holdout: slavery was not fully abolished
on that Spanish island colony until 1886.THREE WORLDS COLLIDE
Christopher Columbus’s discovery
brought together two of the three
founding peoples of Hispanic America:
Native Americans and Spaniards. In the
decades that followed, Spain built a vast
New World empire, forcing Africans to
work in its colonies as slaves. So entered
the third of the three founding Hispanic-
American peoples.American Empires
Several trends combined to drive
European discovery and conquest of the
Americas. First was the unification of
small European states between the 16th
and 18th centuries into centralized, high-
ly competitive nation-states, including
Spain, Portugal, France, and England
(referred to as Great Britain after the
unification of England and Scotland in
1707). Development of new techniques in
shipbuilding and navigation also helped
foster exploration, as did the desire of
Christians to bring the Gospel to peoples
who had never before heard it. But per-
haps the most powerful motive for explo-
ration was greed: the hunger of
merchants to acquire new wealth and the
longing of monarchs to increase the
power of their kingdoms at the expense of
other states.
Goods from Africa and Asia, such as
gold, silk, and spices, were in great demand
in Europe, but most of the profits from
trade in these commodities went to the
Islamic and Italian middlemen who con-
trolled the trade routes. These established
trade routes led mostly overland and across
the Mediterranean. The easiest way to
circumvent the middlemen was to estab-
lish new trade routes along the African
coast or around the southern tip of Africa.
In the course of seeking one such trade
route—westward from Europe to Asia—
Columbus stumbled on the Americas.
That discovery opened up the possibility
of building vast new empires, realms that
would produce yet more riches for the
profit of the European states that con-
trolled them.By the mid-18th century, the
European powers had established many
thriving colonies in the Americas. Spanish
America encompassed much of what is
now the western and southwestern United
States, all of Mexico, and much of Central
and South America. The most extensive
non-Spanish part of South America was
Brazil, claimed by Portugal. North
America was the site of violent jockeying
for power between France and Britain,
Spain’s rivals in the continent. By 1763,
France had been forced out, with Britain’s
domains extending west from the Atlantic
Ocean to the Mississippi, and south from
Canada to the Gulf of Mexico.
In the West Indies, Spain possessed
Cuba, Puerto Rico, and part of
Hispaniola. Other islands in the West
Indies were under English, French, and
Dutch control.
Despite its vast possessions, Spain
by the 18th century was a declining world
power, its treasury sapped by too many
wars in Europe and abroad defending its
colonial interests. At home, religious per-
secution of Jews and Muslims had driven
merchants of both faiths from the coun-
try, forcing Spaniards to import more
and more of their goods from northern
Europe instead of buying them at home.
The late 18th and 19th centuries saw a
wave of wars of independence in the New
World that neither Spain nor other
European powers were able to resist. By
the 1820s, when most of Spain’s colonies
won their independence, 300 years of
Spanish rule had already begun the
blending of peoples that would character-
ize Hispanic America.The Making of
Hispanic AmericaAccording to some estimates, North and
South America just prior to European
colonization were inhabited by more than
90 million Native Americans: about 10
million north of present-day Mexico; 41
million in Mexico and Central America;
39 million in South America; and nearly
half a million in the Caribbean islands. No
one knows the exact figures, because by
the time Europeans began counting, the
Native American populations had been
decimated. Europeans introduced dis-
eases, such as smallpox and influenza, that
killed off large numbers of Native18 ATLAS OF HISPANIC-AMERICAN HISTORY