Showing papers in "Americas in 1983"

A Social History of Black Slaves and Freedmen in Portugal, 1441-1555

Abstract: List of plates List of maps List of tables Preface List of abbreviations Introduction 1. The slave-trade 2. Legal and philosophical justifications of the slave-trade 3. The demography of blacks in Portugal 4. The occupations of slaves 5. The life of the slave 6. Slaves and the law 7. Fugitives, freedom and freedmen 8. Blacks and Christianity 9. Race relations Conclusions Notes Bibliography Glossary Index.

Slavery in a Nonexport Economy: Nineteenth-Century Minas Gerais Revisited

Abstract: HE history of slavery in nineteenth-century Brazil is usually associated with the coffee economy of the centralsouthern region of the country, particularly in the Provinces of Rio de Janeiro, Sao Paulo, and Minas Gerais. In the three decades following 1850 and the closing of the African slave trade, slaves were transferred from the southern and northeastern provinces to the coffee region on such a scale that the three major coffee provinces alone had almost two-thirds of the empire's slave population in the year before abolition. Inside the coffee region itself, a similar movement took place. In the last years of slavery, about 90 percent of the slaves of Sao Paulo lived in the coffee districts and, of those, almost all were employed in the coffee fields. A similar, if less spectacular, trend occurred in Rio de Janeiro Province. For Minas Gerais-which had by far the largest slave population of the empire throughout the century-very little research has been done. While most Mineiro historians seem to have been charmed by the splendor of the golden age, the majority of the historians of slavery in Brazil-Brazilians and Brazilianists-have been content with projecting onto nineteenth-cenltury Minas findings about Sao Paulo and Rio de Janeiro. The main lines of the existing interpretation can be summarized as follows: in the eighteenth century, owing to the gold and diamond rushes, a large contingent of slaves was gathered in Minas Gerais. As the mining

Debt Servitude in Rural Guatemala, 1876-1936

Abstract: R ecent revisionist studies have called into question the role and importance in turn-of-the-century Latin America of debt servitude, long a staple horror of travelers' accounts, novels, and histories. Of the once-fearsome "debt slavery" we are now told: "Most of the new research is concerted in its rejection of debt as a controlling feature of labor."'" Whatever the evidence from other areas, and most of the new work has focused on Peru and northern and central Mexico, this is plainly not true for Mesoamerica. Debt peonage flourished in late nineteenthand early twentieth-century Chiapas, Yucatan, and Guatemala,2 a consequence of rapidly expanding demand for raw materials in the industrial North Atlantic states.3 For the planters of Guatemala, debt servitude proved a stable and effective means to mobilize large numbers of workers at relatively low cost. The state cooperated actively with landowners to force the majority of the indigenous rural population into one

William Pitt’s Settlement at Black River on the Mosquito Shore: A Challenge to Spain in Central America, 1732-87

Abstract: URING the eighteenth century when William Pitt, Earl of Chatham, dominated English political life, a distant relative, also named William Pitt, established an unofficial English colony on the Mosquito Shore of what is now the Caribbean coastline of Honduras. It is unlikely that the two Pitts ever met. Nevertheless, had they done so, they would have discovered a common bond in their desire to undermine Spanish political and economic pretensions in America. Although the Mosquito Shore never attained official colonial status, by 1787 it contained approximately 2,600 British subjects scattered among a dozen small settlements on a 550-mile strip running east along the Honduran coast to Cape Gracias a Dios, and then south and east to Nicaragua's San Juan River. Together with Belize and Jamaica, the Shore formed an important triangular British power base, threatening the weakest link in Spain's New World empire. 1 The small town of Black River, founded by William Pitt in 1732 near Cape Cameron some 80 miles east of the Spanish frontier town of Trujillo, became the Shore's administrative center and a major, frustrating irritant to Spanish colonial administrators when, after 1740, Jamaican governors encouraged Pitt to develop his settlement into an entrep6t for contraband trade and a staging area for attacks on Spain's Central American possessions.

The Church in the Economy of Spanish America: Censos and Depósitos in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries

Abstract: F ROM 1535, when the Spanish crown issued the first of several decrees that prohibited the acquisition of land by any "church, monastery, or ecclesiastic," to the end of the colonial period, the Catholic church, or, more correctly, the various branches and agencies of the Spanish church in America, managed to create a vast material base that ultimately reached into every corner of the newly converted Indies. Apprehensive of clerical power while at the same time convinced that restriction on rights to property would spare the church material concerns that might interfere with its spiritual mission, the crown sporadically opposed, but in the end was unwilling to limit, the income of an institution that provided the fundamental social cohesion in a disparate but pious empire. By the last third of the eighteenth century, however, the various elements that had permitted the church to flourish economicallycrown support, creole largesse, Indian and Black labor-began to come apart. At first, because of the peculiar way in which the church was involved in colonial economy and society, the clergy and creole property owners stood against the crown, an alliance that emerged in the conflict over the expulsion of the Jesuits and the Consolidation of 1804. With independence, however, and the removal of the royal bureaucracy, the victorious but impoverished creoles began to look upon the church for their financial, as much as their spiritual, salvation; the erstwhile ally quickly became the foremost prey. Here again, an important explanation may be found in the peculiar way the church and creole landowners were economically interrelated. The long-term development of ecclesiastical economy in Latin America from the cumulative buildup under crown protection to secularization by the later Bourbons and nineteenth-century liberals forms the political

The Mexican Frontier, 1821–1846: The American Southwest under Mexico

Abstract: The quarter-century of Mexican sovereignty over the land that is today the American Southwest was a period of turmoil and transition. Between 1821 and 1846, Mexico City's ties to the far northern frontier were steadily weakened by domestic political and social strife as well as by foreign economic encroachment. The gradual loss of social and economic links and the eventual lapse of political allegiance is perceptively reinterpreted from the Mexican perspective by Professor Weber. The book is essential reading for all who are interested in the history of the West and the Southwest. The late Ray Allen Billington praised the book as "meticulously prepared, sparklingly written, and brilliantly interpreted. Its perspective will affect all writing on western history for a generation to come."

Nationality, Nationalism, and Supranationalism in the Writings of Simón Bolívar

Abstract: A NY new discussion of more or less any feature of Simon Bolivar's life or thought runs the inevitable risk of covering ground whose most intimate topography has long since been scrutinized with care by generations of scholars. So self-evidently important was the Liberator's career to the course of Latin American history-and no invocation of "structures," or "conjunctures," or even "vast impersonal forces" can really diminish that importance-that legions of historians, good and bad, have devoted themselves with wholehearted passion to the reconstruction of its every detail. In the case of Spanish American writers, patriotic pietas has produced some memorable scholarship as well as examples of exaggerated hero-worship or tedious detallismno. The effort has been prodigious. What, in fact, is there really left to say about Bolivar? The commemoration of his bicentenary offers an opportunity to reexamine some of the main themes of his career and to probe, through a perusal of his copious writings, the more persistent fixed ideas that exercised his extraordinarily vigorous mind. That it was an unusual mind-forcefully imaginative as well as acutely perceptive-is beyond dispute. Daniel O'Leary believed that "the force and activity of his imagination tormented him."' Even Salvador de Madariaga, a by no means sympathetic biographer, admits the quality of "supreme intelligence" to be found in Bolivar's prolific correspondence.2 This is not to say, however, that Bolivar was a systematic thinker: his writings, the great bulk of which were in epistolary form, reflect brilliant intuitions rather than deeply elaborate theoretical constructions. This is certainly the case with his views on the focus of this present essay, incipient nationalism and supranationalism. This topic was,

Power, Class, and Family: Men and Women in the Mexican Elite, 1750-1810*

Abstract: This essay explores the social relations within a landed elite—the dominant class in eighteenth-century Mexico. It aims to outline the nature of the powers that sustained that elite, to determine who directly exercised those powers, and to detail the relations between those pivotal powerholders and the remaining majority of elite class members. My primary concern, then, is the relationship between elite power and class membership. That, in turn, brings atttention to the roles of elite men and women, and the relations between them. Powerholders were usually men while class membership was shared equally between men and women. Was the internal structure of the elite thus based on sexual stratification? Were men able to be powerful and thus wealthy, while women could be wealthy only through subordination to a powerful man? To a great extent, that was true. But the majority of men within the Mexican elite were also wealthy while subordinate to a powerful man. And in a few notable cases, elite women exercised great power while men and women lived as their dependents. Sex was not the only principle of stratification among late colonial Mexican elites. Rather, sexual differentiation interacted with inequalities primarily based on economic power. This essay attempts to study the relations between economic power and sexual differentiation to approach an understanding of life within the late colonial landed elite in Mexico.

The Migration of Canary Islanders to the Americas: An Unbroken Current Since Columbus

Abstract: The Canary archipelago lies off the coast of Africa at 29° N latitude, some 700 nautical miles south of Gibraltar. Its conquest and occupation, including the subjection of the native Guanche population, represented Spain's first overseas venture, a blueprint and precedent for the colonization of America. For nearly a century prior to Columbus the Spanish Crown found here a laboratory and testing ground for colonial administration, including relations with an aboriginal population that offered an irresistible attraction for enslavement and evangelization. The philosophical justification and legitimization of conquest was first faced in the Canaries as a new colonial bureaucracy sought to adapt and refine the medieval, European institutions of government to the new situation. Authority to appoint officials and to distribute land and natives in service was delegated to local governors while exhaustively detailed ordinances formulated by appointed councils (cabildos) regulated every phase of life through a complex structure of regulations, fines and taxes. The model was in place and operative by the time there was need to organize the first Spanish government in the Antilles.

Economic Factors and Stratification in Colonial Spanish America with Special Regard to Elites

Abstract: D URING the past fifteen years, research in colonial Latin American social history has increased dramatically. Since this author's 1967 publication of a short, impressionistic survey of race mixture and acculturation in Latin America, the increase in the use of empirical data to study the evolution of Spanish American social history in particular has been impressive.' Still, historical areas and eras, and a good deal of relevant data, remain untapped. Analytical and theoretical studies have advanced much more slowly than have those employing quantitative data. Marxist and non-Marxist students who have tried to apply crude "feudal," "semifeudal," and "capitalist" models to complex social realities have obstructed rather than facilitated analysis.2 My own study, which said that the regimen de castas resulted from the transfer and imposition of the "hierarchic, estate-based, corporative society of medieval Castile ... upon a multiracial, colonial situation," was criticized by anthropologist John K. Chance and historian William B. Taylor for being simplistic and for underrating the importance of economic factors. In their case study of Oaxaca in 1792, they advocated

Marxism and Anarchism in the Formation of the Mexican Communist Party, 1910-19

Abstract: H TISTORIANS of twentieth-century Mexico generally agree that Marxism contributed little and late to the Mexican workers' movement.' Certain historians explain the limited impact, for example, of the early Mexican Communist party (PCM) by reference to the strength of nationalist ideologies within the Mexican Revolution and the "exotic" and "antinational" character of Marxism.2 Historians of the left comment on the absence of a vigorous Social Democratic tradition and bemoan the deleterious impact of anarchist and libertarian ideology on the Mexican working class, whose capture by bourgeois revolutionary coalitions they attribute to the obfuscatory impact of antistate and antipolitical thought that affected many workers outside formally anarchist circles.3 And although the early history of Mexican communism has been almost totally unexplored, many historians of the Mexican labor movement have commented negatively on the anarchist presence within the PCM during its first ten years. It is this factor that supposedly explains the seriousness and frequency of the theoretical and tactical errors that the party committed in its attempt to confront the emerging national state in the 1920s.4 In fact, this conflation of Social Democratic and anarchist and syndicalist sectors was by no means peculiar to Mexico or to Latin America, as is so often claimed.5