FOCUS QUESTIONS

• What was Spain’s policy on indigenous peoples, and how did it affect the colonial
  economy and political confl icts among the crown, the clergy, and the colonial
  elites?


• What factors shaped the evolution of colonial labor systems from encomiendaand
  slavery, to repartimiento or mita, to theoretically free labor or debt servitude?


• What factors shaped the transition from encomiendato the haciendaand mining
  as the bases of Spanish colonial economic activity?


• What were the characteristic features of the colonial economy that identifi ed it as
  capitalist or feudal?


• What were the main features of the Spanish commercial system, and how did its
  structural weaknesses affect smuggling and piracy?

76

4

The Economic Foundations

of Colonial Life

F

ROM THE FIRST DAYS of the Conquest,

the Spanish government faced the

problem of harmonizing the conquis-

tadors’ demand for cheap labor, which they fre-

quently used in a wasteful and destructive manner,

with the crown’s interest in preserving a large,

tribute-paying indigenous population. The fi rst

decades of colonial experience demonstrated that

indigenous peoples, left to the tender mercies of the

colonists, might either become extinct, as actually

happened on the once densely populated island of

Hispaniola, or rise in revolts that could threaten

the very existence of the Spanish Empire in Amer-

ica. The crown naturally regarded these alterna-

tives with distaste.

The crown also feared that Spanish colonists’

monopolistic control of indigenous lands and labor

might lead to the rise of a class of feudal lords who

were independent of royal authority, a development

the Spanish kings were determined to prevent. The

church also had a major interest in this problem.

If the indígenas(indigenous peoples) died out as

a result of Spanish mistreatment, the great task of

saving pagan souls would remain incomplete and

the good name of the church would suffer. Besides,

who then would build churches and monasteries

and support the servants of God in the Indies?

The dispute over indigenous policy imme-

diately assumed the dramatic outward form of

a struggle of ideas. For reasons deeply rooted in

Spain’s medieval past, Spanish ideas about the six-

teenth century were strongly legalistic and scho-

lastic. At a time when scholasticism^1 was dying out

in other Western lands, it retained great vitality in

Spain as a philosophic method and as an instru-

ment for the solution of private and public prob-

lems. The need “to discharge the royal conscience,”

to make the royal actions conform to the natural

and divine law, helps explain Spanish preoccupa-

(^1) A system of theological and philosophical doctrine and
inquiry that predominated in the Middle Ages. It was based
chiefl y on the authority of the church fathers and of Aris-
totle and his commentators.