1 - The late seventeenth-century crises

Summary

By the seventeenth century the Kingdom or Auditencia of Quito had emerged from over a century of turmoil. It took the Inca state (Tawan-tinsuyu) until 1495 to conquer the region's six independent indigenous chiefdoms. Only forty years later the conquering forces of Sebastián de Belalcázar, Diego de Almagro, Juan de Salinas, and Gonzalo Pizarro established Spanish rule in the region. After founding a town council (cabildo) in their provincial capital of Quito in 1534, the new invaders started distributing the Amerindian settlements into grants of encomienda. This system allowed the Europeans to collect taxes and labor from the Andeans, in return for military protection and religious instruction. A generation of civil war among the conquistadors and periodic indigenous rebellions, however, impeded the consolidation of Spanish rule. It was not until 1563 that the crown established a high court (audiencia) in the city of Quito to head the newly implanted imperial bureaucracy. By then a stable Spanish society had formed in the region, laying the foundations for a vibrant regional economy based on the production of woolen textiles.

The Kingdom of Quito's textile sector was linked to a series of prosperous, integrated regional economies extending throughout the Viceroyalty of Peru during the seventeenth century. While silver mining connected the Spanish Andean colonies and the international economy, smaller regional markets supplied foodstuffs, wine and liquor, cloth, and labor for the burgeoning mining zones. Quito's textile economy played an important role among these evolving secondary regional markets for most of the seventeenth century.