HTY 103 Section 2 Outline

 

Review: Meso American cultures were highly organized and centralized while North American woodland cultures were organized around much smaller social units. Power was thusly decentralized also. Tribes competed with one another for the prestige to maintain coalitions that could command and defend tribal resources. When Europeans confronted Native Americans in Meso-America they encountered an enormous empire. The key to conquest was much like their European experience: If one could capture the king and decapitate the government, and one could take control. But in North America , there was no "king." Local sachems instead were willing to welcome or at negotiate with Europeans as potential allies against their own political rivals, little able to imagine the hordes of Europeans poised to follow the first pioneers.

 

Africa was also a partner largely unknown to Europeans. Accomplished empires had ruled large territories in the West Africa savannah for millennia. Europeans found that they were not able to penetrate into Africa in the face of powerful empires and an environment inhospitable to Europeans. The Portuguese did succeed in gaining permission to establish trading posts (factories) on the coast, where Europeans traded guns, rum, and manufactures for slave labor to work on newly established sugar plantations in the South Atlantic islands. Africans dealt with Europeans not from a position of weakness, but from strength, and Africans saw exchange with Europeans as a potentially strategic advantage because of their value as a source of modern guns, with which African rulers could fortify their military advantage over rivals.

 

So Why was Europe the colonizer? First, Europe was experiencing a demographic recovery.The Church-State complex was invigorated by the development of reciprocity between commerce, military strength, and centralized political power. Reintroduction of classical knowledge spurred interest in mathematics, astronomy, cartography, etc. One result was a burst in practical applications, including refinements with metallurgy, gunpowder, navigation, the printing press, agricultural equipment, etc. The Renaissance/Humanist outlook turned outward. Interest in the natural world flowered, along with a more worldly and individualistic outlook. Trade and wealth expanded the horizons of opportunity in an aristocratic world.

 

Iberian Conquest and Colonization of the Americas Background

 

* Seafaring: Spanish and Portuguese experience in Mediterranean trade and Atlantic exploration, conquest of Azores, Canary and Madeira Islands, and exploration of West African coast. Portuguese factories initiate slave trade to provide labor for sugar plantations on Atlantic islands. Henry the Navigator, carvel ships, navigation and charts, etc.

 

*Ideology of Conquest: Medieval theories of Spoils of a Just War allow victors confiscation of property and persons. Conceptions of the "Other": uncivilized, savage, brutal, heathen, nomadic, tribal, illiterate, different gender roles. Non-Christians were automatically liable to forceful redemption (requerimiento).

 

*Technological advantages (guns, ships, horses and armor).

 

* Experience of Reconquista: The experience of the long struggle to repel the Moors from Spain provided Spain with deep military experience, and it also honed the Spanish capacity for consolidating gains by imposing an effective civil administration. In Spain the celebration of 1492 is not for Columbus, but a celebration of the fall of Granada.

 

In centuries of struggle with the Moors, Spain learned the effective methods of conquest and establishing control through balanced application of military force, the moral force of the church, and the institutional power of civil government.

 

*Columbus in the Caribbean; Cortez conquers Aztecs; Pizarro conquest of Incas; Coronado and Desoto explore Southern North America. Success of conquest in Meso and South America rested in part on the fact that Spanish conquistadors encountered highly structured empires which facilitated the Spanish takeover of large territories literally in a swift stroke. In their incursions into North America, the Spanish and the other Europeans who came later encountered a very different environment, in which native people were dispersed physically and politically in a multitude of tribes.

 

Much more on Columbus: http://www.win.tue.nl/cs/fm/engels/discovery/columbus.html

 

* The Demographic Disaster: Virgin Soil Epidemics in which populations previously isolated from pathogens are especially vulnerable. The mortality in post Columbus Americas decimated native populations.

 

*Planting a Spanish Empire: Spain quickly supplanted conquistadors and adventurers with imperial civil administrators and church institutions. Terms: civil government (cabalde), the justice system (audiencia), labor systems (mita, encomienda), the church. The Spanish-American social model was a three tiered hierarchy: hidalgos and royal governors on top, the clergy and administrators (and a few Spanish artisans and merchants) in the middle, and the Indians and Africans at the bottom of the food chain. Imported African labor compensated for the depopulation of native peoples in the Spanish Americas and promoted emergence of mestizo population. Imperial New Spain was built around the main symbol of power: the town, with the government buildings and the church dominating the center; the layout of the towns symbolized the orderly administration of Spanish society. Characterization: The Spanish conquest was characterized by brutal confiscation of precious metals. The Spanish colonization focused on extraction of resources and labor through coercion and intimidation.

 

* Confiscatory Conquest: Spanish colonization was largely undertaken by military and missionary men. While the latter wanted souls, the former wanted gold and silver.

 

Tenochtitlan (Spanish conquest of Mexico City)

 

Impact of Columbian Exchange

 

 

Plants

New World plants to Europe and Africa : maize (corn), potatoes, sweet potatoes, peanuts, tomatoes, squash (incl. pumpkin), manioc, caco, peppers, most beans, pineapples, papaya, and avocados.

 

Europe to the Americas : rice, wheat, barley, oats, rye, turnips, onions, cabbage, lettuce, peaches, pears, sugar, weeds.

Animals to Americas: horses, pigs, goats, burros, and cattle, vermin.

Diseases (measles, smallpox, malaria, hepatitis to Americas).

Africans received guns, alcohol, textiles, and manufactures in exchange for providing slave labor for the New World empires.

 

Big Result: Blending of peoples to found mestizo and creole populations in addition to Native, European, and African peoples.

Big Result: The blending of African, European, and American practices precipitates a new Euro-American agricultural complex (based on use of draught animals, the plow, the wheel, the plantation)

 

Big Result: New World specie (silver and gold) sparks economic boom in Spain, inflation and expansion of trade throughout Europe (increased demand for consumer products like sugar and tobacco). The boom in Spain prompts other Europeans to promote their own colonization programs.

 

*Why was Columbus Voyage different from previous Euro-American contacts (Vikings, fishing camps, early explorers) ? It was the first time in America for systematic domination of native populations and administrative permanence of state sponsored imperialism. It marked the beginning of the greatest mass migration of people in human history. It precipitated a demographic disaster. Spain's program of confiscation, murder, and slavery set a (low) standard for colonization efforts of other Europeans. Exchange with the New World reinvigorated the European economy and imagination. The success of Spain instilled a heightened sense of nationalism, competition, and urgency for the rest of Western European nations. European and African background.

 

 

 

2. Europeans in North America: Playing Catch-up

 

 

 

The other states of Western Europe felt a growing urgency to share the bounties of American colonization in order to compete with Spain. The French, Dutch, and English all sponsored exploration in the 16th century, but their colonization efforts only began in the 17th century, about a hundred years after the beginning of the Spanish American Empire. Because Spain had such a powerful grip on their American possessions, Northern Europeans looked northward for an opportunity to establish a foothold in the race for colonial riches.

 

 

FRANCE: Traders and Jesuit missionaries guided French colonization, mostly in the northern regions of North America. Their primary goal was cornering the fur trade, while converting Indians was a complementary second motive.   The coureur de bois and the missionaries were mostly single men with the straightforward goals of trade and conversion. Few French families were interested in resettling in the French claim in the St Lawrence valley.  There was not a strong impulse among the French to emigrate to America in order to settle, and in turn there was little pressure to displace native populations. The Indians were more business partners than adversaries.  The Jesuits also were more open to making cultural accommodations with the native peoples than their Spanish (or later Protestant) counterparts. Altogether, we can characterize the French colonial model as limited in scope, trade oriented, and relatively cooperative, thus making a small "footprint" in North America.

 

 

DUTCH settlement (begun by a small trading post, 1610) was also oriented toward fur trade, with a small farming community to supply the traders. It remained relatively small in scale among the global colonization of the Dutch mercantile empire.  The Dutch made no missionary effort. There were a few Swedish settlers (about three hundred, mostly Finns, who introduced the log cabin) in the Delaware region, just south of New Amsterdam (New York), who came in family groups to settle and create new farming homesteads, but the numbers remained quite limited. The settlement was taken over by the Dutch in 1655. On Sewdish efforts: http://www.colonialswedes.org/History/History.html

 

 

 

 

British Charter Generations:

 

*Northern European Seafaring: From the Grand Banks to North America. English fishermen had sought out fishing grounds further and further west over the centuries, developing extended knowledge of the west and honing their seamanship.

 

*British Reconquista in Ireland: the ideology of the other and perfecting colonial controls.

 

*There were three main Nodes of British Colonies in the first phase of settlements:

 

*The Founding of British North American Colonies:

 

        Virginia: Adventurers to Plantations

 

        New England: Religious settlement

 

       

 

Conclusions: Conquistadors to Planters, the Three Modes of Colonization:

 

1.     Confiscatory (Spanish): appropriation and coerced extraction of wealth .

 

2.     Trade (French, Dutch): mutual exchange .

 

3.     Plantation-Settlement (English): territorial expansion of agricultural Anglo culture.