Source 13.4 Conquest and Victory: The Fall of Tenochtitlán from a Spanish Perspective While the Aztecs may well have thought themselves permanently rid of the Spanish, La Noche Triste offered only a temporary respite from the European invaders. Cortés and his nowdiminished forces found refuge among their Tlaxcalan allies, where they regrouped and planned for yet another assault on Tenochtitlán. In mid-1521, Cortés returned, strengthened with yet more Mesoamerican allies, and laid siege to the Aztec capital. Bitter fighting ensued for several months, often in the form of house-to-house combat, ending with the surrender of the last Aztec emperor on August 13, 1521. A Spanish account of this event comes from Francisco de Aguilar, a conquistador who took part in the siege of Tenochtitlán, though he subsequently regretted his action and became a priest. Much later in life, around 1560, he wrote an account of his experiences, including this description of the final battle of the Spanish conquest. Questions to consider as you examine the source: • • How does Aguilar account for the Spanish victory? How does he portray the Spanish and their Aztecs adversaries? Francisco de Aguilar Brief Record of the Conquest of New Spain, ca. 1560 [W]ith [Spanish] forces encircling the city and with the brigantines [warships], which were a great help on the lake, the city [Tenochtitlán] began to be battered by land and water. In addition great trouble was taken to cut off the fresh water from the springs, which reached the city by conduits. . . . The Christians wounded some of the Indians, and great numbers of Indians were killed in the assaults on horseback and by the guns, harquebuses and crossbows. In spite of all this, they put up their strong barricades, and opened causeways and canals and defended themselves courageously. . . . They also killed some of the Spaniards and captured alive one of them called Guzman, who was Cortés’s aide. The war was sustained fiercely by both sides, since on our side we had the help of many Tlaxcalan warriors, while the Mexicans [had the advantage of] their rooftops and high buildings from which they battered us. . . . As soon as the Spaniards took any of the houses, which were all on the water, they had the Tlaxcalan Indians demolish and level them, for this gave more freedom to maneuver. When some of the Indian lords inside the city began to see the danger they were in . . . , they decided to escape by night . . . [and] came over to our side. . . . In addition to this, when the Christians were exhausted from the war, God saw fit to send the Indians smallpox and there was a great pestilence in the city, because there were so many people there, especially women, and they had nothing more to eat. . . . Also for these reasons they began to slacken in their fighting. The Mexicans, almost vanquished, withdrew to their fortresses on the water, and since a great number of women were left among them, they armed them all and stationed them on the rooftops. The Spaniards were alarmed at seeing so many of the enemy again, whooping and shouting at them, and when they began killing them and saw they were women, there was dismay on both sides. [Twice the last Aztec ruler, Cuauhtemoc, refused Spanish offers to surrender in return for a “pardon and many privileges.” Then he was finally captured.] This done, the Spaniards seized the house that had been Cuauhtemoc’s stronghold, where they found a great quantity of gold and jewels and other plunder. The Tlaxcalans, who were assisting us in the war . . . , knew [the city’s] ins and outs, so that when they went home again, they were rich with the spoils they took. Source: Patricia de Fuentes, ed., The Conquistadors: First-Person Accounts of the Conquest of Mexico (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1993), 158–62. Translation copyright © 1963 by Penguin Random House LLC. Used by permission of Viking Books, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. Source 13.5 Defeat: The Fall of Tenochtitlán from an Aztec Perspective From The Florentine Codex comes an Aztec account of what was to them a devastating defeat. The Codex is a compilation of text and images, compiled under the leadership of Fray Bernardino de Sahagún, a Franciscan missionary who believed that an understanding of Aztec culture was essential to the task of conversion. Because Sahagún relied on Aztec informants and artists, many scholars believe that The Florentine Codex and other codices represent indigenous understandings of the conquest. However, they require a critical reading. They date from several decades after the events they describe. Many contributors to the codices had been influenced by the Christian and European culture of their missionary mentors, and they were writing or painting in a society thoroughly dominated by Spanish colonial rule. Furthermore, the codices reflect the ethnic and regional diversity of Mesoamerica rather than a single Aztec perspective. Despite such limitations, these codices represent a unique window into Mesoamerican understandings of the conquest. Questions to consider as you examine the source: • • • To what extent does this document confirm, contradict, or supplement Aguilar’s account of the fall of Tenochtitlan? How does this account explain the terrible defeat? What posture toward the Spanish does this document reflect? Fray Bernardino de Sahagún The Florentine Codex, Mid-Sixteenth Century Before the Spaniards appeared to us, first an epidemic broke out, a sickness of pustules. . . . Large bumps spread on people; some were entirely covered. . . . [The disease] brought great desolation. . . . They could no longer walk about, but lay in their dwellings and sleeping places, no longer able to move or stir. . . . Very many people died of them; . . . starvation reigned, and no one took care of others any longer. . . . The Mexica warriors were greatly weakened by it. And when things were in this state, the Spaniards came. . . . The warriors fought in boats; the war-boat people shot at the Spaniards, and their arrows sprinkled down on them. . . . Many times they skirmished, and the Mexica went out to face them. . . . When [the Spanish finished adjusting the guns], they shot at the wall. The wall then ripped and broke open. The second time it was hit, the wall went to the ground; it was knocked down in places, perforated, holes were blown in it. . . . [T]he warriors who had been lying at the wall dispersed and came fleeing; everyone escaped in fear. And then all the different people [who were on the side of the Spaniards] quickly went filling in the canals. . . . And when the canals were stopped up, some horse[men] came. . . . And the Spaniards did not move at all; when they fired the cannon, it grew very dark, and smoke spread. . . . [In the fighting, the Aztecs captured fifty-three Spaniards and many of their allies.] Then [the Aztecs] took the captives. . . . Some went weeping, some singing, some went shouting while hitting their hands against their mouths. When they got to Yacacolco, they lined them all up. Each one went to the altar platform, where the sacrifice was performed. The Spaniards went first, going in the lead. . . . And when the sacrifice was over, they strung the Spaniards' heads on poles; they also strung up the horses’ heads. . . . And the common people suffered greatly. There was famine; many died of hunger. They no longer drank good, pure water, but the water they drank was salty. Many people died of it, and because of it many got dysentery and died. Everything was eaten: lizards, swallows, maize straw, grass that grows on salt flats. And they chewed at . . . wood, glue flowers, plaster, leather, and deerskin, which they roasted, baked and toasted so that they could eat them, and they ground up medicinal herbs and adobe bricks. There had never been the like of such suffering. Along every stretch of road, the Spaniards took things from people by force. They were looking for gold; they cared nothing for green stone, feathers, or turquoise. They looked everywhere with the women, on their abdomens, under their skirts. And they looked everywhere with the men, under their loincloths and in their mouths. And [the Spaniards] took, picked out the beautiful women, with yellow bodies. And some of the women covered their faces with mud . . . , clothing themselves in rags. . . . And when the weapons were laid down and we collapsed, the year was Three House and the day count was One Serpent. Source: James Lockhart, ed. and trans., We People Here: Nahuatl Accounts of the Conquest of Mexico (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1993), 108–18. Copyright 1993 by the Regents of the University of California. Reprinted by permission. C h a p t e r 1 3 Political Transformations Empires and Encounters 1450–1750 European Empires in the Americas The European Advantage The Great Dying and the Little Ice Age The Columbian Exchange Comparing Colonial Societies in the Americas In the Lands of the Aztecs and the Incas Colonies of Sugar Settler Colonies in North America The Steppes and Siberia: The Making of a Russian Empire Experiencing the Russian Empire Russians and Empire Asian Empires Making China an Empire Muslims and Hindus in the Mughal Empire Muslims and Christians in the Ottoman Empire Reflections: The Centrality of Context in World History Zooming In: Doña Marina: Between Two Worlds Zooming In: Devshirme: The “Gathering” of Christian Boys in the Ottoman Empire Working with Evidence: State Building in the Early Modern Era “What he [Vladimir Putin] wants to do, you can just see the lust in his eyes, he wants to re-create the Russian empire, and this move on Crimea is his first step.” So said U.S. senator Bill Nelson in March of 2014, referring to the Russian president’s actions in seizing Crimea and in pressuring Ukraine to remain within a Russian sphere of influence. In reflecting on this very current political situation, the senator, and many others as well, invoked the Russian Empire, which had taken shape during the early modern era. In the same vein, commentators on the economic and political resurgence of twenty-first-century Turkey often refer to it as an effort “to rebuild the Ottoman Empire,” likewise a creation of the early modern era.1 In such ways, the memories of these earlier empires continue to shape understanding of current events and perhaps to inspire actions in the present as well. A s these comments imply, empire building has been largely discredited during the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, and “imperialist” has become a term of insult rather than a source of pride. How very different were the three centuries (1450–1750) of the early modern era, when empire building was a global process! In the Americas, the Aztec and Inca empires flourished before they were incorporated into the rival empires of the Spanish, Portuguese, British, French, and Dutch, constructed all across the Western Hemisphere. Within those imperial systems, vast transformations took place: old societies were destroyed, and new societies arose as Native Americans, Europeans, and Africans came into sustained contact with one another for the first time in world history. The Mughal Empire Among the most magnificent of the early modern empires was that of the Mughals in India. In this painting by an unknown Mughal artist, the seventeenth-century emperor Shah Jahan is holding a durbar, or ceremonial assembly, in the audience hall of his palace. The material splendor of the setting shows the immense wealth of the court, while the halo around Shah Jahan’s head indicates the special spiritual grace or enlightenment associated with emperors. 553 554 CHAPTER 13 / POLITICAL TRANSFORMATIONS, 1450–1750 It was a revolutionary encounter with implications that extended far beyond the Americas themselves. But European empires in the Americas were not alone on the imperial stage of the early modern era. Across the immense expanse of Siberia, the Russians constructed what was then the world’s largest territorial empire, making Russia an Asian as well as a European power. Qing (chihng) dynasty China penetrated deep into Inner Asia, doubling the size of the country while incorporating millions of nonChinese people who practiced Islam, Buddhism, or animistic religions. On the South Asian peninsula, the Islamic Mughal Empire brought Hindus and Muslims into a closer relationship than ever before, sometimes quite peacefully and at other times with great conflict. In the Middle East, the Turkish Ottoman Empire reestablished something of the earlier political unity of heartland Islam SEEKING THE MAIN POINT and posed a serious military and religious threat to European Christendom. In what ways did European empires Thus the early modern era was an age of empire. Within in the Americas resemble their Russian, Chinese, Mughal, and Ottoman their borders, those empires mixed and mingled diverse peoples counterparts, and in what respects in a wide variety of ways. Those relationships represented a were they different? Do you find the new stage in the globalization process and new arenas of crosssimilarities or the differences more cultural encounter. The transformations they set in motion striking? echo still in the twenty-first century. European Empires in the Americas Among the early modern empires, those of Western Europe were distinctive because the conquered territories lay an ocean away from the imperial heartland, rather than adjacent to it. Following the breakthrough voyages of Columbus, the Spanish focused their empire-building efforts in the Caribbean and then, in the early sixteenth century, turned to the mainland, with stunning conquests of the powerful but fragile Aztec and Inca empires. Meanwhile, the Portuguese established themselves along the coast of present-day Brazil. In the early seventeenth century, the British, French, and Dutch launched colonial settlements along the eastern coast of North America. From these beginnings, Europeans extended their empires to encompass most of the Americas, at least nominally, by the mid-eighteenth century (see Map 13.1). It was a remarkable achievement. What had made it possible? The European Advantage Connection What enabled Europeans to carve out huge empires an ocean away from their homelands? Geography provides a starting point for explaining Europe’s American empires. Countries on the Atlantic rim of Europe (Portugal, Spain, Britain, and France) were simply closer to the Americas than were any potential Asian competitors. Furthermore, the fixed winds of the Atlantic blew steadily in the same direction. Once these air currents were understood and mastered, they provided a far different maritime environment than the alternating monsoon winds of the Indian Ocean, in EUROPEAN EMPIRES IN THE AMERICAS A MAP OF TIME 1453 1464–1591 Ottoman conquest of Constantinople Songhay Empire in West Africa 1480 Russia emerges from Mongol rule 1494 Treaty of Tordesillas divides the Americas between Spain and Portugal 1501 Safavid Empire established in Persia/Iran 1519–1521 Spanish conquest of Aztec Empire 1526 Mughal Empire established in India 1529 Ottoman siege of Vienna 1530s 1532–1540 First Portuguese plantations in Brazil Spanish conquest of Inca Empire 1550 Russian expansion across Siberia begins 1565 Spanish takeover of Philippines begins 1607 Jamestown, Virginia: first permanent English settlement in Americas 1608 French colony established in Quebec 1680–1760 1683 After 1707 Chinese expansion into Inner Asia Second Ottoman siege of Vienna Fragmentation of Mughal Empire which Asian powers had long operated. European innovations in mapmaking, navigation, sailing techniques, and ship design — building on earlier models from the Mediterranean, Indian Ocean, and Chinese regions — likewise enabled Europeans to penetrate the Atlantic Ocean. The enormously rich markets of the Indian Ocean world provided little incentive for its Chinese, Indian, or Muslim participants to venture much beyond their own waters. Europeans, however, were powerfully motivated to do so. After 1200 or so, European elites were increasingly aware of their region’s marginal position in the rich world of Eurasian commerce and were determined to gain access to that world. Once the Americas were discovered, windfalls of natural resources, including highly productive agricultural lands, drove further expansion, ultimately underpinning the long-term growth of the European economy into the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Beyond these economic or ecological stimuli, rulers were driven by the enduring rivalries of competing states. The growing and relatively independent merchant class in a rapidly commercializing Europe sought direct access to Asian wealth 555 Hudson Strait Hudson Bay . eR nc wr e QUEBEC .L St LOUISIANA a Quebec Boston i R. New York Mississip p NEW SPAIN Acapulco St. Augustine Gulf of Mexico Mexico City Veracruz ATL ANTIC O CE AN Jamestown HAITI CUBA SANTO DOMINGO JAMAICA Caribbean Sea Panama City NEW GRANADA PACIFIC O C EA N GUIANA zon Ama PERU R. BRAZIL Lima Cuzco Potosí Rio de Janeiro São Paulo RÍO DE LA PLATA Dutch territories English territories French territories Portuguese territories Spanish territories Buenos Aires PAT AG ON IA Concepción 0 0 500 500 1,000 kilometers Map 13.1 European Colonial Empires in the Americas By the beginning of the eighteenth century, European powers had laid claim to most of the Western Hemisphere. Their wars and rivalries during that century led to an expansion of Spanish and English claims, at the expense of the French. 556 1,000 miles EUROPEAN EMPIRES IN THE AMERICAS to avoid the reliance on Muslim intermediaries that they found so distasteful. Impoverished nobles and commoners alike found opportunity for gaining wealth and status in the colonies. Missionaries and others were inspired by crusading zeal to enlarge the realm of Christendom. Persecuted minorities were in search of a new start in life. All of these compelling motives drove the relentlessly expanding imperial frontier in the Americas. Summarizing their intentions, one Spanish conquistador declared: “We came here to serve God and the King, and also to get rich.”2 In carving out these empires, often against great odds and with great difficulty, Europeans nonetheless bore certain advantages, despite their distance from home. Their states and trading companies enabled the effective mobilization of both human and material resources. Their seafaring technology, built on Chinese and Islamic precedents, allowed them to cross the Atlantic with growing ease, transporting people and supplies across great distances. Their ironworking technology, gunpowder weapons, and horses initially had no parallel in the Americas, although many peoples subsequently acquired them. Divisions within and between local societies provided allies for the determined European invaders. Various subject peoples of the Aztec Empire, for example, resented Mexica domination and willingly joined Hernán Cortés in the Spanish assault on that empire. In the final attack on the Aztec capital of Tenochtitlán, Cortés’s forces contained fewer than 1,000 Spaniards and many times that number of Tlaxcalans, former subjects of the Aztecs. After their defeat, tens of thousands of Aztecs themselves joined Cortés as he carved out a Spanish Mesoamerican empire far larger than that of the Aztecs. (See Zooming In: Doña Marina, page 558.) Much of the Inca elite, according to a recent study, “actually welcomed the Spanish invaders as liberators and willingly settled down with them to share rule of Andean farmers and miners.”3 A violent dispute between two rival contenders for the Inca throne, the brothers Atahualpa and Huáscar, certainly helped the European invaders recruit allies to augment their own minimal forces. In short, Spanish military victories were not solely of their own making, but the product of alliances with local peoples, who supplied the bulk of the Europeans’ conquering armies. Perhaps the most significant of European advantages lay in their germs and diseases, with which Native Americans had no familiarity. Those diseases decimated society after society, sometimes in advance of the Europeans’ actual arrival. In particular regions such as the Caribbean, Virginia, and New England, the rapid buildup of immigrant populations, coupled with the sharply diminished native numbers, allowed Europeans to actually outnumber local peoples within a few decades. The Great Dying and the Little Ice Age Whatever combination of factors explains the European acquisition of empires in the Americas, there is no doubting their global significance. Chief among the consequences was the demographic collapse of Native American societies. Although precise figures remain the subject of much debate, scholars generally agree that the 557 ZOOMING IN IN Doña Marina: Between Two Worlds I Described by Bernal Díaz, n her brief life, she was known one of Cortés’s associates, as variously as Malinal, Doña “good-looking, intelligent, Marina, and La Malinche.4 and self-assured,” the teenage By whatever name, she was a Malinal soon found herself in woman who experienced the service to Cortés himself. Since encounter of the Old World Spanish men were not supposed and the New in particularly intito touch non-Christian women, mate ways, even as she became these newcomers were distriba bridge between them. Born uted among his officers, quickly around 1505, Malinal was the baptized, and given Christian daughter of an elite and culnames. Thus Malinal became tured family in the borderlands Doña Marina. between the Maya and Aztec Doña Marina (center left) translating With a ready ear for lancultures in what is now southern for Cortés. guages and already fluent in Mexico. Two dramatic events Mayan and Nahuatl, the language of the Aztecs, Doña decisively shaped her life. The first occurred when her Marina soon picked up Spanish and quickly became father died and her mother remarried, bearing a son to indispensable to Cortés as an interpreter, cross-cultural her new husband. To protect this boy’s inheritance, broker, and strategist. She accompanied him on his Malinal’s family sold her into slavery. Eventually, she march inland to the Aztec capital, Tenochtitlán, and on came into the possession of a Maya chieftain in Tabasco several occasions her language skills and cultural awareon the Gulf of Mexico. ness allowed her to uncover spies and plots that might Here her second life-changing event took place in well have seriously impeded Cortés’s defeat of the Aztec March 1519, when the Spanish conquistador Hernán Empire. Díaz reported that “Doña Marina, who underCortés landed his troops and inflicted a sharp military stood full well what was happening, told [Cortés] what defeat on Tabasco. In the negotiations that followed, Tabasco authorities gave lavish gifts to the Spanish, photo: Biblioteca Nacional Madrid/Giraudon/Bridgeman Images including twenty women, one of whom was Malinal. pre-Columbian population of the Western Hemisphere was substantial, perhaps 60 to 80 million. The greatest concentrations of people lived in the Mesoamerican and Andean zones, which were dominated by the Aztec and Inca empires. Long isolation from the Afro-Eurasian world and the lack of most domesticated animals meant the absence of acquired immunities to Old World diseases such as smallpox, measles, typhus, influenza, malaria, and, later, yellow fever. Therefore, when Native American peoples came into contact with these European and African diseases, they died in appalling numbers, in many cases losing up to 90 percent of the population. As one recent historian has noted, “It was as if the suffering these diseases had caused in Eurasia over the past millennia were concentrated into the span of decades.”5 The densely settled peoples of Caribbean islands 558 EUROPEAN EMPIRES IN THE AMERICAS was going on.” In the Aztec capital, where Cortés took the emperor Moctezuma captive, it fell to Doña Marina to persuade him to accept this humiliating position and surrender his wealth to the Spanish. Even Cortés, who was never very gracious with his praise for her, acknowledged that “after God, we owe this conquest of New Spain to Doña Marina.” Aztecs soon came to see this young woman as the voice of Cortés, referring to her as La Malinche, a Spanish approximation of her original name. So paired did Cortés and La Malinche become in Aztec thinking that Cortés himself was often called “Malinche.” More than an interpreter for Cortés, Doña Marina also became his mistress and bore him a son. But after the initial conquest of Mexico was complete and he no longer needed her skills, Cortés married Doña Marina off to another Spanish conquistador, Juan Jaramillo, with whom she lived until her death, probably around 1530. Cortés did provide her with several pieces of land, one of which, ironically, had belonged to Moctezuma. Her son, however, was taken from her and raised in Spain. In 1523, Doña Marina performed one final service for Cortés, accompanying him on a mission to Honduras to suppress a rebellion. There her personal life seemed to come full circle, for near her hometown she encountered her mother, who had sold her into slavery, and her half brother. Díaz reported that they “were very much afraid 559 of Doña Marina,” thinking that they would surely be put to death by their now-powerful and well-connected relative. But in a replay of the biblical story of Joseph and his brothers, Doña Marina quickly reassured and forgave them, while granting them “many golden jewels and some clothes.” In the centuries since her death, Doña Marina has been highly controversial. For much of the colonial era, she was viewed positively as an ally of the Spanish. But after independence, some came to see her as a traitor to her own people, shunning her heritage and siding with the invaders. Still others have considered her as the mother of Mexico’s mixed-race, or mestizo, culture. Should she be understood primarily as a victim or as a skillful survivor negotiating hard choices under difficult circumstances? Whatever the judgments of later generations, Doña Marina herself seems to have made a clear choice to cast her lot with the Europeans. Even when Cortés had given her to another man, Doña Marina expressed no regret. According to Díaz, she declared, “Even if they were to make me mistress of all the provinces of New Spain, I would refuse the honor, for I would rather serve my husband and Cortés than anything else in the world.” Questions: How might you define the significance of Doña Marina’s life? In what larger contexts might that life find a place? virtually vanished within fifty years of Columbus’s arrival. Central Mexico, with a population estimated at some 10 to 20 million before the Spanish conquest, declined to about 1 million by 1650. A native Nahuatl (nah-watl) account depicted the social breakdown that accompanied the smallpox pandemic: “A great many died from this plague, and many others died of hunger. They could not get up to search for food, and everyone else was too sick to care for them, so they starved to death in their beds.”6 The situation was similar in Dutch and British territories of North America. A Dutch observer in New Netherland (later New York) reported in 1656 that “the Indians . . . affirm that before the arrival of the Christians, and before the small pox broke out amongst them, they were ten times as numerous as they are now, and 560 CHAPTER 13 / POLITICAL TRANSFORMATIONS, 1450–1750 that their population had been melted down by this disease, whereof nine-tenths of them have died.”7 To Governor Bradford of Plymouth colony (in present-day Massachusetts), such conditions represented the “good hand of God” at work, “sweeping away great multitudes of the natives . . . that he might make room for us.”8 Not until the late seventeenth century did native numbers begin to recuperate somewhat from this catastrophe, and even then, they did not recover everywhere. As the Great Dying took hold in the Americas, it interacted with another natural phenomenon, this time one of genuinely global proportions. Known as the Little Ice Age, it was a period of unusually cool temperatures that spanned much of the early modern period, most prominently in the Northern Hemisphere. Scholars continue to debate its causes. Some have suggested a low point in sunspot activity, leading to less intense solar irradiation of the earth, while others have argued that the chief cause was volcanic eruptions, whose ash and gases blocked the sun’s warming energy in the upper atmosphere. More recently, some scientists have linked the Little Ice Age to the demographic collapse in the Americas. The Great Dying, they argue, resulted in the desertion of large areas of Native American farmland and ended the traditional practices of forest management through burning in many regions. These changes sparked a resurgence of plant life, which in turn took large amounts of carbon dioxide, a greenhouse gas, out of the atmosphere, contributing to global cooling. Whatever the causes, shorter growing seasons and less hospitable weather conditions adversely affected food production in regions across the globe. While the onset, duration, and effects of the Little Ice Age varied from region to region, the impact of a cooler climate reached its peak in many regions in the mid-seventeenth century, helping to spark what scholars term the General Crisis. Much of China, Europe, and North America experienced record or near-record cold winters during this period. Regions near the equator in the tropics and Southern Hemisphere also experienced extreme conditions and irregular rainfall, resulting, for instance, in the growth of the Sahara Desert. Wet, cold summers reduced harvests dramatically in Europe, while severe droughts ruined crops in many other regions, especially China, which suffered its worst years of drought in the previous five centuries between 1637 and 1641. Difficult weather conditions accentuated other stresses in societies, leading to widespread famines, epidemics, uprisings, and wars in which millions perished. Eurasia did not escape lightly from these stresses: the collapse of the Ming dynasty in China, nearly constant warfare in Europe, and civil war in Mughal India all occurred in the context of the General Crisis, which only fully subsided when more favorable weather patterns returned in the eighteenth century. Nor were the Americas, already devastated by the Great Dying, spared the suffering that accompanied the Little Ice Age and the General Crisis of the seventeenth century. In central Mexico, heartland of the Aztec Empire and the center of Spanish colonial rule in the area, severe drought in the five years after 1639 sent the price of maize skyrocketing, left granaries empty and many people without water, and prompted an unsuccessful plot to declare Mexico’s independence from Spain. EUROPEAN EMPIRES IN THE AMERICAS 561 Continuing drought years in the decades that followed witnessed repeated public processions of the statue of Our Lady of Guadalupe, who had gained a reputation for producing rain. The Caribbean region during the 1640s experienced the opposite condition — torrential rains that accompanied more frequent El Niño weather patterns — which provided ideal conditions for the breeding of mosquitoes that carried both yellow fever and malaria. A Maya chronicle for 1648 noted, “There was bloody vomit and we began to die.”9 Like the Great Dying, the General Crisis reminds us that climate often plays an important role in shaping human history. But it also reminds us that human activity — the importation of deadly diseases to the Americas, in this case — may also help shape the climate, and that this has been true long before the twenty-first century. The Columbian Exchange In sharply diminishing the population of the Americas, the Great Dying and the impact of the Little Ice Age created an acute labor shortage and certainly did make room for immigrant newcomers, both colonizing Europeans and enslaved Africans. Over the several centuries of the colonial era and beyond, various combinations of indigenous, European, and African peoples created entirely new societies in the Americas, largely replacing the many and varied cultures that had flourished before 1492. To those colonial societies, Europeans and Africans brought not only their germs and their people but also their plants and animals. Wheat, rice, sugarcane, grapes, and many garden vegetables and fruits, as well as numerous weeds, took hold in the Americas, where they transformed the landscape and made possible a recognizably European diet and way of life. Even more revolutionary were their animals — horses, pigs, cattle, goats, sheep — all of which were new to the Americas and multiplied spectacularly in an environment largely free of natural predators. These domesticated animals made possible the ranching economies and cowboy cultures of both North and South America. Horses also transformed Disease and Death among the Aztecs many Native American societies, Smallpox, which accompanied the Spanish to the Americas, devastated native populations. This image, drawn by an Aztec artist and contained in the sixteenth-century Florentine Codex, particularly in the North American illustrates the impact of the disease in Mesoamerica. (Private Collection/Peter Newark American West as settled farming peoples such Pictures/Bridgeman Images) 562 CHAPTER 13 / POLITICAL TRANSFORMATIONS, 1450–1750 Change What large-scale transformations did European empires generate? as the Pawnee abandoned their fields to hunt bison from horseback. In the process, women lost much of their earlier role as food producers as a male-dominated hunting and warrior culture emerged. Both environmentally and socially, these changes were nothing less than revolutionary. In the other direction, American food crops such as corn, potatoes, and cassava spread widely in the Eastern Hemisphere, where they provided the nutritional foundation for the immense population growth that became everywhere a hallmark of the modern era. In Europe, calories derived from corn and potatoes helped push human numbers from some 60 million in 1400 to 390 million in 1900. Those Amerindian crops later provided cheap and reasonably nutritious food for millions of industrial workers. Potatoes, especially, allowed Ireland’s population to grow enormously and then condemned many of the Irish to starvation or emigration when an airborne fungus, also from the Americas, destroyed the crop in the midnineteenth century. In China, corn, peanuts, and especially sweet potatoes supplemented the traditional rice and wheat to sustain China’s modern population explosion. By the early twentieth century, food plants of American origin represented about 20 percent of total Chinese food production. In Africa, corn took hold quickly and was used as a cheap food for the human cargoes of the transatlantic trade. Scholars have speculated that corn, together with peanuts and cassava, underwrote some of Africa’s population growth and partially offset the population drain of the slave trade. Beyond food crops, American stimulants such as tobacco and chocolate were soon used around the world. By the seventeenth century, how-to manuals instructed Chinese users on smoking techniques, and tobacco had become, in the words of one enamored Chinese poet, “the gentleman’s companion, it warms my heart and leaves my mouth feeling like a divine furnace.”10 Tea from China and coffee from the Islamic world also spread globally, contributing to this worldwide biological exchange. Never before in human history had such a large-scale and consequential diffusion of plants and animals operated to remake the biological environment of the planet. Furthermore, the societies that developed within the American colonies drove the processes of globalization and reshaped the world economy of the early modern era (see Chapter 14 for a more extended treatment). The silver mines of Mexico and Peru fueled both transatlantic and transpacific commerce, encouraged Spain’s unsuccessful effort to dominate Europe, and enabled Europeans to buy the Chinese tea, silk, and porcelain that they valued so highly. The plantation owners of the tropical lowland regions needed workers and found them by the millions in Africa. The Atlantic slave trade, which brought these workers to the colonies, and the sugar and cotton trade, which distributed the fruits of their labor abroad, created a lasting link among Africa, Europe, and the Americas, while scattering peoples of African origin throughout the Western Hemisphere. This enormous network of communication, migration, trade, disease, and the transfer of plants and animals, all generated by European colonial empires in the COMPARING COLONIAL SOCIETIES IN THE AMERICAS Americas, has been dubbed the “Columbian exchange.” It gave rise to something wholly new in world history: an interacting Atlantic world connecting four continents. Millions of years ago, the Eastern and Western hemispheres had physically drifted apart, and, ecologically speaking, they had remained largely apart. Now these two “old worlds” were joined, increasingly creating a single biological regime, a “new world” of global dimensions. The long-term benefits of this Atlantic network were very unequally distributed. Western Europeans were clearly the dominant players in the Atlantic world, and their societies reaped the greatest rewards. Mountains of new information flooded into Europe, shaking up conventional understandings of the world and contributing to a revolutionary new way of thinking known as the Scientific Revolution. The wealth of the colonies — precious metals, natural resources, new food crops, slave labor, financial profits, colonial markets — provided one of the foundations on which Europe’s Industrial Revolution was built. The colonies also provided an outlet for the rapidly growing population of European societies and represented an enormous extension of European civilization. In short, the colonial empires of the Americas greatly facilitated a changing global balance of power, which now thrust the previously marginal Western Europeans into an increasingly central and commanding role on the world stage. “Without a New World to deliver economic balance in the Old,” concluded a prominent world historian, “Europe would have remained inferior, as ever, in wealth and power, to the great civilizations of Asia.”11 Comparing Colonial Societies in the Americas What the Europeans had encountered across the Atlantic was another “old world,” but their actions surely gave rise to a “new world” in the Americas. Their colonial empires — Spanish, Portuguese, British, and French alike — did not simply conquer and govern established societies, but rather generated wholly new societies, born of the decimation of Native American populations and the introduction of European and African peoples, cultures, plants, and animals. Furthermore, all the European rulers of these empires viewed their realms through the lens of the prevailing economic theory known as mercantilism. This view held that European governments served their countries’ economic interests best by encouraging exports and accumulating bullion (precious metals such as silver and gold), believed to be the source of national prosperity. In this scheme of things, colonies provided closed markets for the manufactured goods of the “mother country” and, if they were lucky, supplied great quantities of bullion as well. Mercantilist thinking thus fueled European wars and colonial rivalries around the world in the early modern era. Particularly in Spanish America, however, it was a theory largely ignored or evaded in practice. Spain had few manufactured goods to sell, and piracy and smuggling allowed Spanish colonists to exchange goods with Spain’s rivals. 563 564 CHAPTER 13 / POLITICAL TRANSFORMATIONS, 1450–1750 But variations across the immense colonial world of the Western Hemisphere were at least as noticeable as these similarities. Some differences grew out of the societies of the colonizing power, such as the contrast between a semi-feudal and Catholic Spain and a more rapidly changing Protestant England. The kind of economy established in particular regions — settler-dominated agriculture, slave-based plantations, ranching, or mining — likewise influenced their development. So too did the character of the Native American cultures — the more densely populated and urbanized Mesoamerican and Andean civilizations differed greatly from the more sparsely populated rural villages of North America, for example. Furthermore, women and men often experienced colonial intrusion in quite distinct ways. Beyond the common burdens of violent conquest, epidemic disease, and coerced labor, both Native American and enslaved African women had to cope with the additional demands made on them as females. Conquest was often accompanied by the transfer of women to the new colonial rulers. Cortés, for example, marked his alliance with the city of Tlaxcala (tlah-SKAH-lah) against the Aztecs by an exchange of gifts in which he received hundreds of female slaves and eight daughters of elite Tlaxcalan families, whom he distributed to his soldiers. And he commanded the Aztec ruler: “You are to deliver women with light skins, corn, chicken, eggs, and tortillas.”12 Soon after conquest, many Spanish men married elite native women. It was a long-standing practice in Amerindian societies and was encouraged by both Spanish and indigenous male authorities as a means of cementing their new relationship. It was also advantageous for some of the women involved. One of Aztec emperor Moctezuma’s daughters, who was mistress to Cortés and eventually married several other Spaniards, wound up with the largest landed estate in the valley of Mexico. Below this elite level of interaction, however, far more women experienced sexual violence and abuse. Rape accompanied conquest in many places, and dependent or enslaved women working under the control of European men frequently found themselves required to perform sexual services. This was tragedy and humiliation for native and enslaved men as well, for they were unable to protect their women from such abuse. Such variations in culture, policy, economy, and gender generated quite different colonial societies in several major regions of the Americas. In the Lands of the Aztecs and the Incas Change What was the economic foundation of colonial rule in Mexico and Peru? How did it shape the kinds of societies that arose there? The Spanish conquest of the Aztec and Inca empires in the early sixteenth century gave Spain access to the most wealthy, urbanized, and densely populated regions of the Western Hemisphere. Within a century and well before the British had even begun their colonizing efforts in North America, the Spanish in Mexico and Peru had established nearly a dozen major cities; several impressive universities; hundreds of cathedrals, churches, and missions; an elaborate administrative bureaucracy; and a network of regulated international commerce. The economic foundation for this emerging colonial society lay in commercial agriculture, much of it on large rural estates, and in silver and gold mining. In both COMPARING COLONIAL SOCIETIES IN THE AMERICAS 565 cases, native peoples, rather than African slaves or European workers, provided most of the labor, despite their much-diminished numbers. Almost everywhere it was forced labor, often directly required by colonial authorities. In a legal system known as encomienda, the Spanish Crown granted to particular Spanish settlers a number of local native people from whom they could require labor, gold, or agricultural produce and to whom they owed “protection” and instruction in the Christian faith. It turned into an exploitative regime not far removed from slavery and was replaced by a similar system, repartimiento, with slightly more control by the Crown and Spanish officials. By the seventeenth century, the hacienda system had taken shape by which the owners of large estates directly employed native workers. With low wages, high taxes, and large debts to the landowners, the peons who worked these estates enjoyed little control over their lives or their livelihood. On this economic base, a distinctive social order grew up, replicating something of the Spanish class and gender hierarchy while accommodating the racially and culturally different Indians and Africans as well as growing numbers of racially mixed people. At the top of this colonial society were the male Spanish settlers, who were politically and economically dominant and seeking to become a landed aristocracy. One Spanish official commented in 1619: “The Spaniards, from the able and rich to the humble and poor, all hold themselves to be lords and will not serve [do manual labor].”13 Politically, they increasingly saw themselves not as colonials, but as residents of a Spanish kingdom, subject to the Spanish monarch, yet separate and distinct from Spain itself and deserving of a large measure of self-government. Therefore, they chafed under the heavy bureaucratic restrictions imposed by the Crown. “I obey but I do not enforce” was a slogan that reflected local authorities’ resistance to orders from Spain. But the Spanish minority, never more than 20 percent of the population, was itself a divided community. Descendants of the original conquistadores sought to protect their privileges against immigrant newcomers; Spaniards born in the Americas (creoles) resented the pretensions to superiority of those born in Spain (peninsu- Racial Mixing in Colonial Mexico lares); landowning Spaniards felt threatened by This eighteenth-century painting by the famous Zapotec artist Miguel Cabrera the growing wealth of commercial and mercan- shows a Spanish man, a mestiza woman, and their child, who was labeled as castiza. By the twentieth century, such mixed-race people represented the majority tile groups practicing less prestigious occupations. of the population of Mexico, and cultural blending had become a central feature Spanish missionaries and church authorities of the country’s identity. (Museo de América, Madrid, Spain/Bridgeman Images) 566 CHAPTER 13 / POLITICAL TRANSFORMATIONS, 1450–1750 were often sharply critical of how these settlers treated native peoples. While Spanish women shared the racial privileges of their husbands, they were clearly subordinate in gender terms, unable to hold public office and viewed as weak and in need of male protection. But they were also regarded as the “bearers of civilization,” and through their capacity to produce legitimate children, they were the essential link for transmitting male wealth, honor, and status to future generations. This required strict control of their sexuality and a continuation of the Iberian obsession with “purity of blood.” In Spain, that concern had focused on potential liaisons with Jews and Muslims; in the colonies, the alleged threat to female virtue derived from Native American and African men. From a male viewpoint, the problem with Spanish women was that there were very few of them. This demographic fact led to the most distinctive feature of these new colonial societies in Mexico and Peru — the emergence of a mestizo (mehsTEE-zoh), or mixed-race, population, initially the product of unions between Spanish men and Indian women. Rooted in the sexual imbalance among Spanish immigrants (seven men to one woman in early colonial Peru, for example), the emergence of a mestizo population was facilitated by the desire of many surviving Indian women for the relative security of life in a Spanish household, where they and their children would not be subject to the abuse and harsh demands made on native peoples. Over the 300 years of the colonial era, mestizo numbers grew substantially, becoming the majority of the population in Mexico sometime during the nineteenth century. Such mixed-race people were divided into dozens of separate groups known as castas (castes), based on their racial heritage and skin color. Mestizos were largely Hispanic in culture, but Spaniards looked down on them during much of the colonial era, regarding them as illegitimate, for many were not born of “proper” marriages. Despite this attitude, their growing numbers and the economic usefulness of their men as artisans, clerks, supervisors of labor gangs, and lower-level officials in both church and state bureaucracies led to their recognition as a distinct social group. Mestizas, women of mixed racial background, worked as domestic servants or in their husbands’ shops, wove cloth, and manufactured candles and cigars, in addition to performing domestic duties. A few became quite wealthy. An illiterate mestiza named Mencia Perez married successively two reasonably well-to-do Spanish men and upon their deaths took over their businesses, becoming in her own right a very rich woman by the 1590s. At that point, no one would have referred to her as a mestiza.14 Particularly in Mexico, mestizo identity blurred the sense of sharp racial difference between Spanish and Indian peoples and became a major element in the identity of modern Mexico. At the bottom of Mexican and Peruvian colonial societies were the indigenous peoples, known to Europeans as “Indians.” Traumatized by the Great Dying, they were subject to gross abuse and exploitation as the primary labor force for the mines and estates of the Spanish Empire and were required to render tribute payments to their Spanish overlords. Their empires dismantled by Spanish conquest, their religions attacked by Spanish missionaries, and their diminished numbers forcibly COMPARING COLONIAL SOCIETIES IN THE AMERICAS relocated into larger settlements, many Indians gravitated toward the world of their conquerors. Many learned Spanish; converted to Christianity; moved to cities to work for wages; ate the meat of cows, chickens, and pigs; used plows and draft animals rather than traditional digging sticks; and took their many grievances to Spanish courts. Indian women endured some distinctive conditions as Spanish legal codes generally defined them as minors rather than responsible adults. As those codes took hold, Indian women were increasingly excluded from the courts or represented by their menfolk. This made it more difficult to maintain female property rights. In 1804, for example, a Maya legal petition identified eight men and ten women from a particular family as owners of a piece of land, but the Spanish translation omitted the women’s names altogether.15 But much that was indigenous persisted. At the local level, Indian male authorities retained a measure of autonomy, and traditional markets operated regularly. Both Andean and Maya women continued to leave personal property to their female descendants. Maize, beans, and squash persisted as the major elements of Indian diets in Mexico. Christian saints in many places blended easily with specialized indigenous gods, while belief in magic, folk medicine, and communion with the dead remained strong. Memories of the past also endured. The Tupac Amaru revolt in Peru during 1780–1781 was made in the name of the last independent Inca emperor. In that revolt, the wife of the leader, Micaela Bastidas, was referred to as La Coya, the female Inca, evoking the parallel hierarchies of male and female officials who had earlier governed the Inca Empire (see Chapter 12, pages 528–29). Thus Spaniards, mestizos, and Indians represented the major social categories in the colonial lands of what had been the Inca and Aztec empires, while African slaves and freemen were less numerous than elsewhere in the Americas. Despite the sharp divisions among these groups, some movement was possible. Indians who acquired an education, wealth, and some European culture might “pass” as mestizo. Likewise, more fortunate mestizo families might be accepted as Spaniards over time. Colonial Spanish America was a vast laboratory of ethnic mixing and cultural change. It was dominated by Europeans, to be sure, but with a rather more fluid and culturally blended society than in the racially rigid colonies of British North America. Colonies of Sugar Another and quite different kind of colonial society emerged in the lowland areas of Brazil, ruled by Portugal, and in the Spanish, British, French, and Dutch colonies in the Caribbean. These regions lacked the great civilizations of Mexico and Peru. Nor did they provide much mineral wealth until the Brazilian gold rush of the 1690s and the discovery of diamonds a little later. Still, Europeans found a very profitable substitute in sugar, which was much in demand in Europe, where it was used as a medicine, a spice, a sweetener, a preservative, and in sculptured forms as a decoration that indicated high status. Although commercial agriculture in the 567 568 CHAPTER 13 / POLITICAL TRANSFORMATIONS, 1450–1750 Comparison How did the plantation societies of Brazil and the Caribbean differ from those of southern colonies in British North America? Spanish Empire served a domestic market in its towns and mining camps, these sugar-based colonies produced almost exclusively for export, while importing their food and other necessities. Large-scale sugar production had been pioneered by Arabs, who had introduced it in the Mediterranean. Europeans learned the technique and transferred it to their Atlantic island possessions and then to the Americas. For a century (1570– 1670), Portuguese planters along the northeast coast of Brazil dominated the world market for sugar. Then the British, French, and Dutch turned their Caribbean territories into highly productive sugar-producing colonies, breaking the Portuguese and Brazilian monopoly. Sugar decisively transformed Brazil and the Caribbean. Its production, which involved both growing the sugarcane and processing it into usable sugar, was very labor-intensive and could most profitably occur in a large-scale, almost industrial setting. It was perhaps the first modern industry in that it produced for an international and mass market, using capital and expertise from Europe, with production facilities located in the Americas. However, its most characteristic feature — the massive use of slave labor — was an ancient practice. In the absence of a Native American population, which had been almost totally wiped out in the Caribbean or had fled inland in Brazil, European sugarcane planters turned to Africa and the Atlantic slave trade for an alternative workforce. The vast majority of the African captives transported across the Atlantic, some 80 percent or more, ended up in Brazil and the Caribbean. (See Chapter 14 for a more extensive description of the Atlantic slave trade.) Slaves worked on sugar-producing estates in horrendous conditions. The heat and fire from the cauldrons, which turned raw sugarcane into crystallized sugar, reminded many visitors of scenes from Hell. These conditions, combined with disease, generated a high death rate, perhaps 5 to 10 percent per year, which required plantation owners to constantly import fresh slaves. A Jesuit observer in 1580 aptly summarized the situation: “The work is great and many die.”16 More male slaves than female slaves were imported from Africa into the sugar economies of the Americas, leading to major and persistent gender imbalances. Nonetheless, female slaves did play distinctive roles in these societies. Women made up about half of the field gangs that did the heavy work of planting and harvesting sugarcane. They were subject to the same brutal punishments and received the same rations as their male counterparts, though they were seldom permitted to undertake the more skilled labor inside the sugar mills. Women who worked in urban areas, mostly for white female owners, did domestic chores and were often hired out as laborers in various homes, shops, laundries, inns, and brothels. Discouraged from establishing stable families, women had to endure, often alone, the wrenching separation from their children that occurred when they were sold. Mary Prince, a Caribbean slave who wrote a brief account of her life, recalled the pain of families torn apart: “The great God above alone knows the thoughts of the poor slave’s heart, and the bitter pains which follow such separations as these. All that we love taken away from us — oh, it is sad, sad! and sore to be borne!”17 COMPARING COLONIAL SOCIETIES IN THE AMERICAS The extensive use of African slave labor gave these plantation colonies a very different ethnic and racial makeup than that of highland Spanish America, as the Snapshot on page 570 indicates. Thus, after three centuries of colonial rule, a substantial majority of Brazil’s population was either partially or wholly of African descent. In the French Caribbean colony of Haiti in 1790, the corresponding figure was 93 percent. As in Spanish America, a considerable amount of racial mixing took place in Brazil. Cross-racial unions accounted for only about 10 percent of all marriages in Brazil, but the use of concubines and informal liaisons among Indians, Africans, and Portuguese produced a substantial mixed-race population. From their ranks derived much of the urban skilled workforce and many of the supervisors in the sugar industry. Mulattoes, the product of Portuguese-African unions, predominated, but as many as forty separate and named groups, each indicating a different racial mixture, emerged in colonial Brazil. The plantation complex of the Americas, based on African slavery, extended beyond the Caribbean and Brazil to encompass the southern colonies of British North America, where tobacco, cotton, rice, and indigo were major crops, but the social outcomes of these plantation colonies were quite different from those farther south. Because European women had joined the colonial migration to North 569 Plantation Life in the Caribbean This painting from 1823 shows the use of slave labor on a plantation in Antigua, a Britishruled island in the Caribbean. Notice the overseer with a whip supervising the tilling and planting of the field. (Breaking Up the Land, from Ten Views in the Island of Antigua, 1823, color engraving by William Clark [fl. 1823]/British Library, London, UK/© British Library Board. All Rights Reserved/Bridgeman Images) 570 CHAPTER 13 / POLITICAL TRANSFORMATIONS, 1450–1750 Snapshot Ethnic Composition of Colonial Societies in Latin America (1825)18 Highland Spanish America Portuguese America (Brazil) Europeans 18.2 percent 23.4 percent Mixed-race 28.3 percent 17.8 percent Africans 11.9 percent 49.8 percent Native Americans 41.7 percent 9.1 percent America at an early date, these colonies experienced less racial mixing and certainly demonstrated less willingness to recognize the offspring of such unions and accord them a place in society. A sharply defined racial system (with black Africans, “red” Native Americans, and white Europeans) evolved in North America, whereas both Portuguese and Spanish colonies acknowledged a wide variety of mixed-race groups. Slavery too was different in North America than in the sugar colonies. By 1750 or so, slaves in what became the United States proved able to reproduce themselves, and by the time of the Civil War almost all North American slaves had been born in the New World. That was never the case in Latin America, where largescale importation of new slaves continued well into the nineteenth century. Nonetheless, many more slaves were voluntarily set free by their owners in Brazil than in North America, and free blacks and mulattoes in Brazil had more economic opportunities than did their counterparts in the United States. At least a few among them found positions as political leaders, scholars, musicians, writers, and artists. Some were even hired as slave catchers. Does this mean, then, that racism was absent in colonial Brazil? Certainly not, but it was different from racism in North America. For one thing, in North America, any African ancestry, no matter how small or distant, made a person “black”; in Brazil, a person of African and non-African ancestry was considered not black, but some other mixed-race category. Racial prejudice surely persisted, for white characteristics were prized more highly than black features, and people regarded as white had enormously greater privileges and opportunities than others. Nevertheless, skin color in Brazil, and in Latin America generally, was only one criterion of class status, and the perception of color changed with the educational or economic standing of individuals. A light-skinned mulatto who had acquired some wealth or education might well pass as a white. One curious visitor to Brazil was surprised to find a darker-skinned man serving as a local official. “Isn’t the governor a mulatto?” inquired the visitor. “He was, but he isn’t any more,” was the reply. “How can a governor be a mulatto?”19 COMPARING COLONIAL SOCIETIES IN THE AMERICAS 571 Settler Colonies in North America Yet another distinctive type of colonial society emerged in the northern British colonies of New England, New York, and Pennsylvania. Because the British were the last of the European powers to establish a colonial presence in the Americas, a full century after Spain, they found that “only the dregs were left.”20 The lands they acquired were widely regarded in Europe as the unpromising leftovers of the New World, lacking the obvious wealth and sophisticated cultures of the Spanish possessions. Until at least the eighteenth century, these British colonies remained far less prominent on the world stage than those of Spain or Portugal. The British settlers came from a more rapidly changing society than did those from an ardently Catholic, semi-feudal, authoritarian Spain. When Britain launched its colonial ventures in the seventeenth century, it had already experienced considerable conflict between Catholics and Protestants, the rise of a merchant capitalist class distinct from the nobility, and the emergence of Parliament as a check on the authority of kings. Although they brought much of their English culture with them, many of the British settlers — Puritans in Massachusetts and Quakers in Pennsylvania, for example — sought to escape aspects of an old European society rather than to re-create it, as was the case for most Spanish and Portuguese colonists. The easy availability of land and the outsider status of many British settlers made it even more difficult to follow the Spanish or Portuguese colonial pattern of sharp class hierarchies, large rural estates, and dependent laborers. Thus men in Puritan New England became independent heads of family farms, a world away from Old England, where most land was owned by nobles and gentry and worked by servants, tenants, and paid laborers. But if men escaped the class restrictions of the old country, women were less able to avoid its gender limitations. While Puritan Christianity extolled the family and a woman’s role as wife and mother, it reinforced largely unlimited male authority. “Since he is thy Husband,” declared Boston minister Benjamin Wadsworth in 1712 to the colony’s women, “God has made him the Head and set him above thee.”21 Women were prosecuted for the crime of “fornication” far more often than their male companions; the inheritance of daughters was substantially less than that of sons; few girls attended school; and while women were the majority of church members, they could never become ministers. Furthermore, British settlers were far more numerous than their Spanish counterparts, outnumbering them five to one by 1750. This disparity was the most obvious distinguishing feature of the New England and middle Atlantic colonies. By the time of the American Revolution, some 90 percent or more of these colonies’ populations were Europeans. Devastating diseases and a highly aggressive military policy had largely cleared the colonies of Native Americans, and their numbers, which were far smaller to start with than those of their Mesoamerican and Andean counterparts, did not rebound in subsequent centuries as they did in the lands of the Aztecs and the Incas. Moreover, slaves were not needed in an agricultural economy Comparison What distinguished the British settler colonies of North America from their counterparts in Latin America? 572 CHAPTER 13 / POLITICAL TRANSFORMATIONS, 1450–1750 dominated by numerous small-scale independent farmers working their own land, although elite families, especially in urban areas, sometimes employed household slaves. These were almost pure settler colonies, without the racial mixing that was so prominent in Spanish and Portuguese territories. Other differences likewise emerged. A largely Protestant England was far less interested in spreading Christianity among the remaining native peoples than were the large and well-funded missionary societies of Catholic Spain. Although religion loomed large in the North American colonies, the church and colonial state were not so intimately connected as they were in Latin America. The Protestant emphasis on reading the Bible for oneself led to a much greater mass literacy than in Latin America, where three centuries of church education still left some 95 percent of the population illiterate at independence. By contrast, well over 75 percent of white males in British North America were literate by the 1770s, although women’s literacy rates were somewhat lower. Furthermore, British settler colonies evolved traditions of local self-government more extensively than in Latin America. Preferring to rely on joint stock companies or wealthy individuals operating under a royal charter, Britain had nothing resembling the elaborate imperial bureaucracy that governed Spanish colonies. For much of the seventeenth century, a prolonged power struggle between the English king and Parliament meant that the British government paid little attention to the internal affairs of the colonies. Therefore, elected colonial assemblies, seeing themselves as little parliaments defending “the rights of Englishmen,” vigorously contested the prerogatives of royal governors sent to administer their affairs. The grand irony of the modern history of the Americas lay in the reversal of long-established relationships between the northern and southern continents. For thousands of years, the major centers of wealth, power, commerce, and innovation lay in Mesoamerica and the Andes. That pattern continued for much of the colonial era, as the Spanish and Portuguese colonies seemed far more prosperous and successful than their British or French counterSUMMING UP SO FAR parts in North America. In the nineteenth and twentieth cenIn what ways might European empire turies, however, the balance shifted. What had once been the building in the Americas be under“dregs” of the colonial world became the United States, more stood as a single phenomenon? And in politically stable, more democratic, more economically sucwhat respects should it be viewed as a cessful, and more internationally powerful than a divided, set of distinct and separate processes? unstable, and much less prosperous Latin America. The Steppes and Siberia: The Making of a Russian Empire At the same time as Western Europeans were building their empires in the Americas, the Russian Empire, which subsequently became the world’s largest state, was beginning to take shape. When Columbus crossed the Atlantic, a small Russian WOH 2012 Paper #3 Assignment Throughout the semester, you have been building your skills in analyzing primary sources, considering historical context, identifying and presenting evidence, and creating a thesis statement and persuasive argument for your paper. v For the third paper assignment, you will revise your second paper. See the explanation below for more information on how to properly revise your paper – these revisions should be substantial, not just changes in grammar. v This paper will be graded based on the degree and quality of revisions completed. If you do not do revisions and simply turn in the same document you turned in for paper #2, you will receive a 0 for this assignment. In this case, the revisions are the point of the assignment. v Even if you did very well on paper #2, you must complete revisions for paper #3. Focus on places where your paper could be stronger, based on peer review and your TA’s comments. What is revision? Revisions can be categorized in two ways: as Global Revisions and Local Revisions. Global Revisions consider the comments on the paper as a whole and involve rethinking things like paper structure, argument, etc. Local Revisions focus on smaller-scale issues like spelling, grammar, or formatting. For your revision in this course, you will be asked to do both, focusing particularly on Global Revisions. It is not enough to correct grammatical errors in your paper and turn it back in. Instead, you should consider the comments you have received from your TA and in peer review and restructure and make substantial changes to your paper. Revision is an important part of the writing process, one that every published writer undertakes. Steps Toward Revision: • It is often best to print out your paper and revise it in hard copy with a pen in hand, in order to approach the material with fresh eyes. • Reread the paper. If you are having any issues with your prose, reread the paper aloud to yourself. While it may seem strange, it does help catch issues related to local revision like word choice, the flow of the sentences, etc. • Identify your argument, and circle it. Are you happy with the wording? You should spend a significant portion of your revision time on this, because everything in your paper should relate back to and prove your thesis statement. • Look at the structure of your paper. Do you have a thesis statement in the first paragraph? Do your paragraphs have topic sentences that relate to the thesis statement? Does each paragraph develop one big idea? Do the paragraphs flow logically? • Consider the evidence you’ve used to back up your claims. Are you quoting primary sources? Are you including historical context from the textbook and/or class notes? Could you improve your paper by adding additional evidence, or incorporating more sources? • Double-check your paper to make sure you have cited everything correctly, according to Chicago Manual of Style guidelines. Remember that you must have citations for everything that is not your own original thought, including information you have from the textbook or from lecture. If you have questions about when and how to cite, ask your TA. • In addition to thinking about the things listed above, carefully read through your peer review and your TA’s comments. Write down what changes you will be making for your paper. Do you need to find additional quotes to use? Do you need to check your paper for errors in grammar? Then work through the steps, revising the paper. Technical Requirements: The paper should be typed in a Microsoft Word document, in 12-point, Times New Roman font. It must be a minimum of 750 words long. The file should be titled YOURLASTNAME_WOH2012_Paper3. Write the word count at the bottom of the document. For this assignment, you must cite in the Chicago Manual style. If you have questions about this style, consult the handout posted on Canvas, or email the professor or your TA. Grading Rubric for WOH 2012 Paper #3 For paper 3, grading will take into account both the quality of the final paper and, critically, the degree and quality of the revisions. A paper that has not been revised at all, even if originally a strong paper, will not be accepted for credit. A Level B Level C Level D-F Level Global Revisions Thesis Statement/Argument Revision Makes a clear and wellsupported argument about the source and its context. Makes an argument about the source and its context that is supported by some evidence. Makes an argument about the source and its context that is weak, unclear, or largely unsupported. Does not make an argument about the source. Goes beyond the familiar and reveals individual thought and analysis of the material. Explains these revelations. Suggests individual insight but does not expand. May summarize but not analyze some of the material. Favors summary or description over analysis. Contains too few quotes, or too many. Only uses summary or description. Thoroughly answers the questions, backed up with specific and properly cited evidence from at least three of the primary sources. Describes the primary source well, and answers the questions with some properly cited evidence. Describes the primary source incompletely, demonstrating some misunderstanding. May contain evidence from only one source. Does not describe the source or answer the questions from the prompt. Proper sentence and paragraph structure. No grammatical or spelling errors. Avoids clichés and informal language. Shows evidence of proofreading and full and correct citations. Good sentence and paragraph structure. Few grammatical or spelling errors. No major writing errors. Citations are given correctly throughout. Poor sentence and paragraph structure. Some grammatical or spelling errors. Some major writing errors. May reveal some minor problems with citation. Inadequate sentence and paragraph structure. Numerous grammatical or spelling errors. Major writing errors. (25 points) Analysis/Insight Revision (25 points) Content and Evidence Revision Essay contains answers to the questions posed in the prompt, backed up with specific evidence from the sources. (35 points) Local Revisions Writing/Mechanics Proper sentence and paragraph structure. No grammatical or spelling errors. Avoids clichés and informal language (contractions, cursing, overt moralizing.) Shows evidence of proofreading and includes full and correct citations. (15 points)