Spain ruled its American empire for about three centuries, longer than the United States has existed. It did so through two great viceroyalties at first: New Spain, created in 1535 with its capital at Mexico City, and Peru, created in 1542 with its capital at Lima. More were added in the eighteenth century. A viceroy represented the king, courts called audiencias heard appeals, and the Council of the Indies in Spain wrote laws for lands its members had mostly never seen. Officials had a saying for royal orders they could not carry out: I obey, but I do not comply.
Encomienda and the question of rights
The first conquerors were rewarded with encomiendas. An encomienda was a grant of native labor and tribute to a Spaniard, who in return was supposed to protect the people and teach them Christianity. In practice it often meant overwork, abuse and death. In 1511 a Dominican friar, Antonio de Montesinos, preached on Hispaniola that the colonists were in mortal sin for their cruelty and asked whether the native people were not human beings with rational souls. One listener was a young colonist and encomienda holder named Bartolomé de las Casas. He later gave up his grant, became a Dominican himself, and spent fifty years campaigning for indigenous people. His most famous work, A Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies, was written by Bartolomé de las Casas and published in 1552.
The crown listened, partly from conscience and partly to stop conquerors from becoming an independent nobility. The New Laws of 1542 banned enslaving Indians and limited encomiendas, ordering that grants end with the death of their holders. Colonists in Peru rebelled, and the crown softened the laws, but the encomienda slowly faded.
The argument came to a head at the Valladolid debate of 1550 to 1551. The scholar Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda drew on Aristotle's idea of natural slavery, the claim that some people are by nature fit only to be ruled, to argue that war against the native peoples was just. Las Casas answered that they were fully rational, with their own cities, laws and arts, and that, as he put it elsewhere, all the peoples of the world are men. No formal verdict was given. Las Casas was not flawless: he exaggerated death tolls, and early on he suggested bringing enslaved Africans to spare native workers, a view he later bitterly regretted. Still, the debate is an early landmark in the idea that rights belong to all human beings.
Labor, silver and caste
As the encomienda declined, the state organized forced labor directly. In Peru the viceroy Francisco de Toledo adapted the Inca mit'a in the 1570s, and the colonial mita sent highland men to work the silver mines of Potosí. On the haciendas, large rural estates, many workers fell into debt to owners.
Colonial society was ranked. At the top were peninsulares, Spaniards born in Spain, who held most high offices. Below them were criollos, people of Spanish descent born in the Americas, who were often rich but resented being passed over. Then came mestizos of mixed Spanish and indigenous ancestry, indigenous people, Africans and their descendants, and many mixed groups. In the eighteenth century artists produced casta paintings, which sorted families into mixed ancestry categories, each labeled with its own name. Real life was more fluid than the paintings: wealth, dress and reputation could change how a person was classed.
Church and culture
The Catholic Church baptized millions, ran schools and hospitals, and owned great estates. Indigenous people blended Christianity with older beliefs. The Virgin of Guadalupe, said to have appeared to a native man named Juan Diego in 1531, became the emblem of Mexico. In Mexico City the nun Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz wrote some of the finest poetry in the Spanish language, and in her Reply to Sor Filotea of 1691 she defended women's right to study and learn.
Spain's eighteenth century Bourbon reforms raised taxes and tightened control, angering both criollos and indigenous communities. In 1780 a descendant of Inca rulers took the name Túpac Amaru II and led the largest uprising in colonial Andean history. Túpac Amaru II was captured and executed in 1781, but the revolt, which killed tens of thousands on both sides, haunted colonial elites for decades.
Worked example: the silver mountain of Potosí
Potosí sat more than 4,000 meters up in the Andes, below a mountain the Spaniards called the Cerro Rico, the rich hill. By the early 1600s it was one of the largest cities in the Americas, with churches, theaters and gambling houses. Spaniards said of something priceless that it was worth a Potosí. The wealth came from mita workers who descended into narrow shafts by candlelight and carried ore up ladders, and from mercury used to separate the silver, which poisoned workers and refiners. Villages sent men on a rotation that could take them hundreds of kilometers from home, and many families fled their communities to escape it. Seen from Madrid, Potosí was a treasury. Seen from a highland village, it was a draft that took fathers and sons. Asking who paid for a society's wealth, and who enjoyed it, is the question this case teaches.