The colonial socioeconomic structure was organized according to the interests of the Peninsula (Spain). The economic structure of Spain was based on capitalist mercantilism, that is, on the accumulation of precious metals, the basic economic activity of the colonial socioeconomic system was mining, not without first mentioning that other economic activities were also practiced, although without the State stimulus enjoyed by mining.
Land ownership:repartimientos yencomiendas
The conquest and gradual colonization of the regions discovered by the Spaniards had brought enormous wealth that went mostly into royal hands, to the Hispanic treasury and, ultimately, to the banks of Genoa, the crafts of Flanders or the coffers of the Fuggers and the Welsers, German bankers of the 16th century.
The main authors of the conquest, the soldiers and the men of the town , responsible for military successes, atrocities and economic achievements, were left somewhat destitute at the end of their services.
The protagonists of the conquest were then awarded land by the Crown , aware of their enormous desire to forge a future and, above all, to flee from the poverty of their places of origin (especially Andalusia and Extremadura ). Thus arose the colonial socioeconomic structure of land distributions and encomiendas, which were made with the Indians who inhabited them, so that they would work in them in exchange for the Spaniards educating, feeding and Christianizing them. The conquerors also undertook to cultivate the land and live on it for a certain number of years. The cultivation of the land had been ordered by the Crown since 1497, since it wanted to populate it and make it productive. For this, farming tools, seeds, postures and cattle from the Old World were sent. .
However, the repartimientos corresponded to the heads of the conquest, to the men who led it boldly. The bulk of the peninsular troops continued in the greatest poverty and depended, in many cases, on the concessions of the captains graced by royal favor.
The discovery of the mines of Zacatecas and Potosí , in the mid-sixteenth century in Mexico and Peru, constituted a quick form of enrichment that caused the decline of the nascent agricultural economy which, since then, has only been self-sufficient. Poor settlers abandoned the fertile lands in pursuit of easy fortune, which some achieved in regions rich in noble metals.
The discovered lands belonged, by virtue of the Treaty of Tordesillas , to the monarchs for the right of conquest and only they could grant parcels of the New World as royalty, as payment for services rendered to the Crown. As of 1512, the effective possession of the land gave rise to many legal problems, which had to be solved with the intervention of jurists such as Francisco de Vitoria, through the Laws of the Indies .
Feudalism did not arise in America as it existed in Europe, since the land constituted royalties in usufruct. The latifundismo will be born in the XVII century , by applying the old Castilian institution of entailment, by which the eldest son inherits the full royalty in order to maintain the integrity of the family patrimony.
This will also be the basis for the creation of a landed aristocracy, support of realism in America during the independence wars .
The encomiendas raised other questions. It was not about distributing land, but human beings, who constituted the workforce during colonization. Some tribes, like those of the Caribbean Basin, completely disappeared in just two centuries. Most of the Indians died of fatigue and European diseases. The women were merging with the European men, since the first expeditions were made up predominantly of men.
Spain used and exploited the indigenous populations in agriculture, industry and mining, but at the same time, dictated laws from the Peninsula, where they proposed to incorporate the Indian as a subject, theoretically on equal terms with the peninsular Hispanic. It is true that the laws were not strictly enforced.
When most of the indigenous people died and both European and indigenous labor was scarce, a system was resorted to; the forced labor of black Africans taken by force from the shores of the Gulf of Guinea.
Slavery
The problem of the importation of black slaves had already been raised in La Española , when the encomenderos noticed the "laxity" of the Indians, beings accustomed to hunting, fishing and subsistence agriculture. Faced with the abuses of the settlers, some Dominican priests, among whom was fray Bartolomé de Las Casas , they protested. A vehement advocate of the defenselessness of the Indians, Bartolomé de Las Casas had the ingenuity to propose that, in order to alleviate their hard work, it should be replaced by that of the Africans, whom the Europeans considered stronger, more resistant, acclimatized to the tropics and, Above all, they were used to seeing work in Europe in subservient conditions. The proposal started the slave trade. Given the suggestion, King Ferdinand authorizes the Casa de Contratación de Sevilla to carry out the compulsory transfer of Africans to the new lands, thus creating the basis and the legal precedent for the execrable human trade. The first group, of fifty slaves, arrived at the beginning of the 16th century to replace some Indians in the mines. With time and the appearance of sugar cane plantations in Cuba, Santo Domingo, and Brazil, of cotton in the American colonies of England, and of coffee in New Granada and Brazil, trafficking began to become a prosperous business in the Portugal, England and Holland competed. To feed on slaves, they visited the Atlantic coasts of Africa, in an arc that spanned from Gambia to the Namib desert.
Trafficking became entrenched in the 17th century, thanks to the triangular trade maritime route that departed from the ports of southern England and had an apex on the shores of the Gulf of Guinea, where English industrial items were exchanged for slaves, which were transported in the holds of ships, to the centers of commercialization in the markets of the cities from the Caribbean. With the product of their sale, valued overseas merchandise (such as coffee, sugar and cotton) were obtained, with which they returned to be sold in the southern ports of the metropolis.
The mita and the mills
Although the Burgos Laws of 1521 recognized the freedom of the indigenous people and their right to receive humane treatment, and that Francisco de Vitoria had drawn up the Laws of the Indies , the sad reality prevailed.
In the large basins of Upper Peru (today Bolivia) a plan for the exploitation of their natural resources was carried out. However, the lack of manpower led to work in shifts , conceived as a forced distribution of the natives of the place, so that they would serve in agriculture, industry, commerce and, especially, in mining. It was a real obligation, not a personal one, since it was linked to the territory. It consisted of a servitude totally dependent on the land on which they lived, with a view to exploiting the silver of Potosí and the mercury deposits of Huancavélica.
Thus, in the last third of the 16th century, the mitayos arose. , serfs who had to work in subhuman conditions for a week of paid work and rest for two weeks, without pay. His day began an hour and a half after sunrise and lasted until sunset. They only benefited from this schedule during the winter, of somewhat shorter days, but the costs of transportation to the place of work and maintenance were paid by the mitayo and were higher than the income obtained, so he had to borrow from the company that “hired” him. Thus, he was permanently indebted and his status as mitayo was perpetuated, since he could only exonerate himself if someone else bought his place, if he rented his domestic services as a yanacona or if he fled to one of the fourteen Peruvian provinces where the mita did not exist.
To meet the industrial needs of a colony so extensive and so far from European sea routes, the mills were created, the first forms of capitalist industrial production in the region. They used forced Indian labor in factories knitting wool, cotton, hemp rope, espadrilles, glass, and gunpowder. Working hours ranged from seven in the morning to six in the evening, with half an hour to rest and eat. Wool spinning industries were located on the banks of a river, given the enormous amount of water that was required. Women and children also worked, despite the fact that Spanish law prohibited it. The salaries, as in the mita, were not enough and, gradually, they went into debt.
Livestock and its incipient industry
Livestock farming was not particularly rich or appreciated by most aboriginal cultures. Only the Incas used the alpaca, the llama and the vicuña.
The Spanish contributed to the development of the American herd by introducing domestic species such as the horse, for transportation, the pig, a source of protein; and cattle, with the revolution that brought about the use of their milk and their meat in food, as well as their hides, in the manufacture of all kinds of harness, so necessary at the time. The sheep was very useful, since it practically replaced the alpaca in the highlands. But it was not able to acclimatize neither in the Caribbean nor in the warm regions. The caprids perfectly withstood extreme climates, as well as poultry, whose eggs and meat fed the Spaniards and the Indians, the latter accessing them for the first time, although in limited quantities. The only livestock that adapted to all latitudes was cattle, which allowed the development of an industry for tanning their skins, especially in the northern areas of Mexico and in the Rio de la Plata region. Over time, these animals caused profound economic and social changes in certain regions by creating a livestock economy from which the figure of the cowboy emerged in the United States; in Mexico, that of the charro; in Argentina, that of the gaucho; in Chile, that of the huaso, and in Venezuela, that of the llanero.
The latifundist development that cattle demanded gave rise to the appearance of the estancia in the countries of the Southern Cone, and of the hacienda in the others. Determining social factor in the new American societies were the rancher and the landowner.
The Contracting House
This vast Spanish empire implied a commercial structure that, although it was still weak in the 16th century, was consolidated over time. For its coordination, a superministry had been established that centralized all commercial activity:the House of Contracting of Seville . Created in 1503 by Royal Decree of Isabel la Católica, it came to control all trade with the Indies. It included a legal service and the Court of Maritime Justice, within which the first School of Navigation in Europe was born. It also included the Court of the Consulate (based in Seville), the Court of the Indies (based in Cádiz) and the Judges of the Records of the Indies (in the Canary Islands).
But the House exercised all-encompassing functions not only on trade. In addition to controlling the shipments and receipts of merchandise and precious metals, it determined the prices of the articles, organized the expeditions and channeled the emigration. It was also the headquarters of the commercial representations of the Peninsula and of the foreign houses that traded with the new products destined for the rest of Europe.
Seville greatly enriched itself with the monopoly (which it later shared with Cádiz). In this way, social changes were produced by creating a merchant bourgeois class in the city, which would achieve great influence in Spanish politics. This situation, over time, would give rise to privileges against which the Creoles fought, who sought to diversify the commercial outlets of their increasingly important products.
One of the first measures adopted by the Casa in terms of trade was to prohibit the promotion of the cultivation or production in the colonies of any merchandise that competed with the products of the metropolis, such as flax and hemp.
This strict control allowed free trade with other countries; It was strictly monopolistic. The other nations, interested in the new products in great demand in Europe, turned to smuggling. Thus the planting of tobacco continued, the cultivation of which had been prohibited to harm Dutch interests. Faced with a ban on re-exporting firearms, or exporting horses and other draft animals, Americans resorted to smuggling (or ransom trade ), carried out by ships flying the English or Dutch flag. This evident contradiction and the gradual penetration of the interests of other nations, produced increasingly strict measures.
This is how the buccaneers arose (who practiced the ransom trade ) and privateering, which consisted of covert piracy behind a national flag. Famous corsairs of the 16th century include Francis Drake (whom Elizabeth I Tudor ennobled as Sir), John Hawkins, and Henry Morgan (who became Governor of Jamaica). Buccaneers of many nationalities and pirates without a flag, throughout the waters of the Atlantic and the Caribbean Sea, dedicated themselves to intercepting isolated ships or even Spanish fleets that from Havana, the last port, transported merchandise and gold from New Spain and Peru.
The center of his raids was on Tortuga Island (north of Haiti), in the Dutch Antilles and with the English island of Jamaica, an excellent enclave that England obtained in Cromwell's time.
This criminal activity served to undermine, to some extent, the rigid privilege of the merchant families of Seville and Cadiz. They carried out a work of undermining in the Court and obtained increasingly protectionist laws to maintain their prebends.
The flourishing of privateering and piracy was detrimental to the trade of both Americans and Spaniards, since the fleets had to face, in addition to Caribbean cyclones and Atlantic storms, marine piracy.
The situation partially changed in the second half of the 18th century, when Carlos III allowed free trade with all Spanish ports, which notably increased the Crown's income and opened a gap with the privileges maintained by the commercial establishment.