R2.2 Colonialism and the system of slavery in the Americas (circa 1492–1830)

Between 1492 and 1830 European states conquered most of the Americas and built colonial economies on forced labour: first the labour of Indigenous peoples, then that of about 10.7 million enslaved Africans who survived the crossing of the Atlantic. The societies, economies and racial hierarchies created in these centuries shaped every later period of the history of the Americas, from the independence movements to the civil rights movements of the twentieth century.

The timeline of the whole period shows four overlapping phases. Conquest and the first systems of Indigenous labour came first, in the Caribbean, Mexico and Peru. From the 1550s silver mining, worked largely by Indigenous labour, became the centre of the Spanish empire. From the 1640s sugar plantations worked by enslaved Africans spread from Brazil through the Caribbean, and the slave trade grew to its largest size in the eighteenth century. From the 1770s, slavery faced organised opposition for the first time, and the Haitian Revolution showed that it could be destroyed by the enslaved themselves.

Motives for exploration and the first contacts, 1492–1550

Why Europeans sailed west

In the fifteenth century the most valuable goods in European trade, such as spices, silk and porcelain, came from Asia over long land and sea routes controlled by Venetian, Ottoman and other middlemen. Portugal looked for a sea route around Africa, which Vasco da Gama completed in 1498. The Genoese navigator Christopher Columbus proposed a shorter route westward across the Atlantic. Isabella of Castile and Ferdinand of Aragon agreed to back him in the Capitulations of Santa Fe of 17 April 1492, which promised him the title of admiral, the governorship of any lands he found and a tenth of the profits.

The timing was not an accident. On 2 January 1492 the Catholic Monarchs had taken Granada, the last Muslim kingdom in Spain, ending the Reconquista, a war of conquest presented as a crusade that had lasted for centuries. The Reconquista left Castile with a tradition of conquest rewarded with land and titles, a nobility of minor gentlemen (hidalgos) seeking fortune, and a belief that expanding Christendom was a religious duty.

The diagram of motives groups them under the old phrase "God, gold and glory". The phrase is a simplification, but it captures the fact that the same people held all three motives at once. Columbus's own writings return again and again to gold, but also to the conversion of the people he met and to the glory of the Catholic Monarchs. Hernán Cortés described his conquest of Mexico as a service to God and the king, and also made himself one of the richest men in the Spanish world.

Weighing the motives

Economic motives were the most constant. The search for gold shaped the first Spanish settlements in the Caribbean, every early expedition into the mainland, and the royal claim to a fifth of all precious metals mined (the royal fifth). For the English, French and Dutch, who arrived later and found no empires to plunder, profit came from fish, fur, tobacco and later sugar. Religious motives were sincere and shaped colonial policy, as the missionaries' campaigns for Indigenous rights show, but they rarely decided where or when expeditions went. Political rivalry between states explains the speed of expansion: each crown feared that a rival would take lands and trade first.

Columbus and the Caribbean

Columbus landed on an island in the Bahamas, which its Lucayan inhabitants called Guanahaní, on 12 October 1492, and went on to Cuba and Hispaniola. When his flagship ran aground on Hispaniola he left 39 men at a fort called La Navidad; on his return in November 1493 he found that they had been killed after quarrels with the local Taíno. In four voyages between 1492 and 1504 Columbus explored the Caribbean and the coast of Central and South America, still convinced that he had reached the edge of Asia.

The Catholic Monarchs moved quickly to secure their claim. Pope Alexander VI, in the bull Inter caetera of 4 May 1493, granted Castile the lands it discovered, on condition that it converted their peoples. Portugal objected, and in the Treaty of Tordesillas of 7 June 1494 the two crowns divided the non-European world along a line 370 leagues west of the Cape Verde Islands. Lands to the west were Castile's and lands to the east Portugal's, which gave Portugal the eastern bulge of South America when Pedro Álvares Cabral reached Brazil on 22 April 1500.

Other European rulers never accepted the treaty. France, England and later the Netherlands argued that a claim to land depended on effective occupation, not on discovery or papal grant, and their privateers attacked Spanish shipping from the 1520s. The conflicting claims created by Tordesillas were a cause of almost continuous warfare in the Caribbean for the next three centuries.

The conquest of the Caribbean islands

Hispaniola became the first Spanish colony. Under Columbus, and from 1502 under Governor Nicolás de Ovando, the Spaniards forced the Taíno to pay tribute in gold and work in placer mines (river gravels worked for gold) and on farms. Taíno chiefs who resisted were killed, most notoriously at Jaragua in 1503, where Ovando had dozens of chiefs burned and the female chief Anacaona hanged. From Hispaniola the conquest spread to Puerto Rico (1508), Jamaica (1509) and Cuba (1511), where the Taíno chief Hatuey, who had fled from Hispaniola, led resistance until he was captured and burned in 1512.

The Taíno population collapsed. Estimates of the population of Hispaniola in 1492 range from about 100,000 to well over a million, because there was no census and later writers had reasons to exaggerate or minimise. Spanish counts for allocating labour found about 26,000 Taíno in 1514 and only about 18,000 by 1518, shortly before the smallpox epidemic of 1518–1519 (the figures are approximate). Overwork, famine, the breakdown of farming, violence and, from 1518, epidemic disease all contributed. Spanish slave raids on the Bahamas and the coast of the mainland, to replace the dying workforce, spread the destruction further.

French, English and Dutch exploration in North America

North of the Spanish empire, exploration began as a search for a northern sea route to Asia (the "Northwest Passage") and for the cod of the Grand Banks. John Cabot, sailing for Henry VII of England, reached Newfoundland in 1497. Jacques Cartier explored the St Lawrence River for France on three voyages between 1534 and 1542. Permanent settlement came only in the seventeenth century: the English at Jamestown in Virginia (1607) and Plymouth in New England (1620), the French at Quebec, founded by Samuel de Champlain in 1608, and the Dutch at New Amsterdam (later New York), founded by the Dutch West India Company in 1624–1625.

These colonies began without the mineral wealth or dense, tribute-paying populations of Mexico and Peru. Their initial impact therefore came through trade (above all in fur), through the spread of disease ahead of settlement, and through competition for land, which grew as tobacco farming and European settlement spread.

Military conquest of the Mexica and Inca empires

The two largest states in the Americas in 1500 were the empire of the Mexica (often called the Aztecs), ruled from Tenochtitlan in the Valley of Mexico, and the Inca empire, Tawantinsuyu, ruled from Cuzco in the Andes. Their societies before 1500 are a regional study of their own; what follows is how and why they fell. The vertical timeline of the conquests sets out the main events.

The conquest of Mexico, 1519–1521

Hernán Cortés sailed from Cuba in February 1519 with about 500 soldiers, 11 ships, 16 horses and a few small cannon, in defiance of the governor of Cuba, who had tried to cancel the expedition. On the Gulf coast he acquired an interpreter of decisive importance: Malintzin (known to the Spaniards as Doña Marina and later as La Malinche), a Nahua noblewoman who had been sold into slavery among the Maya and given to Cortés as one of twenty enslaved women. Speaking Nahuatl and Maya, and soon Spanish, she made it possible for Cortés to negotiate with Indigenous rulers.

Cortés found that many peoples subject to the Mexica resented the tribute they paid to Tenochtitlan. The Totonacs of Cempoala joined him, and after hard fighting so did Tlaxcala, an independent state that the Mexica had never conquered. In October 1519, at Cholula, a city allied to the Mexica, the Spaniards and Tlaxcalans killed several thousand people in what Cortés claimed was a pre-emptive strike against a planned ambush. On 8 November 1519 the ruler Moctezuma II received Cortés in Tenochtitlan, and within days the Spaniards made him their prisoner.

The occupation broke down in 1520. While Cortés was on the coast defeating an expedition sent to arrest him, his deputy Pedro de Alvarado massacred Mexica nobles at the festival of Toxcatl in May. The city rose against the Spaniards. Moctezuma died in June 1520, killed either by his own people or by the Spaniards (the sources disagree), and on the night of 30 June–1 July the Spaniards fled the city with heavy losses, an episode they called La Noche Triste ("the Sad Night"). They survived only because Tlaxcala took them in.

Smallpox, brought by a member of the expedition sent from Cuba, then struck the Valley of Mexico. Thousands died, including Moctezuma's successor Cuitláhuac. Cortés rebuilt his forces with new Spanish arrivals and many more Indigenous allies, had thirteen brigantines built to control the lake around the island city, and besieged Tenochtitlan from May 1521. The city fell on 13 August 1521, when its last ruler, Cuauhtémoc, was captured. The Spaniards built Mexico City on its ruins.

The conquest of the Inca empire, 1532–1572

The Inca empire was weakened before the Spaniards arrived. An epidemic, probably smallpox spreading south ahead of the Europeans, killed the ruler Huayna Capac and his heir in about 1527, and a civil war followed between two of his sons, Huáscar and Atahualpa. Atahualpa had just won it when Francisco Pizarro's small force arrived in 1532.

On 16 November 1532, at Cajamarca, Pizarro's 168 men ambushed Atahualpa's escort in the town square, killed thousands of unarmed attendants and captured the emperor. Atahualpa offered to fill a large room once with gold and twice with silver in return for his freedom. The ransom was paid and melted down, but the Spaniards executed him in July 1533. They took Cuzco in November 1533 and installed a young son of Huayna Capac, Manco Inca, as a puppet ruler.

Manco soon turned against the Spaniards. In 1536–1537 his armies besieged Cuzco for months and nearly retook it, and when the siege failed he withdrew to the forested region of Vilcabamba, where a neo-Inca state survived for 35 years. Its last ruler, Túpac Amaru, was captured and executed in Cuzco in 1572 on the orders of the viceroy Francisco de Toledo. The conquest of Peru was also slowed by civil wars among the Spaniards themselves, in which Pizarro was assassinated in 1541.

Why did the Spaniards win?

The traditional explanation, popularised by the US historian William Prescott in his History of the Conquest of Mexico (1843), stressed the courage and leadership of Cortés and the superiority of European weapons. Historians since the 1990s have changed the balance of the explanation. The diagram of reasons for Spanish victory shows the three groups of factors now usually weighed against each other.

Indigenous allies and internal divisions

Indigenous allies did most of the fighting. Tens of thousands of Tlaxcalans and other warriors took part in the siege of Tenochtitlan, carried supplies and the timber for the brigantines, and provided intelligence. For these allies the war was a chance to overthrow Mexica domination, not a choice for Spain, and Tlaxcala was rewarded with privileges that it kept throughout the colonial period. In Peru, Pizarro exploited the civil war and the hostility of Huáscar's supporters and of peoples conquered by the Inca, such as the Cañari and Chachapoya.

Disease

Smallpox killed a large share of the population of Tenochtitlan in 1520, including its ruler and many of its warriors, just when the Mexica had driven the Spaniards out. In the Andes, the epidemic of the 1520s started the succession crisis that divided the Inca elite. The Spaniards, who had been exposed to these diseases in childhood, were mostly immune.

Technology and tactics

Steel swords, armour, horses and crossbows gave small Spanish units a real advantage in open battle, and the brigantines were decisive on the lake. Guns were few and slow, however, and the Spaniards often depended on Indigenous weapons and armour. The tactic of seizing the ruler, learned in the Caribbean, worked against centralised empires but not against Manco Inca's guerrilla war in the mountains. Some historians add that Mesoamerican warfare aimed to take captives for sacrifice more than to kill, which put warriors at a disadvantage against an enemy who fought to kill; others see this as overstated.

Some explanations have been rejected. The story that Moctezuma believed Cortés to be the returning god Quetzalcoatl appears only in sources written decades after the conquest, by Spanish friars and by Nahua writers explaining their defeat. Matthew Restall, in Seven Myths of the Spanish Conquest (2003), and Camilla Townsend, in Fifth Sun (2019), argue that it was a post-conquest invention.

Conquest and eradication beyond the great empires

Where Indigenous peoples were not organised in large tribute-paying states, conquest was slower and often aimed at removal rather than rule. In New England, English colonists and their Mohegan and Narragansett allies destroyed the Pequot in the Pequot War of 1636–1638; at Mystic in May 1637 they burned a fortified village, killing several hundred people, many of them women and children. In King Philip's War of 1675–1676 the Wampanoag leader Metacom (called King Philip by the English) led a coalition against English expansion; thousands died on both sides, and many captured Indigenous people were sold into slavery in the Caribbean. These wars cleared land for settler farming, the main way English colonies grew.

Resources and the colonial economies

The first impact of conquest was the seizure of existing wealth: the gold ornaments of the Taíno, the treasure of Moctezuma, the ransom of Atahualpa. Within a generation, however, European colonists had turned to producing wealth: mining silver and gold, trading furs, and growing tobacco and sugar for European markets. Each of these industries depended on the labour of Indigenous or African people, and each tied the Americas to a wider world economy.

All the colonial powers organised this trade on the principles of mercantilism. In this view, colonies existed to enrich the mother country: they supplied raw materials and bought its manufactured goods, and their trade was reserved for its merchants and ships. Spain channelled all American trade through Seville, where the Casa de Contratación (House of Trade) was founded in 1503, and later through Cádiz. England's Navigation Acts of 1651 and 1660 obliged colonial goods such as sugar and tobacco to be carried in English ships and shipped through English ports.

Silver

Silver became the foundation of the Spanish empire. The great silver mountain (Cerro Rico) of Potosí, in the Andes of present-day Bolivia, was found in 1545, and rich deposits were found at Zacatecas in northern Mexico in 1546 and at Guanajuato soon after. Output rose sharply after the introduction of mercury amalgamation, a way of extracting silver from low-grade ore with mercury: the "patio process" was developed in New Spain in the 1550s and adopted at Potosí in the early 1570s, using mercury from Huancavelica in Peru, discovered in 1563. Potosí became one of the largest cities in the Americas, with a population estimated at 100,000 or more by 1600 (estimates vary).

The silver was carried to Spain by armed convoys, the flota system, which sailed from Veracruz and from Portobelo on the isthmus of Panama, while from 1565 the Manila galleon carried silver across the Pacific from Acapulco to the Philippines, where it was exchanged for Chinese silk and porcelain. Much American silver therefore ended up in China, which had made silver its main currency. For the Spanish crown, the royal fifth on silver paid for wars across Europe, though not enough to prevent repeated bankruptcies.

Historians have long debated the effects of this silver on Europe. In American Treasure and the Price Revolution in Spain, 1501–1650 (1934), Earl J. Hamilton argued that the flood of bullion caused the sustained inflation of the sixteenth century, the "price revolution". Later historians accept that silver contributed but stress population growth, the debasement of coinage and rising demand as well.

Gold

Gold mattered most at the beginning and the end of the period. The placer gold of Hispaniola and Puerto Rico was exhausted by about 1520, at a terrible cost in Taíno lives. Later, New Granada (present-day Colombia) produced gold with enslaved African miners, and from the 1690s a gold rush in Minas Gerais in the interior of Brazil drew hundreds of thousands of Portuguese settlers and enslaved Africans, raising Brazilian demand for captives in the eighteenth century.

Fur

In the north, the fur trade drove French and Dutch expansion and the English Hudson’s Bay Company, chartered on 2 May 1670. Beaver pelts were made into felt hats, fashionable throughout Europe. The trade depended on Indigenous hunters and traders, who exchanged furs for metal tools, cloth, guns and alcohol. It therefore created partnerships more than conquest: the French allied with the Wendat (Huron), Algonquin and Innu, married into Indigenous families and relied on Indigenous diplomacy.

The fur trade also had destructive effects. It encouraged over-hunting, spread European diseases and intensified wars between Indigenous nations. In the Beaver Wars of the seventeenth century, the Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) Confederacy, armed by Dutch and then English traders, fought the French-allied nations for control of hunting grounds and trade routes, and in 1649 destroyed the Wendat confederacy, already weakened by epidemics.

Tobacco

Tobacco gave the Virginia colony a profitable export. After John Rolfe began growing a sweeter Caribbean variety around 1612, exports grew from about 20,000 pounds in 1617 to well over a million pounds a year by the 1630s, according to colonial records. Tobacco needed land and labour more than capital. Planters first relied on indentured labour: young English men and women who worked for four to seven years in return for their passage. From the 1670s, as fewer servants came and planters feared the landless former servants who had joined Bacon's Rebellion in 1676, they turned increasingly to enslaved Africans.

Sugar

Sugar was the most valuable and most destructive product of the colonial Americas. The Portuguese had developed slave-worked sugar estates on the Atlantic islands of Madeira and São Tomé and carried the model to the Brazilian coast, where Pernambuco and Bahia made Brazil the world's leading producer by about 1600. In the 1640s English planters on Barbados switched from tobacco to sugar, a change known as the sugar revolution, and the crop spread to Jamaica (taken by England in 1655), to the French islands and, in the eighteenth century, to Saint-Domingue, which by the 1780s was the richest colony in the world. Sugar also created the largest demand for enslaved Africans, and so the plantation system of the Caribbean and Brazil.

The table of resources shows a pattern: where Europeans found dense Indigenous populations and minerals, they built economies on Indigenous labour; where they found neither, as in the Caribbean and Brazil after the population collapse, they turned to enslaved Africans; and where they traded more than they conquered, as in the fur trade, Indigenous peoples kept more control over the terms of contact.

The Columbian Exchange

The voyages of 1492 reconnected continents whose plants, animals and diseases had developed separately for thousands of years. The historian Alfred Crosby called the result the Columbian Exchange in his book The Columbian Exchange: Biological and Cultural Consequences of 1492 (1972). The diagram of the exchange shows its main elements.

Effects on the rest of the world

American crops changed diets across Afro-Eurasia. Maize and cassava became staple foods in much of Africa; potatoes helped populations grow in northern Europe; maize and sweet potatoes allowed Chinese farmers to cultivate hillsides, contributing to China's population growth in the eighteenth century. Tobacco and cacao created new habits and industries. Quinine, from the bark of an Andean tree, later made it possible for Europeans to survive malaria in Africa and Asia.

Effects on the Americas

European animals transformed American landscapes and ways of life. Cattle, sheep and pigs spread faster than settlers and ate Indigenous crops; Elinor Melville, in A Plague of Sheep (1994), shows how grazing turned farmland in the Mezquital valley of central Mexico into scrub within a few decades. Horses, which had died out in the Americas thousands of years earlier, were adopted by peoples of the Great Plains such as the Comanche and Lakota, who built new mounted hunting and raiding cultures in the eighteenth century. Sugar cane, coffee and rice became the crops of the plantation economies.

Demographic catastrophe

The most devastating part of the exchange was disease. Indigenous Americans had no previous exposure to smallpox, measles, influenza or typhus, and epidemics killed huge numbers, often before Europeans arrived in person. Malaria and yellow fever, carried from Africa on slave ships, later made the lowlands of the Caribbean and Brazil deadly for Europeans and Indigenous people alike.

The chart of the population of central Mexico shows the scale of the collapse in one region, as estimated by Sherburne Cook and Woodrow Borah. Their figures are among the highest, and the size of the population at contact is one of the most contested questions in the history of the Americas: estimates for the whole hemisphere range from about 8 million to over 100 million. Historians agree, however, that the Indigenous population of Mexico and the Andes fell by something like 80–90 per cent within a century, in waves of epidemics such as the smallpox of 1520 and the cocoliztli ("pestilence") epidemics of 1545–1548 and 1576–1580.

Disease did not act alone. Historians such as Massimo Livi Bacci (Conquest, 2008) argue that on Hispaniola the Taíno population had already collapsed before smallpox arrived in 1518, because of violence, forced labour and the destruction of food production. Where people were overworked, underfed and moved from their homes, epidemics killed more of them. The demographic catastrophe was therefore both a biological event and a result of colonial policy.

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The Columbian Exchange links Indigenous labour to African slavery. The collapse of Indigenous populations created the labour shortage that colonial governments first met by forcing Indigenous survivors to work harder, and later by importing enslaved Africans. Sugar cane, carried from the Atlantic islands to Brazil and the Caribbean, created the plantations on which most of them would work.

Indigenous labour under Spanish rule: encomienda, mita and yanaconaje

The Spanish crown claimed the Indigenous peoples of the Americas as its free subjects (vassals), who owed tribute but could not, in principle, be enslaved. In practice colonists wanted labour above all, and the crown needed colonists to settle and defend its new lands. The history of Spanish policy towards Indigenous peoples is the history of this tension, between the claims of conscience and law on one side and the demands of settlers and royal revenue on the other.

The encomienda

The encomienda was formalised on Hispaniola in 1503 and carried to Mexico and Peru by the conquistadors, who received the largest grants as rewards. In the Caribbean it was barely distinguishable from slavery: encomenderos worked their Indigenous labourers in the gold mines and on farms until they died. The Dominican friar Bartolomé de las Casas, who had himself held an encomienda on Cuba before giving it up in 1514, described the system on Hispaniola in his Brief Account of the Destruction of the Indies.

they divided among themselves the Young Men, Women, and Children … with this Proviso, that he should see them instructed in the Catholick Religion … they sent the Males to the Mines to dig and bring away the Gold, which is an intollerable labor; but the Women they made use of to Manure and Till the ground … The Men died in Mines, hunger starved and oppressed with labor, and the Women perished in the Fields

Bartolomé de las Casas, A Brief Account of the Destruction of the Indies, written 1542 and printed in Seville in 1552; this English translation was published in London in 1689. Las Casas wrote as an eyewitness of Hispaniola and Cuba, but also as a campaigner addressing the future Philip II, so he gave no space to Spaniards who treated their workers less harshly and his numbers are often exaggerated. The 1689 English edition carried the title Popery Truly Display'd in its Bloody Colours, a reminder that Protestant rivals of Spain used his book as propaganda.

Criticism and the Laws of Burgos, 1512

The first public challenge came from the Dominican friars of Santo Domingo. In an Advent sermon in December 1511 the friar Antonio de Montesinos told the leading colonists that they were in mortal sin for the cruelty with which they treated the Taíno, asking, in the words preserved by Las Casas, "Are they not men? Do they not have rational souls?" The colonists complained to the king, but the sermon forced the crown to consider the question.

The result was the Laws of Burgos, issued on 27 December 1512, the first general code for the treatment of Indigenous people in the Americas. They kept the encomienda but regulated it: encomenderos had to provide housing, food and religious teaching; Indigenous workers were not to be beaten or whipped by their masters; and women more than four months pregnant were not to be sent to the mines. A supplement of 1513 limited the labour of women and children. The laws were widely ignored, because the officials who should have enforced them were often encomenderos themselves.

In 1513 the crown also introduced the Requerimiento, a document to be read to Indigenous peoples before any attack. It told them that God had given the world to the pope and the pope had given their lands to the Spanish monarchs, and demanded their submission; if they refused, war and enslavement would be lawful. It was read in Spanish, often out of earshot or to empty villages, and Las Casas said he did not know whether to laugh or cry at it. Its significance lies in what it shows about how Spaniards justified conquest to themselves as a legal process.

Las Casas, the New Laws and the Valladolid debate

Las Casas became the leading advocate for Indigenous peoples at the Spanish court. Pope Paul III supported the cause in the bull Sublimis Deus (1537), which declared that Indigenous people were rational beings who could not be deprived of their liberty or property. In 1542 Charles I of Spain (Emperor Charles V) issued the New Laws for the government of the Indies.

Item, We ordain and command that from henceforward for no cause of war nor any other whatsoever, though it be under title of rebellion, nor by ransom nor in other manner can an Indian be made a slave, and we will that they be treated as our vassals of the Crown of Castile since such they are.

The New Laws of the Indies, 20 November 1542, in the translation published by Henry Stevens in 1893. The law expresses the crown's view of Indigenous people as free vassals and its wish to limit the power of the conquistadors, who were becoming a hereditary aristocracy in the Americas. It shows what the crown intended; how far it was obeyed has to be judged from other evidence.

The New Laws also forbade the grant of new encomiendas and ordered that existing ones should pass to the crown when their holders died. This attack on their children's inheritance provoked the encomenderos. In Peru, Gonzalo Pizarro led a revolt in which the viceroy, Blasco Núñez Vela, was killed in battle in January 1546. The crown had already revoked the inheritance clause in October 1545, but Pizarro held Peru until he was defeated and executed in 1548. Over the following century encomiendas nonetheless declined, as the crown refused to renew them and the Indigenous populations they drew on shrank.

The argument about Indigenous rights reached its height at the Valladolid debate of 1550–1551, held before a council of theologians and lawyers. The scholar Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda argued, using Aristotle's idea of natural slavery, that some peoples were by nature fitted to be ruled, and that the Indigenous peoples' practices, such as human sacrifice, justified war against them. Las Casas replied that they were rational peoples with their own governments, who should be converted by peaceful persuasion alone. The council reached no formal verdict, but the debate shows that the justice of conquest was contested within Spain itself.

The mita

As the encomienda declined, the colonial state organised forced labour directly. The most important system was the mita of the Andes, adapted from the Inca mit'a, a rotating labour obligation owed by communities to the state. Between 1569 and 1581 Viceroy Francisco de Toledo reorganised it to supply the silver mines of Potosí and the mercury mine of Huancavelica. Communities in sixteen highland provinces had to send one-seventh of their adult men each year; in the 1570s about 13,000–14,000 men a year were allotted to Potosí.

The mitayos, often accompanied by their families, walked for weeks to reach Potosí. They worked in shifts underground, carrying ore up ladders, and their wages did not cover their costs. Mercury mining at Huancavelica was even more dangerous, because of mercury poisoning. Many men fled their home communities to escape the draft, which increased the burden on those who remained; by the seventeenth century many communities paid money instead of sending workers. Toledo also forced scattered Andean settlements into planned Spanish-style towns, reducciones, to make it easier to collect tribute, supply the mita and teach Christianity. The mita lasted until 1812.

The effects of the mita have lasted. In a study published in Econometrica in 2010, the economist Melissa Dell compared districts just inside and just outside the old mita boundary and found that household consumption is still lower today in the districts that had to supply the mita, which she links to weaker landholding and fewer roads in those areas.

Yanaconaje and other forms of labour

Under the Inca, the yanakuna were people removed from their home communities to serve the state, temples or nobles permanently. The Spaniards kept the category. Yanaconaje came to mean the status of Indigenous people attached personally to a Spanish master, as servants, artisans or labourers on an estate, outside their home community. Yanaconas were exempt from the mita, so the system grew as people fled their communities; it gave landowners a dependent workforce and further weakened Andean communities.

In New Spain, a rotating labour draft called the repartimiento replaced most encomienda labour from the 1550s, supplying workers to farms, public works and mines for a few weeks a year at fixed low wages. From the seventeenth century large estates (haciendas) increasingly kept workers through debt peonage: advances of wages that workers could never repay bound them to the estate. Textile workshops (obrajes) used prisoners and indebted workers in conditions close to imprisonment.

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Portuguese, French and English treatment of Indigenous peoples

In Brazil, Portuguese settlers enslaved Indigenous people to work the first sugar estates. Jesuit missionaries, who arrived in 1549, gathered converts into mission villages (aldeias), where they were protected from slavers but subjected to strict religious and labour discipline. A royal law of 1570 allowed Indigenous people to be enslaved only if captured in a "just war", a loophole that settlers exploited. In the seventeenth century slave-raiding expeditions from São Paulo, the bandeirantes, attacked Indigenous villages and even the Spanish Jesuit missions of Guairá (1628–1631). Epidemics, flight and Jesuit opposition made Indigenous labour unreliable, and from the late sixteenth century planters turned to enslaved Africans.

France had few settlers in New France and depended on Indigenous allies for the fur trade and for defence against the English and the Haudenosaunee. French policy therefore relied on alliance, gift-giving and missions. Jesuit missionaries reported on their work among the Wendat and other nations in the annual Jesuit Relations (1632–1673), and marriages between French traders and Indigenous women created the Métis people of the Great Lakes and later the Red River.

English colonists, arriving in larger numbers as families of farmers, wanted land more than labour. Their impact came above all through the spread of settlement, war and treaties that pushed Indigenous nations westward. English traders also created a large Indigenous slave trade in the south-east: from Carolina, founded in 1670, they bought captives taken by allied nations in raids on their neighbours and shipped many of them to the Caribbean. Alan Gallay, in The Indian Slave Trade (2002), estimates that between 24,000 and 51,000 Indigenous people were enslaved by the English in the South between 1670 and 1715, when the Yamasee War, a rising of Indigenous nations against the traders, ended the trade's peak.

Social impact: assimilation and stratification

Conversion and assimilation

The Spanish crown justified its rule by the conversion of its Indigenous subjects, and conversion was the main route by which colonial rulers tried to assimilate them, that is, to make them adopt Spanish religion, customs and ways of living. Twelve Franciscan friars arrived in Mexico in 1524, followed by Dominicans, Augustinians and later Jesuits. They baptised hundreds of thousands, destroyed temples and religious images, and built churches on the sites of old shrines. They also learned Indigenous languages and wrote catechisms and grammars in Nahuatl and Quechua, so Christianity often spread through Indigenous languages, not Spanish.

The friars educated the sons of Indigenous nobles to act as intermediaries. At the Colegio de Santa Cruz de Tlatelolco, founded in Mexico City in 1536, Nahua students learned Latin and helped the Franciscan Bernardino de Sahagún compile the Florentine Codex, an encyclopedia of Nahua culture. When it became clear that Indigenous people would not be ordained as priests, the college declined.

Assimilation was therefore incomplete, and syncretism was common. Indigenous communities organised their own religious brotherhoods (cofradías) and festivals, and saints took on the roles of local protectors. The cult of the Virgin of Guadalupe, said to have appeared to the Nahua convert Juan Diego in 1531 near the former shrine of the goddess Tonantzin, became the most powerful religious symbol of Mexico after the first published account in 1648. Where the clergy suspected that older beliefs survived, as in the Andes in the early seventeenth century, they organised campaigns to "extirpate idolatry", destroying sacred objects and punishing religious specialists.

Spanish law did not aim at full assimilation. It divided colonial society into two "republics": the república de españoles and the república de indios. Indigenous towns had their own councils (cabildos) and nobles, paid tribute, and were in principle protected from Spanish settlers, who were forbidden to live among them. This separation preserved Indigenous communities, land and languages to a degree, while keeping them as a tribute-paying lower order.

Social stratification and the sistema de castas

Colonial society was a hierarchy of birth and descent. At the top were peninsulares, Spaniards born in Spain, who held most of the highest offices in government and Church. Below them were criollos, people of Spanish descent born in the Americas, who owned much of the land and mines but resented their exclusion from top posts (a grievance that fed the independence movements after 1808). Then came the growing population of mixed descent, and at the bottom Indigenous people and people of African descent, free and enslaved.

As the mixed population grew, Spanish officials and writers in the eighteenth century described an elaborate ranking of categories, the sistema de castas. A mestizo had Spanish and Indigenous parents; a mulato Spanish and African parents; a zambo African and Indigenous parents; and dozens of further names were invented for later generations. The ranking drew on the Spanish idea of limpieza de sangre ("purity of blood"), first used in Spain to exclude converted Jews and Muslims, which was turned in the Americas into a measure of descent from Spaniards.

The casta paintings were the most famous expression of this ranking. As sources, they show an ideal of order held by the elite, painted mostly for collectors in Spain. Records of marriages, censuses and lawsuits show a more fluid reality: people could "pass" into a higher category through wealth, marriage or a favourable entry in a parish register, and some families bought legal certificates of whiteness (gracias al sacar) after 1795. Historians such as R. Douglas Cope, in The Limits of Racial Domination (1994), argue that in Mexico City the poor of all categories mixed so much that the castas mattered less in daily life than wealth and personal connections.

Colonial plantations and Indigenous labour

The first plantations in the Americas were worked by Indigenous people. On Hispaniola the first sugar mills were built in the 1510s with Taíno and then African labour, and in Brazil the early engenhos (sugar mills with their cane fields) of Pernambuco and Bahia depended on enslaved Indigenous workers and on labour hired from the Jesuit aldeias. A smallpox epidemic of 1562–1563 and the famine that followed killed tens of thousands of Indigenous people on the Brazilian coast, and Indigenous workers resisted plantation discipline by flight into the interior they knew. By about 1600 enslaved Africans had become the main workforce on the engenhos.

The plantation itself, a large estate growing one crop for export with a large, closely supervised workforce, was the institution that linked conquest to the slave trade. As Indigenous labour failed, the plantation became the main destination of enslaved Africans.

Experiences of Indigenous women

Conquest and colonial rule affected Indigenous women in particular ways. Most sources about them were written by Spanish men, so historians have reconstructed their lives largely from legal records: wills, lawsuits, petitions and tribute lists.

Intermediaries and elite women

Some Indigenous women played a central role in the conquest itself. Malintzin, who interpreted for Cortés, shaped every negotiation of 1519–1521. Her historical reputation has changed with the politics of each period: in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Mexican nationalism "La Malinche" became a symbol of betrayal (the word malinchismo means a preference for things foreign), while recent historians such as Camilla Townsend, in Malintzin's Choices (2006), present her as an enslaved young woman who made the best choices open to her.

Women of the Mexica and Inca nobility were often married to conquistadors, which gave Spaniards a claim to legitimacy and wealth and gave noble families a place in the new order. Moctezuma's daughter Tecuichpo, baptised Isabel, received a large encomienda and married three Spaniards in turn. Their mestizo children formed part of the first colonial elite.

Violence, labour and tribute

For most Indigenous women, conquest brought sexual violence and coercion. Conquistadors took women as captives, servants and concubines, and many of the first generation of mestizo children were born of unequal or forced relationships. Colonial labour systems also fell on women, though less visibly than on men: tribute was assessed on households and paid partly in cloth woven by women; when men were taken for the mita or fled, women kept households and fields going, and often travelled with their husbands to Potosí to provide food and care. Las Casas's account of Hispaniola describes women worked to exhaustion in the fields while their husbands were in the mines.

Women's agency in colonial society

Indigenous women also used colonial institutions to protect themselves and their families. Under Spanish law women could own and inherit property, and Indigenous women made wills, bought and sold land and houses, and went to court over debts and inheritance. In Andean towns such as Lima and Trujillo many Indigenous women became market traders and property owners, a world described by Karen Graubart in With Our Labor and Sweat (2007). In 1724 the convent of Corpus Christi was founded in Mexico City for Indigenous noblewomen, the first convent in New Spain to admit them as full nuns.

Why the system of transatlantic slavery developed

Between 1501 and 1866 about 12.5 million Africans were forced onto ships bound for the Americas, and about 10.7 million survived the voyage. How African states and merchants supplied captives, and how the trade affected Africa, are part of the history of Africa (the African slave trade, 1500–1900). The questions here are why colonial societies in the Americas came to depend on enslaved Africans, and what the system did to the Americas.

Slavery was not new in 1500: it existed in Africa, the Islamic world and Mediterranean Europe, and Spanish and Portuguese law already regulated it. What was new in the Americas was its scale, its concentration on plantation agriculture, its almost exclusive reliance on Africans, and the way chattel slavery came to be identified with race. The diagram of causes groups the explanations historians give.

Economic factors

The most direct cause was the demand for labour in colonies whose Indigenous populations had collapsed or could not legally be enslaved. On Hispaniola the Spaniards began importing Africans soon after 1500, and the first royal licence to ship captives directly from Africa to the Americas was issued in 1518, as the Taíno population fell towards extinction. After the New Laws of 1542 forbade Indigenous slavery, the case for African labour grew stronger wherever Indigenous labour was scarce.

Sugar made the demand enormous. Cane had to be cut at its peak and crushed and boiled within hours, so a sugar estate combined a farm and a factory and needed a large, disciplined workforce working in shifts during the harvest. Planters who had the capital to build mills and boiling houses wanted a workforce they could control completely and replace when it died. European indentured labour could not meet this need: servants were too few, they became free after a few years, and fewer came as wages rose in England in the later seventeenth century. Enslaved Africans served for life, as did their children, and they could be bought in large numbers because African states and merchants were already supplying captives to European traders on the coast.

The switch can be traced in individual colonies. On Barbados, planters relied on English and Irish servants for tobacco and cotton in the 1630s; after the switch to sugar in the 1640s, enslaved Africans outnumbered Europeans on the island by the 1660s. In Virginia, the change came later, in the 1680s and 1690s, as the supply of servants fell and the price of enslaved Africans dropped when the Royal African Company lost its monopoly. Historians such as David Eltis have also argued that ideas set limits on this economic choice: Europeans could in principle have enslaved other Europeans, such as convicts or prisoners of war, more cheaply, but almost never did, because they did not regard fellow Europeans as people who could be enslaved for life.

The role of ideas

Europeans justified enslaving Africans with ideas drawn from classical philosophy, law and religion. Aristotle's theory of natural slavery held that some people were born to be ruled. Roman law, revived in medieval Europe and in the Castilian code of the Siete Partidas (thirteenth century), treated slaves as property while recognising some rights, such as marriage. Christian writers argued that enslavement brought Africans to salvation through baptism, and some used a misreading of the Bible, the "curse of Ham", to claim that Africans were condemned to servitude.

Las Casas himself suggested in the 1510s that colonists be allowed to import Africans to spare Indigenous people, a proposal he later regretted, writing in his History of the Indies that Africans were enslaved just as unjustly. His change of mind shows that the injustice of African slavery could be recognised within the same moral framework that condemned Indigenous slavery, but that hardly anyone in the sixteenth century did so.

Ideas of race developed alongside the system. In the sixteenth century, enslaved people in the Americas were defined mainly by religion and origin; by the eighteenth, colonial law and thought linked slavery to blackness itself, and writers such as the Jamaican planter Edward Long, in his History of Jamaica (1774), claimed that Africans were a separate and inferior species. Historians disagree about which came first, the system or the racism.

Slavery was not born of racism: rather, racism was the consequence of slavery.

Eric Williams, Capitalism and Slavery, 1944. Williams, a historian from Trinidad who later led it to independence, wrote as part of a wider argument that slavery was an economic institution and that its rise and fall are explained by economics. The claim is a historian's interpretation, not a primary source from the period, and many later historians argue that European prejudice against Africans existed before the plantation system and helped decide who was enslaved.

Political factors

Governments organised and protected the system. Portugal's crown controlled the early trade through licences issued in Lisbon. Spain, which had no trading posts in Africa because of the Treaty of Tordesillas, sold the right to supply its colonies with enslaved Africans by contract. This asiento passed from Genoese and German merchants to Portuguese contractors (1595–1640), then to Dutch, French and finally British holders: at the Treaty of Utrecht in 1713 Britain won the asiento for thirty years, with the right to deliver 4,800 enslaved people a year, and handed it to the South Sea Company. Northern European states chartered monopoly companies, such as the Dutch West India Company (1621) and the English Royal African Company (1672), to build forts in Africa and supply their colonies.

The wars of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were fought partly over this trade and the sugar islands it supplied, and every power treated control of the slave trade as a source of national wealth and naval strength. Colonial legislatures, dominated by planters, then wrote the laws that defined the enslaved as property and made the status permanent and hereditary.

The English colonies built their slave codes from scratch, because English law had no place for slavery. Barbados passed the first comprehensive code in 1661, and it became a model for Jamaica and South Carolina. In Virginia, a law of 1662 settled a question that English law would have answered the other way, since under English common law a child took the status of its father.

WHEREAS some doubts have arrisen whether children got by any Englishman upon a negro woman should be slave or ffree, Be it therefore enacted and declared by this present grand assembly, that all children borne in this country shalbe held bond or free only according to the condition of the mother

Act of the Virginia General Assembly, December 1662, in William Waddell Hening, The Statutes at Large, volume 2 (1823). The law was written by and for slaveholders: by making status follow the mother, it guaranteed that the children of enslaved women, including children fathered by their owners, would be enslaved and would add to the owner's wealth. It is evidence of how law turned slavery into a hereditary condition and of the sexual exploitation that the assembly took for granted.

The French crown issued a single code for its Caribbean colonies, the Code Noir of March 1685. It ordered owners to baptise enslaved people as Catholics, forbade the separation of married couples and young children by sale, and obliged owners to feed and clothe them; it also set mutilation and death as punishments for repeated escape, and made enslaved people legally movable property. As in Spanish America, royal law promised some protection that planters routinely ignored.

The fugitive slave who has been on the run for one month from the day his master reported him to the police, shall have his ears cut off and shall be branded with a fleur de lys on one shoulder. If he commits the same infraction for another month … he shall have his hamstring cut and be branded with a fleur de lys on the other shoulder. The third time, he shall be put to death.

Le Code Noir, Article 38, March 1685, in the English translation published by the Liberty, Equality, Fraternity project of George Mason University and the City University of New York. The code was issued by Louis XIV's government, far from the colonies, to regulate slavery in the interests of the crown and the planters. The severity of this article shows how much colonial authorities feared escape, and how they relied on terror to control a population that outnumbered free people many times over.

The role of the colonial powers

Data: SlaveVoyages estimates of captives carried by each national flag; figures rounded. The table of colonial powers shows how far the system was a shared European enterprise: each power copied the others' methods, and enslaved people were traded between empires through Curaçao, Jamaica and the asiento. Smaller carriers included Denmark, which held three islands in the Virgin Islands, and merchants from the British North American colonies, especially Rhode Island.

The chart of disembarkations shows where the captives landed. Brazil and the Caribbean together received more than four in five of all those who arrived; the mainland of North America, later the USA, received under 4 per cent. These proportions reflect the sugar economy, which consumed enslaved people faster than any other.

Living and working on the plantations

Most enslaved Africans in the Americas worked on plantations. Their lives were shaped first by the Middle Passage, the crossing of the Atlantic, which lasted from about six weeks to three months; about one captive in seven died on board. Survivors were sold in the ports of Brazil and the Caribbean, often after being displayed and examined like livestock, and then "seasoned", a first year or two in which new arrivals were forced to adapt to work, climate and disease and in which many died.

Sugar in Brazil and the Caribbean

Sugar plantations were the hardest regime. Enslaved workers dug the holes for cane by hand, planted, weeded and manured the fields, and during the harvest (about five months a year) cut cane by day and fed it into the mills and boiling houses in shifts that ran through the night. Accidents at the rollers and burns in the boiling house were common. On larger estates the field workforce was divided into gangs by strength: the first gang of the strongest adults, a second gang of older or weaker people and adolescents, and a third gang of children doing lighter work, each driven by an enslaved "driver" with a whip under a white overseer.

Each estate was a hierarchy. Owners, many of them absentees living in Britain or France, employed attorneys and overseers; below them came skilled enslaved workers such as sugar boilers, carpenters and coopers, then domestic servants in the great house, and the field gangs at the bottom. House servants had better food and clothing but lived under constant supervision and were more exposed to the owner's family and its sexual demands. In Brazil, sugar mill owners (senhores de engenho) dominated colonial society, and smaller cane farmers (lavradores de cana) who brought their cane to the mill also owned enslaved workers.

Enslaved people received rations of imported salt fish and corn meal, but in Jamaica and other islands they were expected to grow much of their own food on "provision grounds" on marginal land, in their little free time. Many sold surplus food at Sunday markets, which became the centre of a separate economy and social life. Housing was usually a small hut of wattle and thatch in a "quarter" near the works.

Demography: why Caribbean and Brazilian populations did not grow

Overwork, poor food, disease and harsh punishment meant that on sugar plantations deaths regularly exceeded births. Planters found it cheaper to buy new captives than to improve conditions for families, and they bought about two men for every woman. The enslaved populations of Brazil and the Caribbean therefore fell without constant imports. Olaudah Equiano, who had been enslaved in the Caribbean before buying his freedom, made this point in his autobiography.

Their huts, which ought to be well covered, and the place dry where they take their little repose, are often open sheds, built in damp places; so that, when the poor creatures return tired from the toils of the field, they contract many disorders … This neglect certainly conspires with many others to cause a decrease in the births as well as in the lives of the grown negroes … it is no wonder that the decrease should require 20,000 new negroes annually to fill up the vacant places of the dead.

Olaudah Equiano, The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, chapter 5, London, 1789. Equiano wrote as an abolitionist to persuade the British public, in the year Parliament first debated the slave trade. He uses the language of the planters ("negroes", "fresh supplies") and argues partly from their self-interest, saying that better treatment would end the need for imports; the source shows both his first-hand knowledge of the West Indies and his choice of arguments that a British audience would accept.

Mainland North America was the great exception. It received only about 390,000 captives, but because its climate was healthier, its crops (tobacco and later cotton) were less deadly than sugar, and its enslaved population soon had nearly equal numbers of men and women, the population grew by natural increase. The first US census counted about 698,000 enslaved people in 1790; by 1830 there were just over 2 million.

Tobacco and rice in mainland North America

In the Chesapeake (Virginia and Maryland), tobacco was grown on farms and plantations of many sizes, often with fewer than twenty enslaved people working under the eye of their owner in gangs. Families were more common than in the Caribbean but always at risk of being broken up by sale or inheritance. In the Lowcountry of South Carolina and Georgia, enslaved Africans grew rice, drawing on rice-growing knowledge from West Africa, in a hot, malarial environment where whites were a small minority. Rice planters used the task system: each worker was given a daily task, and time left after finishing it belonged to the worker, who could grow food or make goods to sell. Philip D. Morgan compares the two regions in Slave Counterpoint (1998).

The economic, political, social and cultural impact of the slave system

Economic impact

Slavery made the plantation colonies the most valuable possessions of their empires. Sugar was the most valuable commodity in Atlantic trade for most of the eighteenth century; by the 1780s Saint-Domingue alone produced, by common estimates, about 40 per cent of the sugar and over half the coffee consumed in Europe. Planters, merchants, shipbuilders, bankers and insurers in ports from Liverpool to Nantes and Lisbon grew rich on the trade, and colonial demand created markets for European textiles, metal goods and food. New England merchants supplied the islands with fish, timber and grain and distilled their molasses into rum.

How far this wealth transformed Europe is debated. In Capitalism and Slavery (1944), Eric Williams argued that profits from the slave trade and the plantations helped finance the British Industrial Revolution. Critics have calculated that the profits were too small a share of British investment to have been decisive; others, such as Joseph Inikori in Africans and the Industrial Revolution in England (2002), argue that the wider Atlantic economy built on slave labour provided the markets and raw materials that mattered most. Within the Americas, the economic impact was clearer: the slave system concentrated land and wealth in the hands of planters and left economies dependent on a single export crop.

Political impact

Slaveholders dominated the politics of the plantation colonies. They controlled the elected assemblies of Barbados, Jamaica, Virginia and South Carolina and wrote the slave codes. In Britain the absentee planters and merchants of the West India interest formed one of the most powerful lobbies in Parliament. Fear of revolt shaped colonial politics everywhere: it made the planters of Jamaica and South Carolina reluctant to arm their own populations, and after 1791 it made Cuban and Brazilian elites cautious about independence movements that might unleash the enslaved.

Slavery also shaped the founding of the USA. The Constitution of 1787 counted three-fifths of the enslaved population in allocating seats in the House of Representatives and electoral votes, forbade Congress to ban the import of enslaved people before 1808, and provided for the return of people who escaped to other states. These compromises gave the slaveholding states extra power in the new republic, a theme that leads to the crisis of the 1850s.

Social and cultural impact

Slavery created societies divided by race, with whites at the top, a growing population of free people of colour in the middle, and the enslaved at the bottom. The size of the free population of colour varied: in Brazil and Spanish America, where enslaved people could buy their freedom and owners often freed individuals by will, free people of colour were a large share of the population by 1800, while in the British colonies and the USA laws made manumission difficult. In Saint-Domingue the gens de couleur libres, many of them planters and slaveholders, were denied equal rights, a conflict that helped start the revolution there.

Enslaved Africans came from many peoples and spoke many languages, and in the Americas they created new cultures, a process historians call creolisation. New languages developed, such as Haitian Creole, Papiamentu in Curaçao and Gullah in the Lowcountry. African religious practices combined with Catholicism in Vodou in Saint-Domingue, Candomblé in Brazil and Santería in Cuba. Catholic lay brotherhoods (irmandades in Brazil, cofradías in Spanish America) organised by Africans and their descendants provided burials, mutual aid and a public life. Music, dance, food and storytelling carried African forms into every American society.

Experiences of Indigenous societies under the slave system

The slave system affected Indigenous peoples in several ways. In the Caribbean, the plantations occupied land that had belonged to peoples who were dead or displaced; the Kalinago (Island Caribs) kept parts of Dominica and St Vincent into the eighteenth century, where Africans who escaped or were shipwrecked joined them and formed the Garifuna (Black Caribs), whom the British deported to Central America in 1797. On the mainland, Indigenous people were themselves enslaved alongside Africans, as in Carolina. Colonial governments also paid Indigenous nations to catch people who escaped, as they did after the Stono Rebellion; in Central America, the Miskito, allied to the British, both raided Spanish settlements for captives and absorbed people of African descent. Some nations, such as the Seminole in Spanish Florida, sheltered people escaping from slavery, while by the early nineteenth century some Cherokee and Creek leaders had adopted plantation agriculture and themselves owned enslaved Africans.

Experiences of enslaved women

Women and girls made up about a third of the captives carried across the Atlantic, but their experiences differed from men's in ways that historians have studied closely since the 1980s.

Work

On sugar plantations women did the same heavy field work as men, and by the late eighteenth century they often formed the majority of the first gangs in Jamaica and Barbados, because men were more often trained for skilled jobs as boilers, carpenters or drivers. Women also did domestic work in the great house, cooking, washing and nursing. Outside the fields, enslaved and free women of colour were the main traders in the markets of Kingston, Bridgetown and Salvador, selling food from the provision grounds; these market women, or higglers, gained a degree of mobility and income.

Sexual exploitation and reproduction

Enslaved women had no legal protection against rape by owners, overseers or other men. The diary of Thomas Thistlewood, an overseer and later small landowner in western Jamaica from 1750 to 1786, records thousands of sexual acts with well over a hundred enslaved women, most of them coerced, alongside brutal punishments; the historian Trevor Burnard analyses it in Mastery, Tyranny, and Desire (2004). Because the law made the status of children follow the mother, the children of these relationships were born enslaved, unless the father chose to free them.

Fertility among enslaved women in the Caribbean and Brazil was low. Overwork, poor food and disease all contributed; women may also have spaced births by long breastfeeding, and some historians suggest that some women limited births to avoid bringing children into slavery, though this is hard to prove. Jennifer Morgan, in Laboring Women (2004), shows how planters came to see enslaved women's bodies as a source of both labour and future property. After the British and US bans on the slave trade in 1807–1808, planters who could no longer import captives tried to encourage births with small rewards, with limited success in the Caribbean.

Freedom and family

Women were more likely than men to be freed. Owners freed their enslaved partners and children more often than other enslaved people, and in Brazil and Spanish America women who earned money in the markets bought their own and their children's freedom more often than men did. Women were also central to family and community life under slavery, keeping kin networks together across plantations and passing on language, religion and memory. Women took part in resistance too: Nanny, a leader of the Windward Maroons of Jamaica in the 1720s and 1730s, is remembered as a military and spiritual leader and is today one of Jamaica's National Heroes.

Resistance by enslaved peoples

Enslaved people resisted slavery from the moment of capture to the end of the system. Historians distinguish four broad forms, set out in the table of forms of resistance: everyday resistance, cultural resistance, rebellion and escape. The forms overlapped. A revolt usually grew out of networks built through religion and kinship, and maroon communities needed the support of people still enslaved on nearby plantations.

Everyday resistance

Most resistance was quiet. Enslaved people worked slowly when not watched, broke or "lost" tools, damaged crops, pretended to be ill, stole food and goods from their owners, and ran away for days or weeks to visit family or escape punishment. Raymond and Alice Bauer first described these acts as "day to day resistance" in an article of 1942. Owners wrote endlessly about the "laziness" and "dishonesty" of the people they enslaved, which historians now read as evidence of this constant struggle over work. Planters' fear of poisoning, real or imagined, shows how insecure they felt.

Some historians warn against seeing every act as resistance: taking food could be simple survival, and treating all behaviour as political can understate how much slavery constrained people. Stephanie Camp, in Closer to Freedom (2004), shows how enslaved women in particular created a "rival geography" of secret meetings, parties and places in the woods, beyond the owner's control.

Cultural resistance

Enslavers tried to strip people of their names, families and beliefs. Enslaved people resisted by keeping and remaking their cultures. Many kept African day-names such as Quashie and Cuffee (Kwasi and Kofi in the Akan languages); they built kinship networks with "shipmates" who had crossed on the same vessel; and they practised African-derived religions such as Obeah in the British Caribbean and Vodou in Saint-Domingue, or adapted Christianity to their own ends, finding in the story of the Exodus a promise of deliverance. Some learned to read in secret. Muslims from West Africa kept their faith and Arabic literacy, most visibly in Bahia, where Muslim Africans led the Malê revolt of 1835.

Colonial authorities recognised these practices as threats. Slave codes banned drums, gatherings and the carrying of messages, and after revolts, religious leaders were often identified as organisers: Obeah practitioners were accused of administering oaths to the rebels of Tacky's Revolt in Jamaica in 1760, and Obeah was made a crime there soon after.

Rebellions

The first major African revolt in the Americas broke out on 26 December 1521 on the sugar estate of Diego Colón, the son of Columbus, on Hispaniola. Revolts followed wherever slavery spread, but most were small, local and quickly crushed, because the rebels faced trained militias, could rarely obtain arms, and were betrayed by informers. The revolts timeline shows the largest of them.

The Stono Rebellion, 1739

The largest revolt in the British mainland colonies began on 9 September 1739 near the Stono River in South Carolina, a colony with a large Black majority. About twenty enslaved men, many of them probably from the Catholic kingdom of Kongo, broke into a store, seized guns and marched south towards Spanish Florida, where the Spanish governor had offered freedom to people escaping from the British colonies. Others joined them, perhaps sixty to a hundred in all, before the militia caught them that afternoon.

On the 9th of September last at Night a great Number of Negroes Arose in Rebellion, broke open a Store where they got arms, killed twenty one White Persons, and were marching the next morning in a Daring manner out of the Province, killing all they met and burning several Houses as they passed along the Road. … forty four of them have been killed and Executed; some few yet remain concealed in the Woods

William Bull, lieutenant governor of South Carolina, letter to the Board of Trade in London, 5 October 1739 (UK National Archives, CO 5/388). Bull had met the rebels on the road and escaped, and he wrote to reassure his superiors that the colony was under control. The letter shows the colonial elite's view: the rebels' aims appear only as "desertion" and "mischief". In the same letter Bull reported the Council's advice to reward Indigenous nations for pursuing people who escaped, and said he had sent for Chickasaw and Catawba chiefs.

South Carolina responded with the Negro Act of 1740, which banned enslaved people from keeping livestock, assembling, earning money or learning to write, and placed a heavy duty on imports of new captives for several years. The rebellion thus led to tighter control, a pattern repeated after most revolts.

Revolts in the Caribbean and the impact of Haiti

In the Caribbean, where enslaved people were large majorities, revolts were larger. In Tacky's Revolt of 1760 in Jamaica, Akan-speaking Africans led uprisings across the island that took months to suppress, with hundreds of rebels killed or executed. In Berbice (part of present-day Guyana) in 1763, rebels led by a man named Coffy held most of the Dutch colony for almost a year. The Haitian Revolution of 1791–1804 in the French colony of Saint-Domingue was the only revolt that destroyed a slave system and created an independent state, Haiti, on 1 January 1804; its causes, course and outcome are a focused study of their own.

Haiti changed the meaning of every later revolt. For the enslaved it proved that freedom could be won, and news of it spread through ports and plantations across the Americas; for planters and governments it was a nightmare that justified repression and made them fear any political change. Later rebels often aimed at ending slavery altogether: José Antonio Aponte's conspiracy in Cuba (1812) circulated images of Haitian leaders, and Denmark Vesey's planned rising in Charleston (1822) may have aimed at escape to Haiti. Bussa's Rebellion in Barbados (1816) and the Demerara revolt (1823) were fought partly on rumours that the British government had already freed the enslaved; the brutal suppression of Demerara, and the death in prison of a missionary blamed for it, helped turn British opinion against slavery itself.

Escape and maroon communities

Maroonage was possible where there were mountains, forests or swamps beyond colonial control. Maroon communities lived by farming, hunting and trading with, or raiding, nearby plantations. Their existence encouraged others to escape and was a constant threat to planters, who sent militias and hired trackers against them. Where they could not be destroyed, colonial governments negotiated.

Case study: Palmares, c. 1605–1695

The largest and longest-lasting maroon community in the Americas was Palmares, in the forested hills inland from the sugar coast of Pernambuco in north-eastern Brazil. It grew from the early seventeenth century, as people fled the engenhos, and expanded during the war between the Dutch and Portuguese for control of Brazil (1630–1654), when the plantations were disrupted. By the 1690s it was a federation of villages with a capital, Macaco, and a population that historians estimate at anywhere from about 10,000 to 20,000, with Stuart Schwartz giving about 11,000; Portuguese sources called its ruler a king.

Palmares was a new society, not a copy of any one African state. Its people came from many African regions, especially West Central Africa, and included people born in Brazil, Indigenous people and a few poor whites. Its villages grew maize, beans, cassava and sugar cane, traded with nearby settlers, and defended themselves with palisades and weapons taken in raids. Some inhabitants held captives of their own, taken in raids on plantations, a sign that freedom inside Palmares did not mean the end of all forms of bondage.

The Dutch and then the Portuguese sent more than a dozen expeditions against Palmares. In 1678 its leader, Ganga Zumba, accepted a treaty with the governor of Pernambuco: those born in Palmares would be free and receive land, but new runaways were to be returned. Many in Palmares rejected the deal; Ganga Zumba died, probably poisoned, and his nephew Zumbi led continued resistance. In 1694 a large force of paulista bandeirantes under Domingos Jorge Velho destroyed the capital after a long siege. Zumbi escaped but was betrayed and killed on 20 November 1695, and his head was displayed in the town of Recife.

Palmares survived for almost a century against a colonial state. Its destruction shows the limits of marronage, and its treaty shows the dilemma all maroon communities faced, between securing their own freedom and protecting others who escaped. In modern Brazil Zumbi has become a symbol of Black resistance, and 20 November is celebrated as the Day of Zumbi and Black Consciousness, a national holiday since 2024.

Maroon treaties in Jamaica and Suriname

In Jamaica, maroons in the mountainous interior fought the British in the First Maroon War of the 1720s–1730s. In 1739 the governor signed a treaty with the Leeward Maroons under Cudjoe, and in 1740 another with the Windward Maroons. The treaties recognised their freedom and gave them land, but obliged them to return future runaways and to help suppress revolts, which they did during Tacky's Revolt in 1760. In Suriname, the Dutch, unable to defeat maroons in the rainforest, signed treaties with the Ndyuka (1760) and Saramaka (1762) on similar terms, and both peoples still live there today. In New Granada, the palenque of San Basilio, near Cartagena, won recognition from the Spanish authorities in the early eighteenth century, and its people still speak a creole language based on Spanish and Kikongo.

Escape could also cross imperial borders. Spain offered freedom to people who fled from the British colonies and accepted Catholic baptism, partly to weaken its rivals, and in 1738 established Gracia Real de Santa Teresa de Mose (Fort Mose), near St Augustine in Florida, as a town for them, led by a formerly enslaved Mandinka militia captain, Francisco Menéndez. Other escapees lived for years in places such as the Great Dismal Swamp on the border of Virginia and North Carolina.

Emergence and growth of early opposition to slavery, 1688–1830

For two centuries almost no one in Europe or the Americas questioned the legitimacy of slavery. Individual churchmen condemned its abuses, and some Catholic writers questioned the slave trade: the Jesuit Alonso de Sandoval, who worked among newly arrived Africans in Cartagena, described its horrors in 1627, and two Capuchin friars, Francisco José de Jaca and Epifanio de Moirans, were arrested in Havana in 1681–1682 for refusing absolution to slaveholders. Organised opposition, however, began only in the late seventeenth century, among Protestant dissenters in British North America. The timeline of early opposition shows how it grew from a religious minority into a political movement.

Religious leaders and groups

The Religious Society of Friends, or Quakers, provided the first and most persistent opposition. Quakers believed that every person had an "inner light" from God and that all were equal before God, and they refused to use violence; owning people taken by violence sat badly with both principles. In 1688 four German and Dutch Quakers in Germantown, Pennsylvania, sent their meeting the first known written protest against slavery in the English colonies.

There is a saying, that we shall doe to all men like as we will be done ourselves; making no difference of what generation, descent or colour they are. And those who steal or robb men, and those who buy or purchase them, are they not all alike? Here is liberty of conscience, wch is right and reasonable; here ought to be likewise liberty of ye body, except of evil-doers

Francis Daniel Pastorius, Garret Hendericks, Derick and Abraham op den Graeff, petition to the Monthly Meeting of Friends, Germantown, "18th of the 2nd month" (April) 1688. The petitioners were recent migrants who had come to Pennsylvania for religious freedom, and they argued from the Golden Rule and from the comparison between liberty of conscience and liberty of the body. The petition was passed from meeting to meeting, and the Yearly Meeting declined to make a judgement; its significance lies in the arguments it set out, which later Quakers took up, more than in any immediate effect.

Over the next century a few Quaker campaigners persuaded their community. Benjamin Lay staged dramatic protests at meetings in the 1730s; John Woolman travelled among slaveholding Quakers and published Some Considerations on the Keeping of Negroes (1754); and Anthony Benezet, a teacher in Philadelphia, ran a school for Black children and wrote widely read accounts of the slave trade, such as Some Historical Account of Guinea (1771). The Philadelphia Yearly Meeting decided in 1758 to discipline members who bought or sold enslaved people and in 1776 to disown those who refused to free them. By the 1780s Quakers on both sides of the Atlantic had become the core of the organised movement.

Evangelical Protestants followed. The Methodist founder John Wesley condemned slavery in Thoughts upon Slavery (1774). In Britain, evangelical Anglicans, later known as the Clapham Sect, gave the movement its leader in Parliament, William Wilberforce. Baptist and Methodist missionaries in the Caribbean converted many enslaved people, and Black Baptist preachers such as George Liele, who had been enslaved in Georgia, founded congregations in Jamaica from 1783; planters saw these churches as subversive, and they played a part in the revolts of 1816–1831. Religious opposition had limits: many churches and missionary societies owned plantations, and most clergy in the Americas defended slavery as compatible with Christianity.

The role of ideas

Enlightenment thinkers attacked slavery as contrary to reason and natural rights, the idea that all people possess certain rights by nature. Montesquieu mocked the arguments for African slavery in The Spirit of the Laws (1748). The History of the Two Indies (1770) edited by the abbé Raynal, with passages by Denis Diderot, condemned the slave trade and predicted that a leader would rise among the enslaved to avenge them. Adam Smith argued in The Wealth of Nations (1776) that free labour was in the end cheaper than slave labour, an economic argument that abolitionists used to answer planters.

The revolutions of the late eighteenth century turned these ideas into political claims. The American Declaration of Independence (1776) declared that "all men are created equal", and its contradiction with slavery was obvious to critics in Britain and to enslaved people in America, many of whom petitioned for their freedom in its language. The French Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen (1789) was used in the same way by the free people of colour and the enslaved of Saint-Domingue. Enlightenment ideas were not consistently antislavery, however: Thomas Jefferson, author of the Declaration, owned more than six hundred people over his lifetime, and some Enlightenment writers helped develop theories of racial difference.

The role of formerly enslaved people

People who had experienced slavery gave the movement its most powerful testimony. In 1773 Phillis Wheatley, taken from West Africa as a child and enslaved in Boston, became the first African American woman to publish a book of poems. In a poem to the Earl of Dartmouth, the British secretary for the colonies, she linked the American colonists' complaints of tyranny with her own enslavement.

Should you, my lord, while you peruse my song,

Wonder from whence my love of Freedom sprung, …

I, young in life, by seeming cruel fate

Was snatch'd from Afric's fancy'd happy seat: …

Steel'd was that soul and by no misery mov'd

That from a father seiz'd his babe belov'd:

Such, such my case. And can I then but pray

Others may never feel tyrannic sway?

Phillis Wheatley, "To the Right Honourable William, Earl of Dartmouth", in Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral, London, 1773. Wheatley was still enslaved when the book was printed, and it opened with a statement by leading Bostonians confirming that she had written it, because many readers doubted that an African could. She wrote within the polite conventions of the period for an elite audience, so her protest is restrained; its value lies in showing an enslaved woman claiming the language of liberty for herself.

In London, a group of Black abolitionists who called themselves the Sons of Africa wrote to newspapers and politicians. Ottobah Cugoano, kidnapped from the Gold Coast and enslaved in Grenada, published Thoughts and Sentiments on the Evil and Wicked Traffic of the Slavery and Commerce of the Human Species (1787), which demanded the abolition of the slave trade and the emancipation of the enslaved. Olaudah Equiano's Interesting Narrative (1789) went through nine British editions by 1794, and Equiano toured Britain and Ireland to promote it and the cause. In North America, Prince Hall and other Black residents of Boston petitioned the Massachusetts legislature for their freedom in January 1777, and in 1781 Elizabeth Freeman, known as Mum Bett, won her freedom in court by arguing that the new Massachusetts constitution declared all men free and equal. Her case and those of Quock Walker (1781–1783) effectively ended slavery in Massachusetts.

The most powerful contribution of formerly enslaved people was the Haitian Revolution itself. By destroying slavery in the richest colony in the world, the people of Saint-Domingue proved the abolitionists' claim that the enslaved wanted and could win freedom, although the violence of the revolution also hardened the opposition of planters and slowed reform in Britain during the 1790s.

The role of technology in spreading antislavery ideas

The antislavery campaign was one of the first to use the full range of printed media to build public opinion. Cheap pamphlets, newspapers and books carried its arguments; abolitionist societies printed and distributed them by the thousand. In Britain the Society for Effecting the Abolition of the Slave Trade, founded in London on 22 May 1787 by Quakers and Anglicans including Thomas Clarkson and Granville Sharp, sent Clarkson around the country to collect evidence and organise local committees.

The most famous single image of the campaign was the plan of the Liverpool slave ship Brooks (also spelled Brookes). The Plymouth abolition committee first printed it late in 1788, and the London committee issued a more detailed version in 1789; thousands of copies circulated in Britain and the USA, and it was copied in France. Using the ship's official measurements, it showed how the 454 people still allowed under the regulating act of 1788 would be packed together, and its text noted that the ship had once carried 609. The plan is a primary source for abolitionist methods more than for any single voyage. The abolitionists also used the potter Josiah Wedgwood's medallion of a kneeling enslaved man asking "Am I not a man and a brother?" (1787), worn as jewellery and printed on goods, and Clarkson carried a chest of African-made goods to show that legitimate trade with Africa was possible.

Printing made mass petitioning possible. In 1792 the House of Commons received 519 petitions for the abolition of the trade, the largest petitioning campaign Parliament had yet seen, and in 1791–1792 hundreds of thousands of British families stopped buying slave-grown sugar in a consumer boycott (Clarkson estimated about 300,000). Women, who could not vote, organised much of the boycott and many of the local committees. These methods spread across the Atlantic: the Société des Amis des Noirs, founded in Paris in February 1788, and the antislavery societies of Pennsylvania, New York and other states translated and reprinted British material.

The first legal victories, 1777–1830

The early movement won its first victories where slavery was least important to the economy. In the northern United States, Vermont's constitution of 1777 banned adult slavery, Pennsylvania passed the first gradual abolition law on 1 March 1780, and by 1804 every northern state had abolished slavery or begun gradual emancipation; the Northwest Ordinance of 1787 banned slavery in the territories north of the Ohio River. France abolished slavery in its colonies on 4 February 1794, confirming emancipation already declared in Saint-Domingue, but Napoleon restored it in 1802 everywhere except Haiti, which kept its freedom by winning independence.

The main targets of the transatlantic movement before 1830 were the slave trade, not slavery itself. Denmark passed a law in 1792 ending its trade from 1803. The British Parliament passed the Abolition of the Slave Trade Act on 25 March 1807, and the US ban on importing enslaved people took effect on 1 January 1808, the earliest date the Constitution allowed. Britain then used diplomacy and the Royal Navy to press other states to end the trade, with limited success: Brazil and Cuba imported hundreds of thousands of captives illegally after 1830.

In Spanish America, the independence wars pushed the question forward. Many patriot leaders freed enslaved men who joined their armies, and the new republics passed free-womb laws, which declared children born to enslaved mothers after a certain date free: Chile in 1811, the United Provinces of the Río de la Plata in 1813 and Gran Colombia in 1821. Chile abolished slavery completely in 1823, the Federal Republic of Central America in 1824 and Mexico, under its first president of African descent, Vicente Guerrero, in 1829. The ending of slavery in these republics, and the long struggle against it in the rest of the Americas, continued after 1830.

Perspectives and debates

Almost every part of the history of colonialism and slavery in the Americas has been argued over, by contemporaries and by historians. The debates matter because they show how the same evidence can support different explanations, and because the questions they raise, about violence, profit, race and responsibility, still shape how societies in the Americas understand their past.

Explaining the conquest

Nineteenth-century historians such as William Prescott told the conquest as a story of heroic Spanish leaders and superior European civilisation, drawing mainly on the conquistadors' own accounts, such as Cortés's letters to Charles V. Since the 1970s historians have used Nahua and Andean sources to tell it differently. Ross Hassig, in Mexico and the Spanish Conquest (1994), argues that the fall of Tenochtitlan was largely the work of Indigenous allies pursuing their own aims, so that the "Spanish conquest" was also an Indigenous civil war. Matthew Restall (2003) calls the idea of a small band of Spaniards conquering an empire a myth, and Camilla Townsend (2019) reconstructs Nahua decision-making from texts written in Nahuatl after the conquest. A third approach, represented by Alfred Crosby (1972) and the geographer Jared Diamond in Guns, Germs, and Steel (1997), explains European success through disease and long-term differences in environment and technology. Critics of Diamond argue that this underplays human choices and Indigenous agency.

The "Black Legend" and the treatment of Indigenous peoples

Las Casas's accounts were translated and used by Spain's Protestant enemies, who presented Spaniards as uniquely cruel; Spanish writers later called this the "Black Legend". Lewis Hanke, in The Spanish Struggle for Justice in the Conquest of America (1949), stresses that Spain was unusual in debating the justice of its own conquest, as the Laws of Burgos, the New Laws and the Valladolid debate show. Charles Gibson, in The Aztecs under Spanish Rule (1964), used local records to show both how Nahua communities survived and adapted and how heavy the burdens of tribute and labour were. Historians today generally agree that the Black Legend exaggerated Spanish uniqueness (English, French and Portuguese colonists also killed and enslaved Indigenous people) but that the violence Las Casas described was real.

Economics or ideas?

The most influential debate concerns both the rise and the fall of slavery. Eric Williams (1944) argued that economics explained both: slavery arose because it was the cheapest way to produce sugar, and Britain abolished the trade in 1807 because the West Indian economy was in decline and industrial capitalists no longer needed it. Seymour Drescher, in Econocide (1977), used trade figures to show that the British slave economy was still expanding and profitable in 1807, so abolition was an economic sacrifice made for moral and political reasons. Roger Anstey (1975) stressed evangelical religion, and Christopher Leslie Brown, in Moral Capital (2006), argued that after losing the American colonies British reformers took up abolition partly to restore Britain's sense of national virtue.

Slavery and racism

A related debate asks whether racism caused African slavery or resulted from it. Williams argued that it was a consequence. Winthrop Jordan, in White over Black (1968), found negative English attitudes to blackness before the plantation system and argued that they made Africans the obvious people to enslave. Edmund Morgan, in American Slavery, American Freedom (1975), showed how Virginia's elite, after Bacon's Rebellion of 1676, turned from indentured servants to enslaved Africans and used racial laws to divide poor whites from Black people. Most historians now see a two-way process: existing prejudices shaped who was enslaved, and the system then hardened prejudice into a racial ideology.

Comparing slave systems

Frank Tannenbaum, in Slave and Citizen (1946), argued that slavery in Spanish and Portuguese America was milder than in the British colonies and the USA, because Iberian law and the Catholic Church recognised the enslaved as persons with souls, rights to marriage and a path to freedom through manumission. Carl Degler, in Neither Black nor White (1971), and Herbert Klein, in African Slavery in Latin America and the Caribbean (1986), replied that conditions depended far more on the economy: Brazilian sugar plantations were among the deadliest in the Americas, while the enslaved population of the USA grew naturally. Tannenbaum's point about manumission and the large free population of colour in Latin America is still widely accepted; his claim about milder treatment is not.

Resistance

Herbert Aptheker, in American Negro Slave Revolts (1943), challenged the older image of contented slaves by counting some 250 revolts and conspiracies in North America. Eugene Genovese, in From Rebellion to Revolution (1979), argued that revolts changed character after the Haitian Revolution, from attempts to escape or restore African ways of life to attempts to overthrow slavery itself in the name of universal rights. Richard Price's collection Maroon Societies (1973) made marronage a central subject, and historians of women such as Stephanie Camp (2004) and Jennifer Morgan (2004) widened the definition of resistance to include the everyday struggles of enslaved women.

The table of debates shows that most disagreements come from different kinds of evidence. Conquistadors' letters, planters' account books and colonial laws were written by the powerful, so explanations based on them stress European decisions; Nahua texts, court records, maroon traditions and the testimony of formerly enslaved people bring Indigenous and African choices into view. A balanced judgement uses both and asks whose perspective each source reflects.

Applying the ideas in exam questions

The questions that follow are written in the style of IB Paper 3, with guidance on what a strong answer contains.

Paper 3: motives for exploration

Paper 3: the Spanish conquest

Paper 3: colonial government and Indigenous peoples

Paper 3: the development of transatlantic slavery

Paper 3: early opposition to slavery

Self-check

• To do:

  I can explain the economic, religious and political motives for European exploration and judge which mattered most.

• To do:

  I can describe Columbus's voyages, the Treaty of Tordesillas and the conquest of the Caribbean islands.

• To do:

  I can outline French, English and Dutch exploration and settlement in North America.

• To do:

  I can narrate the conquests of Mexico (1519–1521) and Peru (1532–1572) and explain the reasons for Spanish success.

• To do:

  I can explain how silver, gold, fur, tobacco and sugar shaped colonial economies, and what mercantilism meant.

• To do:

  I can explain the Columbian Exchange and the causes of the Indigenous demographic collapse.

• To do:

  I can explain how the encomienda, the mita, yanaconaje and the repartimiento worked, and their effects.

• To do:

  I can assess the Laws of Burgos, the New Laws and the Valladolid debate, and how far they protected Indigenous people.

• To do:

  I can compare Spanish, Portuguese, French and English treatment of Indigenous peoples.

• To do:

  I can explain assimilation, syncretism and the sistema de castas, and use casta paintings as a source.

• To do:

  I can describe the experiences of Indigenous women, including Malintzin, elite women and commoners.

• To do:

  I can explain the economic, political and ideological reasons for the development of transatlantic slavery and the role of each colonial power.