Race and Colonialism in the Americas

In the period immediately preceding New World exploration and conquest, the two major powers in that enterprise—Portugal and Spain—were involved in a process that would shape the European conception of people with dark skin; whether African or Native American, this conception would be applied to the advantage of Europeans.

After the centuries-long presence of the Moors, or Muslim North Africans, in Iberia (the peninsula occupied by Spain and Portugal), the Christian Iberians adopted the Muslim view of sub-Saharan Africans. As the Portuguese and Spanish transitioned from warring with the Moors to colonizing the New World, they transferred this Muslim-influenced conception of blackness to the Americas. Most importantly, the connection between having black skin and being a slave became more common not only in Iberia but throughout Europe.

The development of this idea accelerated as the Portuguese, in an effort to find an all-water route to India, established trade relations with peoples along the west coast of Africa. Informed by their interaction with the Moors, the Portuguese saw the West Africans' religion and appearance as reasons for their inferiority. Though it would take decades for slavery and the slave trade to emerge, the Portuguese became the main purveyors of the racial ideology upon which both New World colonization and slavery were based.

Prior to the arrival of Christopher Columbus (1451–1506) in the New World, notions of differences among groups of people—and their implications for who could be enslaved—were based on a combination of religion, law, and historical examples. First and foremost, the Bible was filled with references to slaves and slavery. The entire Old Testament, in fact, granted tacit justification for the legality of human bondage, provided it conformed to certain religious precepts. As the Portuguese sailed around the west coast of Africa, encountering more and more people with black skin, Europeans turned to the biblical passage involving the curse of Ham, the son of Noah (Gen. 9:20-27). They argued that black Africans were descended from the accursed Ham and thereby subject to eternal slavery. Europeans also melded the story of Ham with the tradition that blacks were descendents of Cain, who had been cursed by God.

Similarly, the New Testament, particularly the letters of Paul, reveals a certain recognition of slavery as a legitimate human institution. By echoing what the ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle (384–322 b.c.e.) called "natural slavery"—or the belief that some people were actually meant to be slaves by their nature—the Bible became a commonly cited justification for enslaving both Native Americans and Africans during the colonization of the Americas. Nevertheless, although the Spaniards used the concept of natural slavery as a means of justifying the subordination of Indians, they did not conceive the Indians as "natural slaves" before they developed a need for their labor, and views of Indians were far from uniform at the time.

Though the Spanish would have to determine how the indigenous peoples of the Americas fit within this system of whiteness and blackness, they and the Portuguese were not strangers to Africans. In fact, both nations enslaved Africans on the Iberian Peninsula throughout the sixteenth century, producing African populations of 5 to 10 percent in the major Iberian cities. As a result of this familiarity with dark-skinned people, both the Spanish and Portuguese would turn to Africans as potential slaves during their colonization enterprise in the New World.

Northern Europeans were also familiar with slavery. Although England, France, and the Netherlands were beginning to enhance personal freedoms and celebrate political liberty as a national characteristic that set them apart from the Portuguese and Spanish, they still condoned forms of bondage akin to slavery in the early modern era. Customary forms of servitude fit this mold, particularly in the authority that masters were accorded to circumscribe their servants' lives. Combined with the growing sentiment across the continent that blackness equaled slavery, Europeans began arguing that slavery actually ameliorated the inferior natural status of Africans and other dark-skinned peoples. The combination of various strands of such ideology provided a potent force in the conquest and eventual colonial reordering of the Americas.

THE ROLE OF RACE IN COLONIAL LABOR SYSTEMS

From almost the instant Columbus encountered the Tainos in the Caribbean, Europeans saw Native Americans as an invaluable source of labor. During the decades that followed the planting of Spanish, Portuguese, French, and English colonies, Indians were systematically preyed upon and regularly reduced to a state of slavery. The prevailing belief among Europeans that Native Americans were the lost tribes of Israel produced sufficient justification that enslavement by Christians would bring them back into God's kingdom. However, this was not a justification for enslaving Indians that was widely used by Spaniards. The Spanish monarchy allowed enslavement of Indians only in special conditions such as resistance to evangelization, cannibalism, and sodomy. Their brown skin—deemed problematic by those Europeans well versed in issues related to blackness—suggested that at one time these people had been white, but had become sunburned through many years of hard work. By reorganizing native populations according to what they believed was their God-favored social organization, Europeans rationalized the enslavement of Indians.

The enslavement of Indians, however, did not come without controversy, even among Europeans. The issue was particularly complicated within the Spanish Empire. The Spanish monarchs, Ferdinand (1452–1516) and Isabella (1451–1504), for example, evidenced their concern with the legality of Indian slavery when they drafted a letter to Pedro de Torres in Seville in 1500 ordering the release of the Indians in his custody and their return to the Americas. Even so, Indians continued to be enslaved during the first half-century of the Spanish conquest, especially in peripheral zones, where the practice was justified as a natural outgrowth of an ongoing "just war." Between 1515 and 1542, historians estimate that as many as 200,000 Indians were captured in what is now Nicaragua and sold into slavery in the West Indies.

In 1542, however, the Council of the Indies issued the famous New Laws, which were designed to end indigenous slavery. The New Laws provided several imperial protections to Indians, but they did not signify a departure from the idea that Indians were, and should be, bound laborers. In Peru, Indian labor was extracted through the mita, a compulsory, forced rotational labor draft that was used primarily in silver mines. To the north, Spanish authorities continued to countenance the encomienda system, which had been formalized in the Laws of Burgos (1512–1513). An encomienda was a grant to an individual (the encomendero) of the right to the labor of a group of Indians in exchange for the promise to protect the Indians and see to their conversion to Christianity.

Abuses in the encomienda system had been evident from the beginning, and famous defenders of native rights, such as the Spanish Dominican missionary Bartolomé de las Casas (1474–1566), attacked the system vigorously. The New Laws attempted to rein in the prerogative power of encomenderos as part of their effort to address the catastrophic demographic losses being suffered by Indians. Labor demands, however, continued to be placed on Indians through the repartimiento, a tribute system that funneled labor to private individuals through government mechanisms. This system, too, was abolished in 1635. Nonetheless, because the system of slavery—itself key in the development of colonies—was predicated on an inflexible belief in the inferiority of Indians, the plight of the indigenous Americans did not improve.

Indian slavery was not confined to the Spanish-American world alone. Virtually every European nation participated in the practice. Almost as quickly as the Portuguese began to establish coastal outposts in Brazil, for example, they began to deal in Indian slaves. As early as April 1503, a fleet returned to Portugal with a cargo of brazilwood and Indian slaves. Since the Portuguese waited several decades to establish permanent settlements, however, it was not until the middle of the sixteenth century that they began to enslave Indians in larger numbers, locally either knocking down brazilwood trees or, increasingly, as laborers on the developing sugar plantations.

Regardless of medieval legacies and flexible notions of human bondage, the enslavement and transportation of African peoples was already commonplace during the sixteenth century among northern and southern Europeans alike. Yet, while every European colonizing nation in America was familiar with racial slavery from the outset, each nation initially relied on either Native Americans or other Europeans as their primary labor force. Every European nation, however, would eventually turn to enslaved Africans as their primary labor force.

By the eighteenth century, although indentured servitude and Indian labor systems continued to operate, racial slavery and labor—especially in the cultivation and production of cash crops and the mining of precious metals—became virtually inseparable notions. How, when, and to what degree this transformation occurred, however, depended upon a number of factors, including European politics, mortality rates among indigenous peoples, the evolution of the transatlantic slave trade, European labor concerns, and even choice.

FROM INDIAN TO AFRICAN

The transition to a labor force predominantly made up of enslaved Africans occurred first in the Iberian-American colonies. This shift represents further evidence of the centrality of servile labor—whether of Indians or of Africans—to the colonizing project of Europeans.

Before 1580, African slaves were rare in the Americas, though they were common in the Atlantic islands—where many were already laboring on sugar plantations—and in Iberian port cities like Lisbon and Seville. During the last third of the sixteenth century, however, there were two important developments that increased the potential supply of African slaves for American markets: a more readily available supply of Africans, and the unification of Spain and Portugal under Philip II (1527–1598) in 1580, which gave Spain access to the Portuguese monopoly of the Atlantic slave trade.

Between 1595 and 1640, more than 268,000 Africans were imported into Spanish colonies, and another 150,000 slaves arrived in Portuguese Brazil. Thus, even the demographic collapse of the indigenous population did not arrest the economic growth of the Americas, as Europeans' racial ideologies could readily justify replacements for the declining numbers of Indian slaves.

The transition to black slavery in Latin America, then, represented a transition from exploiting the labor of Indians to exploiting the labor of Africans. Nonetheless, while enslaved Africans numerically dominated in places like Brazil, Spanish colonists continued to expropriate the labor of Indians in both Mexico and Peru. Mexico's Indian population was particularly large and even began to recover from the devastation wrought during the first 150 years of colonization.

Furthermore, the transition to enslaved Africans represented more than a demographic shift at the beginning of the seventeenth century—it was a cultural transformation as well. During the early part of the sixteenth century, most of the Africans who were transported to Spain's American colonies were actually ladinos, or Africans who were already assimilated into European society and culture by pre-residence on the Iberian Peninsula. By the middle of the sixteenth century, however, bozales, or Africans who have been exposed to neither European culture nor Christianity, were increasingly being shipped to America directly from Africa. In that regard, the nature of the colonial population was significantly transformed once the transatlantic slave trade intensified.

By the middle of the seventeenth century, then, Brazil and several parts of Spanish America were fully committed to the slave labor of Africans. The colonial possessions of other European nations, however, continued to rely on their own distinctive labor systems, primarily indentured servitude. Neither Spain nor Portugal relied on their fellow countrymen as laborers during the colonial period, mainly because of the availability of Indians who could be coerced into work and the possibility of importing African slaves.

After the initial conquest of the indigenous peoples in Spanish and Portuguese America, birth became an increasingly significant factor in determining a person's social status. Limpieza de sangre, or blood purity, had been a crucial issue in fifteenth-century Spain; in particular, not having any Jewish or Muslim ancestors was essential to advancing in Spanish society. Like their concepts of race and slavery, the Spanish transferred their construct of pure blood when they settled the Americas. For example, children of two Spanish parents were infinitely more advantaged than peers who were not so endowed. Mestizos, or children born out of Spanish-Indian relationships, discovered a rigid social stratification that ranked them lower than peninsulares (people born in Spain) and Creoles (people born in the New World, but of "pure" Spanish blood). The corresponding groups in Portuguese America—mamelucos, mestiços, and caboclos—all found themselves limited in their opportunities for social advancement. The dramatic growth in the population of these mixed-raced peoples—as well as those with African heritage—made the sistema de castas (caste system) all the more complex, and yet, even more important for those at the top.

BRITISH NORTH AMERICA

The English, unlike the Spanish, had a profound over-population problem. From the late sixteenth century, English colonizers imagined the colonial enterprise as one that would not only enrich the nation and advance the cause of Protestant Christianity, but would also help rid the land of the idle, underfed, and unemployed masses. England also had little choice but to use European laborers because the West Indies and North America did not possess the high concentrations of native peoples encountered by the Iberians.

The transition to racial slavery for northern Europeans, particularly the English, therefore, amounted to the gradual replacement of European indentured servants with enslaved Africans, especially in plantation agricultural zones, during the second half of the seventeenth century. There were several factors related to supply and demand that coincided to make this possible. North American Indians experienced a dramatic population decline as a consequence of their encounter with Europeans. Although northern Europeans never relied on Indian labor like the Spanish and Portuguese, Indian slaves were nonetheless exploited in small numbers, particularly in the southwestern frontier region.

Indian slavery, however, proved to be an unattractive option in the long run because Indians were relatively scarce in North America even before the English and French arrived. There were probably fewer than two million native inhabitants east of the Mississippi River in 1492, and that number decline to roughly 250,000 in subsequent centuries. Additionally, the people most likely to profit from Indian slavery quickly developed the idea that Indians were poor workers. Thus, the English enslaved indigenous Americans, but only as a secondary or tertiary enterprise and usually as slave traders rather than slave drivers.

The need for labor, enslaved or otherwise, intensified in English North America and the West Indies with the shift to tobacco and sugar cultivation during the seventeenth century. In the West Indies, economic prosperity hinged on sugar agriculture, which began in the 1640s when Barbados experienced an agricultural boom. Tobacco and sugar cultivation subsequently developed in virtually every English, French, and Dutch West Indian colony, bringing African slavery in its wake.

Initially, the northern European colonies in the West Indies were hardscrabble settlements where small planters and their indentured servants cleared the land, cultivated tobacco, and raised livestock for export. In the 1640s, however, with the technological and financial assistance of Dutch traders who had been chased out of Brazil, English planters began to develop sugar plantations. Almost immediately, the sugar economy transformed the island into a profitable enterprise, and within two decades Barbados would be more profitable than all other English colonies combined. Visions of potential riches also attracted immigrants. Between 1640 and 1660 the English West Indies were the most popular destination of English emigrants, free and indentured.

As the European population expanded in the West Indies during the middle decades of the seventeenth century, so too did the enslaved African population. This growth was in part a product of the commercial relationship between primarily English planters and Dutch traders who, in addition to transporting English sugar to European markets, imported African slaves to American plantations. Even more, however, the rise of African slavery in the West Indies was demand driven. Sugar cultivation was dangerous and degrading work that required many more laborers than tobacco. Already by 1660 there were about 25,000 enslaved Africans in Barbados working alongside a roughly equal number of indentured servants and free whites. At the same time, there were probably no more than five thousand additional Africans in all of the other English colonies combined, with Virginians possessing only about one thousand slaves.

Though the English did not develop the same kind of racial stratification system as existed in Iberian America, the presence of a dark-skinned "other" still gave English colonists an economic and social force upon which to grow crops and construct a racially divided society. Even with that and other differences between British and Iberian America, however, one touchstone remained prominent: race informed early colonization, and came to define the very contours of each nation's respective colonies.

By the mid-nineteenth century, both colonialism and slavery were on the wane throughout the Americas. But the oldest tenet of the colonial enterprise—race—remained. Without it, colonialism in the Americas would have been dramatically different.

see also African Slavery in the Americas; Encomienda; Indentured Labor.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

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