worldhistory
European empires built new societies, not just ruled old ones
Native depopulation,
mercantilism
Conquest was gendered: alliance-making, elite intermarriage, sexual coercion
Mexico & Peru (Aztec & Inca lands)
Early 1500s conquest by 1600: cities, universities, cathedrals, bureaucracy, global trade
Economy: commercial agriculture + silver / gold mining
Labor: Native coercion, encomienda, 17th hacienda
low wages, taxes, debt peonage
Top strata: Spaniards / creoles
tensions: peninsulares & creoles
Women: barred from office yet guardians of “limpieza de sangre” and dynastic legitimacy
Mestizaje & Indigenous Continuities
Skewed sex ratios, boom of mestizo / mestiza
dozens of labeled castas
Some mobility: educated / wealthy Natives, counted as mestizo, fortunate mestizos
Indigenous burdens: tribute, relocation (reducciones), women legally infantilized
Continuities: markets, foods, saint-deity syncretism
Colonies (Brazil & the Caribbean)
Weak pre-conquest states; sugar for export replaces mining wealth
Mediterranean tech + European capital, Atlantic plantation complex
Arguably first mass industry for global markets
hallmark: massive slave labor
80% of Africans in the Atlantic trade sent to Brazil / Caribbean
societies become heavily African-descended
Brazil & Caribbean / British North America
Iberian America: many recognized mixed groups
color as a sliding scale shaped by class, some could pass as white
More urban niches and manumission opportunities than in North America
British colonies: sharper racial binaries
little acceptance of mixed categories
slavery self-reproducing by around 1750