Now thoroughly updated in this seventh edition, Colonial Latin America is indispensable for students who wish to gain a deeper understanding of the fascinating and often colorful history of the cultures, the people, and the struggles that have played a part in shaping Latin America. I have to give this book a good review because I got an A in Dr.
Johnson was a fasinating storyteller and quite a funny lecturer, and he really knows his stuff. Burkholder Lyman L. Johnson and Publisher Oxford University Press. This particular edition is in a Paperback format. This books publish date is Mar 21, and it has a suggested retail price of It was published by Oxford University Press and has a total of pages in the book.
Mark a. Fordham University. Search for more papers by this author. Burkholder and L. BurkholderLyman L. Crosby, Alfred W. Clendinnen, Inga. Ambivalent Conquests.
To Be a Slave in Brazil, The new edition of this highly acclaimed text has been revised and updated to relect the latest scholarship, with particular emphasis on social and cultural history. It also features a new section. Johnson, Lyman L. Traces the history of South America from preconquest times to the wars of independence in the early nineteenth century and analyzes labor, family life, and social structure during the period. Outstanding treatments of the colonial Iberian world include Mark A.
Create Alert Alert. Share This Paper. Citation Type. Has PDF. Publication Type. More Filters. Colonial identifications for native Americans in the Carolinas, Just a moment while we sign you in to your Goodreads account. The new edition of this highly acclaimed text has been revised and updated to reflect the latest scholarship, with particular emphasis on social and cultural history.
From inside the book. Howev I have to say, they do a very thorough job of discussing the various aspects of the colonial era in Latin America. The suggested reading lists at the end of each chapter have also been thoroughly revised. The new edition of this highly acclaimed text has been revised and updated to reflect the latest scholarship, with particular emphasis on social and c Now in its sixth edition, Colonial Latin America provides a concise study of the history of the Iberian colonies in the New World from their preconquest background to the wars of independence in the early nineteenth century.
Breen, Northwestern University R. The European battle dress, however, bespeaks a very different conception of warfare: practical and deadly. If you need to contact the Course-Notes.
Uh-oh, it looks like your Internet Explorer is out of date. For a better shopping experience, please upgrade now. Javascript is not enabled in your browser. Enabling JavaScript in your browser will allow you to experience all the features of our site. High-quality wool from merino sheep dominated Castile's exports in the mid-fifteenth century and continued to do so for many years.
Vast numbers of sheep held by members of the rnesta, or sheep owner's guild, migrated annually from summer pastures in Aragon to winter forage in Andalusia and Extremadura. Great aristocrats, monasteries, and small private owners sent their sheep on the great walks that traversed Castile, but even more sheep stayed home.
Although restrictions prohibited owners from letting their sheep wander through planted lands, the immense size of the flocks necessarily reduced the amount of land avail- able for agriculture.
The pattern of exporting raw materials wool and importing finished goods textiles was ftrmly established before Henry IV's reign.
Castile lacked a solid industrial base on the eve of empire and failed to develop one in the nex-t three centuries. Engaging in substantial foreign trade joined northern Castilians with mer- chants of Barcelona, Seville, and Lisbon in an international mercantile system. The Portuguese, long involved in international trade, in the second half of the fif- teenth century were exporting slaves, gold, ivory, and sugar brought from Africa and the Madeira Islands as well as salt and other domestic products in exchange for finished goods.
With important bases in Seville and Lisbon, Genoese ftnan- ciers and merchants comprised an influential foreign presence in Iberian com- mercial circles.
Although the amount of regular revenue increased more than tenfold during their reign, it was never enough to support the court, the army, and Ferdinand's foreign ven- tures. Consequently the Crown resorted to borrowing, a recourse that ultimately had disastrous results for the succeeding Habsburg monarchs. The revenue of the Portuguese Crown also rose in the late fifteenth century, but similarly its expenses repeatedly exceeded its normal tax income.
The Iberian world of the late ftfteenth century remained fragmented politi- cally but had become substantially stronger through the union of the crowns of Castile and Aragon and the conquest of Granada. In addition, the forced con- version or exile of non-Christians, the Inquisition's activities against suspected heretics, and the imposition of royal justice had brought a unity to Castile that rivaled that achieved earlier in Portugal.
The Iberian population was expanding as it continued to recover from the ravages of the fourteenth-century Black Death. The African trade and early exploitation of the Atlantic islands was benefit- ing Portugal. And with technological advances in sailing vessels and sailors' increased confidence in their ability to undertake lengthy voyages, the way was opened for the great era of exploration. Yestern Europe and West Africa were situated at the far western boundary of the rich medieval trade routes that distributed the products of the Eastern Hemisphere.
As these commercial links increased in importance at the beginning of the fifteenth century, the economic power of the Islamic Middle East grew rela- tive to both regions.
By the mid-sixteenth century, Portugal's direct entry into both African and Asian trades and Spanish and Portuguese exploration, conquest, and settlement in the Western Hemisphere had transformed these global economic and commercial arrangements. In contrast to the direct colonial rule and substan- tial European immigration imposed by the Iberians on their American colonies, however, most peoples of Africa remained outside of direct European domination into the nineteenth century.
The Portuguese capture of Ceuta across the Strait of Gibraltar in opened the era of exploration, trade, conquest, and settlement for the Iberian kingdoms. The arrival of the Portuguese on the Atlantic coast of sub-Saharan Africa in the fif- teenth century, and the later appearance of other Europeans, initiated what would ultimately become broad changes in the region. Prince Henry, the energetic, ambi- tious, and wealthy younger son of John I of Portugal , promoted the exploration of the West African coast-earning from later generations but not con- temporaries the nickname "the Navigator," despite his personally having sailed no farther than Morocco.
Yestern Sahara. By the late fifteenth century, Portuguese ships had coasted Atlantic Africa and with the permission of native rulers established a small number of forti- fied trading posts. These vulnerable commercial outposts would remain the most common form of European presence for more than three centuries. These fortress warehouses were erected at Sao Jorge da Mina Elmina in and at other coastal sites, and Portuguese reliance on them reflected several realities.
First, with the important exception of the Atlantic islands, the Portuguese gen- erally sought quick profits from trade, avoiding the more expensive and diffi- cult alternative of colonization and the direct control of economic resources in the African interior.
As West African states gained firearms through trade, the ability of the Portuguese and other Europeans to impose their will was further reduced. Consequently, the Portuguese could control the sea, but African kingdoms controlled the land, and native merchants, as a result, largely determined the terms of trade.
And finally, the effects of deadly local diseases, notably malaria, yellow fever, and gastrointestinal maladies, retarded any ambitions of the Portuguese or other Europeans to penetrate permanently the interior of Africa. Yest African tropics within a year and another quarter within the second year. A voyage in to what the English merchants called the "great city of Benin" to purchase pepper and ivory ended in near disaster when a local fever attacked the ship's crew.
In little more than a week, the fever took the lives of the captain, mate, and so many crew members that the survivors could barely pull up the anchor. The lure of direct maritime trade with Asia reduced even more the willingness of the Portuguese court to allocate significant resources to controlling the West African coast. They therefore sought to find profits within existing markets and trade routes.
The richest gold mines were distant from the coast, and West African gold had long been one of the most important products traded north across the Sahara Desert. Portuguese merchants soon gained access to this profitable commod- ity through coastal intermediaries. They also began to trade European goods for slaves, purchasing and exporting about 2, slaves annually from all of Africa between and The Atlantic slave trade eventually came to dom inate relations between Africa and Europe.
For at least a hundred years after first contacts, however, the Portuguese and other important European coastal traders bought and sold relatively small numbers of slaves. In this era, European merchants purchased a range of African goods including cloth, salt, gold, iron, and copper.
They also paid local taxes and generally accepted restrictions imposed by African rulers. Yest Central Africa, vast regions extending from the Senegal River to the southern reaches of Angola, were home to hundreds if not thousands of ethnic groups often separated by language and other cultural differences. Here, numerous rulers of states of varied size competed for power and wealth.
Yest Central Africa. As in contempo- rary Iberia, the local and regional identities-for example, Bambara, Hausa, Jolof, Mandingo, and other ethnicities-dominated. Yest Central African polities were very unlikely to consider themselves "Africans'. W est Africa Throughout the four teenth century, the empire of Mali was the preeminent power in the interior of West Africa.
Mande speakers dominated this empire centered in the lower Gambia and Senegal River areas. The royal cour t and most merchants were Muslims, but much of the countryside remained outside this faith.
The empire's wealth was displayed spectacularly in ruler Mansa Musa's pilgrimage to Mecca. Along his route, which passed through Cairo and other powerful Muslim cities, he distributed so much gold that he drove down the price of this precious metal for years.
The negroes possess some admirable qualities. They are seldom unjust, and have greater abhorrence of injustice than any other people. Their s ultan the Mansa shows no mercy to anyone guilty of the least act of it. There is complete security in the country. Neither travellor [sic nor inhabitant in it has anything to fear from robbers or men of violence. Despite this wealth, Mali declined and eventually fell to the expanding Songhay empire by the middle of the fifteenth century.
Songhay's capital was Gao, but it also controlled the ancient center of learning at Timbuktu. During the reigns of Sunni Ali d. As in Mali, the Songhay rulers in this period of rapid expansion needed to fuse the interests of a largely Muslim merchant class, crucial to the court, and a vast rural population tied to the kings in older royal rites and traditional religious practices.
The political structures of Songhay were more centralized than those of Mali, with most conquered rulers replaced by royal appointees. Renowned for its learning and crafts and the success of its merchants, the Songhay empire had been created militarily, and Askiya Muhammad, its most ambitious conqueror, gained the throne as a usurper whose power rested on the loyalty of the army.
Although gold remained a crucial trade item, Songhay's currency was salt or cowries, mollusk shells used as currency. In addition to gold, the empire's most important trade items were cloth, food, kola nuts, and slaves. Successful military campaigns enlarged the slave population, and these slaves allowed the empire to increase agricultural production.
Visitors were impressed by the intellectual life of the capital Gao and Timbuktu, a manufacturing and commercial center that became the major center of Islamic scholarship in the region. One visitor com- mented on the city's commercial importance: "Here are many shops of craftsmen, especially those who weave linen and cotton cloth.
To this place [Berber mer- chants bring cloth from Europe The inhabitants are exceedingly rich:' Another noted, "In Timbuktu there are numerous judges, doctors and clerics, all receiving good salaries from the king There is a big demand for books in manuscript, imported from Barbary.
More profit is made from the book trade than from any [other line of business. Among them was the kingdom of Benin, located inland from the Niger River Delta. King Oba Ewuare established Benin's commercial and political power in the mid-fifteenth century. This expansion of Benin's political and economic influence reduced the authority of other rulers and chiefs.
Benin City, the capital, was large and prosperous, as early European visitors universally testified. Yest Africa. Its merchants also controlled the regional trade in ivory and pepper. At the time of the first European voyages to West Africa, the Kingdom of Benin was ru led by a dynasty of d ivine kings known as Obas. The king's palace was decorated with numerous brass pl aques depicting court life and historical event s.
This pl aque portrays t he king in the center, supported by two noblemen. The king's regalia, includ ing cora l bead s, rich clot h, and brass penda nt s, demonstrate his wea lth a nd power. Following first contacts with the Portuguese, the Oba sent an emissary to Portugal to learn about these strangers.
This ambassador returned with rich gifts, some Christian missionaries, and a new group of Portuguese merchants. The Oba certainly recognized that European fuearms could prove useful in his wars and perhaps thought the missionaries might also strengthen his power. Political and economic disruptions arising from the growing European presence on the coast and, more importantly, the pressures of the expanding Atlantic slave trade during the eighteenth century would contribute to the eventual decline of Benin.
West Centr al Africa To the southeast, the kingdom of Kongo with its capital of Mbanza Kongo domi- nated a broad region that included numerous linguistically related Bantu ethnic groups. Kongo was a great regional power that faced few local threats to its polit- ical ambitions when the Portuguese appeared in Kongo's ruler, the man- ikongo, controlled numerous tributary states and direct dependencies through a bureaucracy made up mostly of kinsmen.
At the end of the fifteenth century, the kingdom's population of nearly 2. Its economy relied on an important metallurgical sector as well as on highly productive agriculture. The elites perceived the political benefits that relations with the Portuguese might bring. These included desired trade goods, prestige, and enhanced spiritual power. As in Benin, Kongo had a coherent, non-Islamic religious tradition.
Experimentation culminated in with the baptism of the royal heir, Nzinga Mbemba. As Afonso I, he became the man- ikongo in and ruled as a Christian until the s. With the encouragement of the manikongo and his court, Portuguese missionaries pursued conversion across the kingdom and sent many sons of important families to Portugal for instruction in the faith. Many came back fluent in Portuguese as well. Despite this success in inserting Christianity into an African kingdom, Christianity never completely replaced native religious traditions in Kongo.
Instead, the two religious practices melded to produce a unique local Christianity. The need for Portuguese allies is an important explanation for the Kongo elites' willingness to sanction the sale of slaves. Nonetheless, as the Portuguese presence grew and Christianity spread, the Kongo royal court began to lose power relative both to the increasingly aggressive and confident Portuguese and to the kingdom's distant tributaries that now saw the chance to assert their own power.
Central to Kongo's decline was the growing importance of the region's slave trade that connected the kingdom to the Portuguese colony of Brazil with its rap- idly expanding sugar sector. Although the Kongo royal court's interests initially benefited by using some Portuguese auxiliaries in military campaigns, the pre- dictable result was a dramatic increase in the volume of the slave trade.
Warfare became a continuous part of the region's political life as armies made up of Portuguese soldiers and much more numerous native allies campaigned relent- lessly. Each campaign and every victory added to the volume of the slave trade, for Kongo's elite required war captives to exchange with the Portuguese for the goods and missionaries which helped support their political power.
But it was too late. The authority of the manikongo and the power of the capital declined while the slave trade roiled the interior and pro- voked constant warfare. By the end of the sixteenth century, no African state had been more affected by the ar rival of Europeans than Kongo, and nowhere else in Africa had the slave trade become more impor tant.
In these regions of intense contact with Europeans, especially the Portuguese, African peoples incorporated elements of European culture, technology and belief. Scholars refer to these regions as Atlantic Creole cultures. In the Kongo, for exam- ple, evangelization by Por tuguese priests and African conver ts spread Christian belief and practice to areas outside direct control by colonial administrators.
The Portuguese recruited large numbers of native military allies that, in turn, adapted European tactics, weapons and hierarchies. At the same time the Kongo elite as well as rulers of other African allies of the Portuguese sought access to language, religious instruction, and material goods as ways of strengthening their authority and status.
The Kongo and Angola, areas where Portuguese presence was most intense, were centers of Atlantic Creole culture, but the Ndongo and Matamba, more distant from Portuguese settlement, participated in these cultural exchanges as well.
This meant that a large number of slaves carried to the New World had experience with impor- tant elements of European culture, including Christian belief, language, aesthetics and material culture, before entering the colonial orbit.
Once in the colonies, these prior experiences and adaptations facilitated the rapid development of a slave community. Slavery was well established in most of Atlantic Africa centuries before Portugal's seizure of Ceuta. Wealth rested heavily on the possession of slaves across the large empires of West Africa as well as in Benin and other kingdoms. Most slaves were taken in wars and came from distinct ethnic groups with their own religious traditions.
Rulers and other slave owners used this human prop- erty as administrators, soldiers, concubines, domestic labor, field labor, miners, artisans, and in a host of other occupations. Slave owners in sub-Saharan Africa also employed their chattel in a variety of occupations.
Slave laborers, for example, produced agricultural products including millet, cotton, wheat, and rice. In the wester n Sudan, slaves labored in gold mines and, in some desert sites, worked in saltworks.
Slave owners used, sold, or traded the products of slave labor, and r ulers taxed people rather than land, which was held collectively rather than as private property. In the fifteenth century, war, raiding, and kidnapping in sub-Saharan regions enabled slavers to send annually an estimated four to five thousand vic- tims to Islamic regions of North Africa and the Middle East via routes along the East African coast and the Red Sea, and especially across the Sahara Desert.
The Slave Trade The Atlantic slave trade expanded during the initial centur y of contacts between Africans and Europeans and would continue to do so for more than three hundred years. Europe's monetary system and crucial to the growth of markets and Jong-distance commercial operations.
Salt, pepper, ivory, and cloth also proved profitable. Building upon an existing slave trade brought additional profits. A low ratio of people to land in much of West Africa made control over labor a key to wealth. Coupled with extensive political fragmentation that resulted in ample potential slaves located within traveling distance, this low ratio goes far to explain the development of slavery in sub-Saharan Africa.
Slaves were a part of both Mali and Songhay trade and had become important to the West African regional economy as well by the time the Portuguese arrived. Backed by private investors, Portuguese merchants moved slowly down the Atlantic coast of Africa with trading goods that included textiles; copper and brass wristlets and basins; horses, saddles, bridles, and other tack; iron bars; and cowries.
As the fifteenth century progressed, the importance of slaves in this trade increased. By the s, fifteen slaves were traded for one horse, suggesting the expected value of slave labor. Central to this slow expansion was the use of slaves in the labor force of southern Iberia and increasingly in the sugar plantations of the Azores and Sao Tome.
The rapid expansion of sugar agriculture in Brazil would usher in a new era in the slave trade. The slave trade with the Portuguese, and later with other Europeans, was initially constrained along the West African coast by the decisions of local political authorities.
Slavery had an important place in the Islamic world, but rulers' restrictions on who could be enslaved limited the scale of the trade.
The result was that slaves flowed only slowly from the states of the interior to the coast and the Atlantic trade. Similarly, Benin controlled the growth in slave exports, even prohibiting the export of male slaves for centuries. Nevertheless, Benin utilized slaves in its own economy and allowed Europeans to import slaves into the kingdom from other African regions as an ongoing part of their trade.
Although local rulers were eventually unable to control the mounting flow of slaves crossing the Atlantic, there is no doubt that the Portuguese lacked the military power to overcome their objections during the century that fol- lowed first contacts.
Despite the pervasiveness of slavery across the region and despite slavery's economic and cultural importance prior to the arrival of the Portuguese, the his- toric place of slavery in Africa was essentially different from the form of slavery later developed by Europeans in their American colonies.
First and foremost, the Atlantic slave trade extracted a volume of slaves never previously witnessed in Africa. As this trade matured, numbers spiraled upward until reaching their peak in the eighteenth century.
Second, the distance that the trade carried its victims also necessarily altered the meaning of slavery, tearing families, ethnicities, and even polities apart by forcefully removing men and women from their native regions, cultures, languages, and religions and relocating them to the distant Americas. Finally, the Atlantic slave trade worsened the status of slaves relative to African customs, reducing legal protections and increasing the power of owners over their slaves.
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