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The Colonial Economy: The Transfer of the European System of Production to New Spain and Peru

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 February 2009

Carlos Sempat Assadourian
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Extract

Research into the economic structures established by Spain in the Indies, based on sources which allow at least an approximate reconstruction of reality, dates only from the last thirty or forty years. The advances made, despite the uncertainty still surrounding certain aspects of the processes of production, appropriation and distribution, enable us to abandon traditional conceptions of this economy as isolated, closed, rustic in its technology, archaic or ‘feudal’.

The dominant profile of the economic structures imposed on New Spain and Peru, especially during a fifty-year cycle the nature and timing of which will be discussed below, was shaped by the transfer of the European system of mercantile production, in terms of both its technological bases and the legal structure and methods of calculation which governed its reproduction. Thus, we retain the adjective ‘colonial’ for this modern economy, in as much as its development was conditioned by the need to maximise shipments of silver to the metropolis and, in pursuit of this aim, the indigenous population was subjected to severe oppression. Likewise, the metropolis maintained a high level of control over the internal economic dynamic of these regions and a monopoly of their foreign trade.

Towards the mid-sixteenth century the expression ‘conquista y población’ was frequently invoked to characterise Spain's dominion in the New World. ‘Conquista’ referred to the initial feat of arms, by which the papal right to grant lands to the Catholic monarchs (hitherto only valid within the order of European nations) was imposed on the indigenous kingdoms and domains of the Indies.

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of Latin American Studies , Volume 24 , Supplement S1 , March 1992 , pp. 55 - 68
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1992

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References

1 The Europeans also tried to bring about changes in the usage of maize: in Potosí, for example, about 1555, there is evidence of plans to impose the ‘industrial’ milling of maize in the preparation of chicha.

2 Recall Adam Smith's reflection that at that time muslins and other kinds of cottons made in the East Indies were greatly admired in Europe, but ‘in this continent there were no factories producing that fibre’.

3 In the early stages of colonisation, the Indians sowed wheat using their traditional methods. Fray Toribio de Motolinia, pointing out that the Indians of New Spain obtained extraordinary yields of 1:150, in terms of the ratio of sowing to harvest, commented: ‘they make ridges in the soil and scrape with their hands and put in two or three grains and inch by inch they do the same again, and later springs up a field full of stalks and ears’.

4 Indigenous agriculture had achieved an exceptional development of the association and rotation of crops.

5 In 1553 the indigenous cabildo of Tlaxcala bought 30 oxen, ploughshares and ploughs to work its extensive uncultivated lands, but it also hired a Spaniard ‘so that the work was well done’.

6 From the following commentary by Father Cobo, it can be deduced that in the Andean area around 1650 the cbaquitaclla was still more frequently used than the plough: the Indians ‘are becoming keen’ on oxen, ‘to the extent that in many areas they have abandoned their former use of so much tedious hard labour to plough the land by hand, and plough it now with oxen’.