THE COLONIAL ECONOMY 87
in contrast to the intensive native digging-stick
agriculture. Second, Spanish agriculture was pre-
dominantly commercial, producing commodities
for sale in local or distant markets, in contrast to
the subsistence character of traditional agriculture.
Through the need to pay tribute and other obliga-
tions in cash, the indigenous farmer came under
increasing pressure to produce for the market. But,
as a rule, the hacendado’s superior resources made
it diffi cult for him to compete except in times of
abundant harvests, and he tended to fall back to
the level of subsistence agriculture, whose meager
yield he sometimes supplemented by labor for the
local hacendado.
Spanish colonial agriculture early produced
wheat on a large scale for sale in urban centers like
Mexico City, Lima, Veracruz, and Cartagena. Maize
was also grown on haciendas for the sizable na-
tive consumers’ market in Mexico City and Lima.
Sugar, like wheat, was one of Europe’s agricultural
gifts to America. Spaniards brought it from the Ca-
nary Islands to Hispaniola, where it soon became
the foundation of the island’s prosperity. By 1550,
more than twenty sugar mills processed cane into
sugar, which was shipped in great quantities to
Spain. “The sugar industry is the principal indus-
try of those islands,” wrote José de Acosta at the
end of the sixteenth century, “such a taste have
men developed for sweets.” From the West Indies,
sugar quickly spread to Mexico and Peru. After
silver mining, sugar refi ning, with its large capital
outlays for equipment and black slaves, was the
largest-scale enterprise in the Indies.
In the irrigated coastal valleys of Peru, wine and
olives, as well as sugar, were produced in quantity.
The silk industry had a brief period of prosperity in
Mexico but soon declined in the face of labor short-
ages and competition from Chinese silk brought in
the Manila galleons from the Philippines to the port
of Acapulco. Spain’s sporadic efforts to discourage
the production of wine, olives, and silk, regarded as
interfering with Spanish exports of the same prod-
ucts, seem to have had little effect. Other products
cultivated by the Spaniards on an extensive plan-
tation basis included tobacco, cacao, and indigo. A
unique Mexican and Central American export, and
highly valued by the European cloth industry, was
cochineal, a blood-red dye made from the dried bod-
ies of insects parasitic on the nopal cactus.
Spain made a major contribution to American
economic life with the introduction of various do-
mestic animals—chickens, mules, horses, cattle,
pigs, and sheep. The mules and horses revolution-
ized transport, gradually eliminating the familiar
spectacle of long lines of native carriers loaded
down with burdens. Horses and mules became
vital to the mining industry for hauling and turn-
ing machinery. Cattle and smaller domesticated
animals greatly enlarged the food resources of the
continent. Meat was indispensable to the mining
industry, for only a meat diet could sustain the
hard work of the miners. “If the mines have been
worked at all,” wrote a Spanish judge in 1606, “it
is thanks to the plentiful and cheap supply of live-
stock.” In addition to meat, cattle provided hides
for export to Spain and other European centers of
leather manufacture, as well as hides and tallow
(used for lighting) for the domestic market, espe-
cially in the mining areas. Sheep raisers found a
large market for their wool in the textile workshops
that arose in many parts of the colonies.
In a densely settled region like central Mex-
ico, the explosive increase of Spanish cattle and
sheep had catastrophic consequences. A horde of
animals swarmed over the land, often invading
not only the land vacated by the dwindling native
population but the reserves of land needed by
their system of fi eld rotation. Cattle trampled the
indigenous crops, causing untold damage; torren-
tial rains caused massive erosion on valley slopes
close-cropped by sheep. By the end of the sixteenth
century, however, the Mexican cattle industry had
become stabilized. Exhaustion of virgin pasture-
lands, mass slaughter of cattle for their hides and
tallow, and offi cial efforts to halt grazing on native
harvest lands had produced a marked reduction in
the herds. The problem further abated in the seven-
teenth century as a result of the cumulative trans-
fer of these lands in the Central Valley to Spaniards
who established haciendas that produced pulque
(a fermented drink very popular with the natives)
and wheat. Gradually, the cattle ranches and sheep
herds moved to new, permanent grazing grounds
in the sparsely settled, semiarid north.