labor for Spanish mines and farms as encomienda had, but it limited work time and mandated that wages be paid to native workers.
In the Andes, the Spanish took the mita system, the form of coerced labor used previously by the Incas, and adapted it for their own purposes. They also relied increasingly on the importation of slaves from Africa.
Colonization, particularly in the Americas, created mixed populations, such as creoles (whites), mestizos (white mixed with the Amerindian), mulattos (white mixed with black), and zambos (black with the Amerindian). New hierarchies, based on racial discrimination, emerged in the Spain’s New Word colonies.
From 1580, after the death of the King of Portugal, Sebastian I, the Portuguese crown had been joined to that of Spain in an "Iberian Union" under the heir of Emperor Charles V, Philip II of Spain.
Expert questions
1. What were the stimuli of the Spanish explorations and colonial expansion?
2. What tools and strategies did the Spanish use in their colonial expansions and capital accumulation?
3. Did the Spanish use joint-stock companies? If not, then, how, you think, Spain organized its explorations and expansion?
4. What were the main achievements of Spain’s expansion? Were there any falls in this expansion during the considered period?
5. Compared with other nations (Portugal, France, England and Holland) what were the distinct features of Spain? (before giving answer read other nations in the theme 8 section)