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How does it work? Select the purchase option. Using their rights to Indian labor and produce as a base, encomenderos created networks of enterprises in almost all branches of economic activity that were locally profitable, though livestock and agriculture always occupied a prominent place.
They did their best to make coherent economic units of these varied holdings, each part supplementing and balancing the others. The whole estate was under unified management, since the majordomos were responsible both for official encomienda activities and for enterprises of a more private nature, as were the estancieros at a lower level. The tendency to build complete, diversified estates, then, was already observable at a time when the Spanish sector of the economy was generally booming under the influence of newly opened mines and the demand of the nascent Spanish towns for all kinds of supplies.
This fact throws a new light on the self-sufficiency so characteristic of the later hacienda, which has often been explained very largely as a response to depressed conditions.
Much the same type of structure appeared earlier in response to social and economic forces of quite a different kind. The vision of society which the Spaniards brought with them to America included a clear picture of the attributes of a great estate and its lord. Aside from his mansion and numerous servants, guests, and vassals, he must have land, cattle, and horses, and various agricultural enterprises from wheat farms to vegetable gardens.
From the early Conquest period, this ideal constituted a fixed pattern of ambitions for successful Spaniards. First the encomenderos and then the hacendados exerted themselves to carry it out to the last detail, even where local conditions rendered it economically irrational. But by and large the great estate scheme was economically rational as well as socially desirable.
Everything the estates produced was wanted in the cities; taken together these products helped create a Spanish as opposed to an Indian economy. The desire to assemble a complete set of varied holdings was not inconsistent with a thoroughly commercial orientation. Self-sufficiency is very hard to distinguish from the diversification or integration of a commercial enterprise, and the complete refusal to specialize, which may strike us today as amateurish, characterized not only the lords of estates, but colonial merchants as well.
In an age of commercial rather than industrial capitalism, there was little thought of expansion and usually little justification for it. The constant effort of the most acute commercial minds was to monopolize, drive out competition, and sell at high prices to the severely limited market. The hacienda would carry the tendencies toward self-sufficiency and monopoly to their logical conclusion, without ever giving up a strong element of market orientation.
Monopolizing the land discouraged the rise of competitors in the immediate neighborhood. If the hacendado actually developed production on the whole vast expanse, however, he would have flooded the city market, as sometimes happened in any case. It seems probable that the size of urban markets and the amount of silver available were the real factors limiting hacienda production at any given time.
The most market-oriented establishments in the Spanish Indies, the sugar plantations, still did not typically become specialized, but raised much of their own maize, wheat, and cattle. A drive toward self-sufficiency, diversification, or completeness—for the three cannot be separated—was a constant in Spanish colonial estates from the early sixteenth century onward.
All in all, the replacement of the encomienda by the hacienda involved only a shift in emphasis, whatever the factual details of institutional development. A semigovernmental domain, serving as the basis of a private economic unit, gave way to a private estate with many characteristics of a government.
There was also a significant movement into the countryside, but both institutions stretched from the city into the country, and indeed their main function was to connect the two worlds. After the city itself, the estate was the most powerful instrument of Hispanization in Spanish American culture. During the early period, when Indian structures were relatively intact and Spanish cities relatively small, the estate could emphasize government and tribute collection over active supervision.
As Indian structures deteriorated and the cities grew, supervision increased; the city came into the country. The perspective here suggested makes it possible to treat the evolution of the great estate as one single line of development underneath the changing forms on the institutional surface. To judge from certain portions of their works, scholars like Zavala, Miranda, and Gibson have long had a good subjective understanding of this deep continuity, but they have never chosen to give it methodical expression.
The standard works still tend to speak in terms of three successive systems: encomienda, repartimiento, and hacienda. The internal history of each system is worked out separate from the others; each new stage is seen as requiring a much greater transformation than was in fact the case. But looking beneath the level of formal institutions and administrative policy, the evolution could be expressed in simplest terms as follows.
At all times there were private Spanish holdings in the countryside with workers attached to them, and these holdings always drew temporary labor from the Indian villages. From the Conquest period until the present century, the constant trend was for the Spanish properties and their permanent crews to grow, while the Indian villages and their lands and production shrank. It now begins to appear that Spanish agricultural enterprises, generally speaking, never achieved complete reliance on a resident working force during the colonial period.
Scholars familiar with conditions in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries may have projected into the colonial period the solid, sedentary force of debt peons thought to characterize more recent times. The villagers came to work on the estancias and later haciendas, first through encomienda obligations, then through the mechanism of the repartimiento, 31 and finally through individual arrangements, but they were always the same people doing the same things.
In the Conquest period the greatest landowners were the encomenderos, whose estancias formed an integral if informal part of their estates. Yet from the very beginning there were other Spaniards with similar holdings, both small and large. Encomendero families or their legal successors seem often to have retained, consolidated, and even expanded their properties, which may have had a special aura of permanence and nobility. But the lands of the non-encomenderos increased even more, until the countryside contained several times the number of great estates present in the Conquest period.
This development paralleled the great expansion of the Spanish or broadly speaking urban sector. The organization and social composition of those who owned and managed the estate hardly changed from the age of the encomienda to the hacienda of the eighteenth century. Giving importance to these basic social and economic continuities does not require one to believe that the encomienda as an institution involved landholding, or that it evolved directly into the hacienda.
As far as agriculture and landownership are concerned, the technical antecedent of the hacienda was the estancia rather than the encomienda. One may retain a narrowly legal definition of the encomienda as the right to enjoy labor and tribute and. At the same time, it is quite possible to appreciate that the Spaniards tried to use each legal framework in turn as the basis of the same kind of great estate.
Ideally this would have combined jurisdiction over vassals with vast possessions of land and stock. In the encomienda only the governmental aspect was formally expressed, and the rest was left to the spontaneous action of socioeconomic ambitions and opportunities. The hacienda was just the opposite, giving legal status only to landownership and leaving the jurisdictional aspects to de facto patterns.
This basic, essentially unitary social institution, the great estate, was quite fixed as to ideal attributes and social organization, and it maintained constant its function as intermediary between the growing Spanish towns and the receding Indian villages.
It evolved along two simple lines— constant rise in the legal ownership of land and change in the balance of the labor force, as permanent workers increased and temporary workers decreased.
Let us view the great estate, therefore, as a basic social pattern with certain permanent attributes and a few recognized principles of evolution. By so doing, we can hope to understand the increasingly complex picture that is emerging as research proceeds to areas other than Mexico. Each region in the Spanish Indies seems to have produced a different form of the encomienda and a different timetable for its downfall.
The same is true for the repartimiento or mita. Some areas suffered great population loss, while others did not; still others had little or no population to start with. Some estates arose from holdings associated with encomiendas, others from lands accumulated by administrative and judicial officials, others from humble wheat farms.
From region to region the hacienda veered toward pastoralism, cereal production, sugar growing, and other activities. But we can cope with all these variations if we understand them as retarding, hastening, or modifying an institution that was ultimately embedded in Spanish social practice and had its own coherence, its own dynamics of development. One may conclude that the rise of the hacienda was essentially a development rather than a struggle.
The evolution of the great estate responded to such realities as the size of cities and Spanish populations, the degree of acculturation among the Indians, and the nature of Spanish society in early modern times. The royal policy of discouraging an independent aristocracy and the humanitarian campaigns to protect the Indians deserve intensive study in themselves, but the struggles over these matters cannot be said to have greatly affected the evolution of the great estate.
During the first years of the colonial era , Native Peruvians died by the hundreds of thousands. The owners of the encomiendas were not supposed to ever visit the encomienda lands: this was supposed to cut down on abuses.
The Indigenous people instead brought the tribute to wherever the owner happened to be, generally in the larger cities. The Indigenous people were often forced to walk for days with heavy loads to be delivered to their encomendero. The lands were run by cruel overseers and Native chieftains who often demanded extra tribute themselves, making the lives of the Indigenous people even more miserable.
Priests were supposed to live on the encomienda lands, instructing the Indigenous people in Catholicism, and often these men became defenders of the people they taught, but just as often they committed abuses of their own, living with Native women or demanding tribute of their own. While the conquistadors were wringing every last speck of gold from their miserable subjects, the ghastly reports of abuses piled up in Spain. On the other hand, the crown had made it quite clear that the Indigenous people were not enslaved but Spanish subjects with certain rights, which were being flagrant, systematically, and horrifically violated.
The New Laws were a series of royal ordinances designed to halt the abuses of the encomienda system, particularly in Peru. Native Peruvians were to have their rights as citizens of Spain and could not be forced to work if they did not want to. Reasonable tribute could be collected, but any additional work was to be paid for. Existing encomiendas would pass to the crown upon the death of the encomendero, and no new encomiendas were to be granted. Furthermore, anyone who abused Indigenous people or who had participated in the conquistador civil wars could lose their encomiendas.
The colonial elite was livid with rage when the provisions of the New Laws became known. The encomenderos had lobbied for years for the encomiendas to be made permanent and passable from one generation to another, something the King had always resisted. The New Laws removed all hope of perpetuity being granted.
In Peru, most of the settlers had taken part in the conquistador civil wars and could, therefore, lose their encomiendas immediately. The settlers rallied around Gonzalo Pizarro , one of the leaders of the original conquest of the Inca Empire and brother of Francisco Pizarro.
The King of Spain almost lost Peru during these conquistador uprisings. Gonzalo Pizarro's supporters had urged him to declare himself King of Peru, but he refused: had he done so, Peru might have successfully split from Spain years early. Charles V felt it prudent to suspend or repeal the most hated aspects of the New Laws. The spread of Catholicism was the stated goal of the Spanish conquest of the New World, but the Spanish also wanted to profit from their new territories.
Once the treasure of Native civilizations was looted, colonists turned to mining and plantation farming, and needed to find cheap labor to maximize their profits. In her early instructions for the governance of the colonies, Queen Isabella I of Spain required all Native people to pay tribute to the crown or its representatives.
Out of this directive, the encomienda system was born. In this system, encomendero s were awarded the control of all of the Native people who lived in a defined territory, usually in recognition of special services to the crown. He could demand tribute in the form of crops or currency. He could force them to construct forts and towns, or work the mines or plantations. He could sexually exploit the women, and even sell the people who worked for him to other encomenderos.
In time, the horrors of life on the encomiendas would spark outrage back in Spain. He was rewarded with an encomienda for his services to the crown. Over time, he grew horrified by the outrageous abuse suffered by Native people under the encomienda system, and in , he gave up his own encomienda and began a campaign to end the system.
This illustration comes from a book he published in This particular illustration centers the suffering of women and children, and hints at the sexual exploitation Native women experienced at the hands of their oppressors.
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