Slavery in colonial Spanish America

and the Siete Partidas Slavery in Spain traces back to the times of the Greeks, Phoenicians and Romans. Slavery was cross-cultural and multi-ethnic, and had an important role in the development of European economies such as Spain. The Romans extensively utilized slaves according to the Code of Justinian. Following the rise of Christianity, Christians were in theory barred from enslaving their fellow Christians, but the practice persisted. With the rise of Islam, and the conquest of most of the Iberian peninsula in the eighth century, slavery declined in the remaining Christian kingdoms of Iberia. At the formation of Al-Andalus, Muslims were prohibited from enslaving other Muslims, but non-Muslim Spanish and Eastern European slaves were traded by Muslims and local Jewish merchants. Mozarabs and Jews were allowed to remain and retain their slaves if they paid a head tax for themselves and half-value for the slaves, but non-Muslims were prohibited from holding Muslim slaves. If one of their slaves converted to Islam, they were required to sell the slave to a Muslim. Mozarabs were later, by the 9th and 10th centuries, permitted to purchase new non-Muslim slaves via the peninsula's established slave trade. During the reconquista, Christian Spain sought to retake territory lost to Muslims, leading to changing norms regarding slavery. Though enslavement of Christians was originally permitted, the Christian kingdoms gradually ceased this practice between the 8th and 11th centuries, limiting their pool of slaves to Al-Andalusian Muslims. The enslavement of conquered Muslims was supposedly justified on the basis of conversion and acculturation, but Muslim captives were often offered back to their families and communities for cash payments (rescate). The thirteenth-century code of law, the Siete Partidas of Alfonso X of Castile (1252–1284), specified slaves' good treatment by their masters, and who could be enslaved: those who were captured in just war; offspring of an enslaved mother; those who voluntarily sold themselves into slavery. This was generally domestic slavery and was a temporary condition for members of outgroups. The Siete Partidas described slavery as "the basest and most wretched condition into which anyone could fall because man, who is the freest noble of all God's creatures, becomes thereby in the power of another, who can do with him what he wishes as with any property, whether living or dead." As the Spanish (Castilians) and Portuguese expanded overseas, they conquered and occupied Atlantic islands off the north coast of Africa—including the Canary Islands, São Tomé and Madeira—where they introduced sugar plantations. In the Canary Islands, the Spanish practised the encomienda system, a type of forced labor modelled on the reconquista practice of awarding Muslim laborers to Christian victors. The Spanish treated the Canarian natives, known as the Guanches, as pagans, but several attempts were made by the Catholic Church to prevent their enslavement and defend the freedom of evangelized Canarians. In these colonies off the coast of Africa, the Spanish engaged in sugar cane production following the model of Mediterranean production. The sugar complex consisted of slave labor for cultivation and processing, with the sugar mill (ingenio) and equipment established with significant investor capital. When plantation slavery was established in Spanish America and Brazil, they replicated the elements of the complex in the New World on a much larger scale. In the Spanish colonies of the New World, the encomienda system would also be revived to enslave indigenous peoples. This system became much more widespread following the Spanish contact and conquests in Mexico and Peru, but the precedents had been set prior to 1492, in the Canary Islands. ==Indigenous slavery==

punished by their owner in 1844 Following the arrival of Christopher Columbus in 1492, European enslavement of Indigenous Americans began with the Spanish colonization of the Caribbean. Initially, slavery represented a means by which the conquistadors mobilized native labor, with disastrous effects on the population. Unlike the Portuguese Crown's support for the slave trade in Africa, los Reyes Católicos () opposed the enslavement of the native peoples in the newly conquered lands on religious grounds, so when Columbus returned with indigenous slaves, they ordered the survivors to be returned to their homelands. In 1500, the Catholic Monarchs issued a decree that specifically forbade the enslavement of indigenous people, but they allowed three exceptions which were freely abused by colonial Spanish authorities: slaves taken in "just wars"; those purchased from other indigenous people; or those from groups alleged to practice cannibalism (such as the Kalinago). The escapees were later rounded up and enslaved. In 1508, Juan Ponce de León and the Spaniards arrived on the island of Borikén (Puerto Rico), and enslaved Taíno tribes on the island, forcing them to work in the gold mines and in the construction of forts. In 1511, the Taíno in Puerto Rico allied with the Kalinago to resist the enslavement and abuse by Ponce de Léon, triggering the Spanish–Taíno War of San Juan–Borikén. of 1542 Members of the Spanish religious and legal professions were especially vocal in opposing the enslavement of native peoples. The first speech in the Americas for the universality of human rights and against the abuses of slavery was given on Hispaniola, a mere nineteen years after the first contact. In New Spain, succeeding governors were appointed and recalled, often because of stories about their treatment of native populations. Encomienda system Despite religious objections, forced labor continued and was ultimately institutionalized as the encomienda system during the first decade of the 16th century. This system was established on the island of Hispaniola by Nicolás de Ovando, the third governor of the Spanish colony, in 1502. Some women and some indigenous elites—such as Maria Jaramillo, the daughter of Marina and conqueror Juan Jaramillo—were also owners of such contracts (or encomenderos). The Caribbean system was based on similar grants given during the Reconquista in Spain. By 1508, the original Taíno population of 400,000 or more had been reduced to around 60,000. Historian Andrés Reséndez at the University of California, Davis suggests that even though disease was a factor, the indigenous population of Hispaniola would have rebounded the same way Europeans did following the Black Death if it were not for the constant enslavement they were subject to. He says that "among these human factors, slavery was the major killer" of Hispaniola's population, and that "between 1492 and 1550, a nexus of slavery, overwork and famine killed more natives in the Caribbean than smallpox, influenza or malaria". By 1521, the islands of the northern Caribbean were largely depopulated. In New Spain, the collapse of indigenous populations from conquest and disease led to a shift from the encomienda system to pueblos de indios. The encomienda system no longer made economic sense as there were not enough Amerindians remaining. This shift consolidated labor in a process known as reducciones, and replaced encomienda with "two parallel yet separate 'republics'": the república de españoles "included Spaniards, who lived in Spanish cities and obeyed Spanish law"; and the república de indios "included natives, who resided in native communities, where native law and native authorities (as long as they did not contradict Spanish norms) prevailed". In most of the Spanish domains acquired in the 16th century, the encomienda phenomenon lasted only a few decades. In Peru and New Spain, the encomienda institution lasted much longer. In Chiloé Archipelago in southern Chile, where the abuse of encomienda had led to the Huilliche uprising of 1712, the encomienda was only abolished in 1782. Repartimiento system After passage of the New Laws in 1542, also known as the New Laws of the Indies for the Good Treatment and Preservation of the Indians, the Spanish greatly restricted the power of the encomienda system, which had allowed abuse by holders of the labor grants (encomenderos), and officially abolished the enslavement of the native population except in certain circumstances. The encomienda system was replaced by the repartimiento system. The replacement of encomienda with repartimiento caused considerable anger among the conquistadors, who had expected to hold their grants to hold indigenous slaves in perpetuity. The repartimiento system was not considered slavery—since the worker was not owned outright, was free in various respects other than in the dispensation of their labor, and the work was intermittent—but it created slavery-like conditions in certain areas, most notoriously in silver mines of the 16th century Viceroyalty of Peru under the draft labor system known as mita, which was partially influenced by a similar draft labor system the Inca used also called ''mit'a''. The repartimiento system allocated a number of Native workers to the Crown who were then assigned to work for Spanish settlers for a set period of time, usually several weeks, through a local Crown official. This was intended to reduce the abuses associated with encomienda. In practice, the process was overseen by a conquistador, or later a Spanish settler or official, and applications for laborers were submitted to a district magistrate or special judge. Legally, these systems were not allowed to interfere with the Amerindians' own survival, with only 7-10% of the indigenous adult male population allowed to be assigned at any time. The Amerindians were paid wages, which they could then use to pay tribute to the Crown. Native men, working around three to four weeks a year, could also be allocated to public works such as harvests, mines, and infrastructure. Mining, specifically, was a concern for the Crown as well as the Peruvian viceroy. While there were attempts to guard against overwork, abuses of power and high quotas set by mine owners continued, leading to both depopulation and the system of indigenous men buying themselves out of the labor draft by paying their own curacas or employers. Enslavement of rebels Despite the abolition of the encomienda system, indigenous people who rebelled against the Spanish could still be enslaved. Following the Mixtón War (1540–42) in northwest Mexico, many indigenous slaves were captured and relocated. The statutes of 1573, within the "Ordinances Concerning Discoveries", forbade unauthorized operations against independent Indian peoples. It required appointment of a protector de indios, an ecclesiastical representative who acted as the protector of the Indians and represented them in formal litigation. Reinstatement of slavery for Mapuche rebels King Philip III inherited a difficult situation in colonial Chile, where the Arauco War raged and the local Mapuche succeeded in razing seven Spanish cities (1598–1604). An estimate by Alonso González de Nájera put the toll at 3000 Spanish settlers killed and 500 Spanish women taken into captivity by Mapuche. In retaliation, the proscription against enslaving Indians captured in war was lifted by Philip in 1608. Spanish settlers in Chiloé Archipelago abused the decree to launch slave raids against groups such as the Chono people of northwestern Patagonia, who had never been under Spanish rule and never rebelled. The Real Audiencia of Santiago said in the 1650s that Mapuche slavery was one of the reasons for the constant state of war between the Spanish and the Mapuche. Enslavement of Mapuches "caught in war" was abolished in 1683 after decades of legal attempts by the Spanish Crown to suppress it. This trade in slaves was new: prior to the arrival of Europeans, tribes in eastern North America did not view slaves as commodities that could be bought and sold freely. Anthropologist David Graeber suggests that debt and the threat of violence made this sort of transformation of human beings into commodities possible. Tribes like the Yamasee raided for slaves in order to pay back the debt they owed to European traders for finished goods. This in turn created a demand for guns and ammunition, which further indebted the slave-raiding tribes and created a vicious cycle. Slave-raiding also led to constant wars between tribes, and eventually destroyed or threatened to destroy most peoples in the vicinity of the colonies. ==Black slavery==

. The Spaniards are accompanied by native porters, La Malinche, and a black man (holding the horse). Codex Azcatitlan. When Spain first enslaved Native Americans on Hispaniola, and then replaced them with captive Africans, it established slave labor as the basis for colonial sugar production. Europeans believed that Africans had developed immunities to European diseases, and would not be as susceptible to illness as the Native Americans because they had not been exposed to the pathogens yet. With the increased dependency on enslaved Africans and with the Spanish crown opposed to the enslavement of indigenous people, except in the case of rebellion, slavery became associated with race and racial hierarchy, with Europeans hardening their concepts of racial ideologies. These were buttressed by prior ideologies of differentiation as that of the limpieza de sangre (en: purity of blood), which in Spain referred to individuals without the perceived taint of Jewish or Muslim ancestry. In Spanish America, purity of blood came to mean a person free of any African ancestry. In the vocabulary of the time, each enslaved African who arrived at the Americas was called "Pieza de Indias" (en: a piece of the Indies). The crown issued licenses or "asientos" to merchants, regulating the trade in slaves. During the 16th century, the Spanish colonies were the most important customers of the Atlantic slave trade, purchasing thousands of slaves directly from the Portuguese, but other European nations soon dwarfed these numbers when their demand for enslaved workers began to drive the slave market to unprecedented levels. In 1524, the Spanish began to import African slaves to what is now the country of Honduras—about half of them coming from other colonies such as from the Dominican Republic, Cuba, and Cartagena, Colombia, as well as directly from African regions such as Senegambia and Central Africa. In Spanish Florida and farther north, the first African slaves arrived in 1526 with Lucas Vázquez de Ayllón's establishment of San Miguel de Gualdape on the current Georgia coast. They rebelled and lived with indigenous people, destroying the colony in less than two months. More slaves arrived in Florida in 1539 with Hernando de Soto, and in 1565 with the founding of St. Augustine, Florida. and it became a place of refuge for slaves fleeing the Thirteen Colonies. By the 1530s there were large amounts of black African slaves in the recently conquered Inca capital of Cusco as attested by Diego de Almagro departing this city with about 100 black Africans for Chile in 1535. By 1570, the colonists in Puerto Rico found the gold mines were depleted, relegating the island to a garrison for passing ships. The cultivation of crops such as tobacco, cotton, cocoa, and ginger became increasingly important to the economy. With rising demand for sugar on the international market, major planters increased their labour-intensive cultivation and processing of sugar cane. Sugar plantations supplanted mining as Puerto Rico's main industry and kept demand high for African slavery. Cuba developed two distinct but interrelated sources of sugar production using enslaved labor, which converged at the end of the eighteenth century. The first of these sectors was urban and was directed in large measure by the needs of the Spanish colonial state, reaching its height in the 1760s. As a result, Thomas Kitchin reported in 1778 that "about 52,000 slaves" were being brought from Africa to the West Indies by Europeans, with approximately 4,000 being brought by the Spanish. The second sector, which flourished after 1790, was rural and was directed by private planters involved in the production of export agricultural commodities. After 1763, the scale and urgency of defense projects led the state to deploy many of its enslaved workers in ways that foreshadowed the intense work regimes on sugar plantations in the nineteenth century. Another important group of workers enslaved by the Spanish colonial state in the late eighteenth century were the king's laborers, who worked on the city's fortifications. After 1784, Spain provided five ways by which slaves could obtain freedom. Under "El Código Negro", a slave could buy his freedom, in the event that his master was willing to sell, by paying the price sought in installments. Slaves were allowed to earn money during their spare time by working as shoemakers, cleaning clothes, or selling the produce they grew on their own plots of land. For the freedom of their newborn child, not yet baptized, they paid half the going price for a baptized child. Conditions for black slaves Enslaved Africans were sent to work in the gold mines, or in the island's ginger and sugar fields. The slaves who worked on sugar plantations and in sugar mills were subject to some of the harshest conditions. The field work was rigorous manual labour which the slaves began at an early age. The work days lasted between 16 and 21 hours a day during harvest and processing, including cultivating and cutting the crops, hauling wagons, and processing sugarcane with dangerous machinery. Others were given more space—allowed to live, for instance, with their families in huts, with a small patch of earth for farming, on their masters' lands—but were still subjected to harsh treatment. The slaves had little choice but to adapt. Many converted to Christianity and were given their masters' surnames. Hanging was a common punishment for rebellion. For example, in Mexico City in 1537, a number of blacks were accused of rebellion and executed in the main plaza (zócalo) by hanging. African slaves were also legally branded with a hot iron on the forehead, which prevented their escape, "theft", or any lawsuits which might challenge their captivity. The colonists continued this branding practice for more than 250 years. Those slaves who escaped to freedom often formed autonomous communities with local indigenous groups, known as Maroons. Women and girls were also subject to sexual abuse, since most colonists arriving in the New World were men and there was a shortage of women. The death toll for African slaves was often high, requiring the planters to replace slaves who died under the harsh regime. According to Montejo, masters wanted to pair strong and large-built black men with healthy black women. He described slaves being placed in the barracoons and forced to have sex, to provide new "breed stock" from their children, who would sell for around 500 pesos. Montejo said that sometimes, if the overseers did not like the quality of children, they separated the parents and sent the mother back to working in the fields. The slaveowners did not protest against all the measures of the codex, many of which they argued were already common practices. They objected to efforts to set limits on their ability to apply physical punishment. For instance, the Black Codex limited whippings to 25 and required the whippings "not to cause serious bruises or bleeding". The slave-owners thought that the slaves would interpret these limits as weaknesses, ultimately leading to resistance. Another contested issue was the work hours that were restricted "from sunrise to sunset"; plantation owners responded by explaining that cutting and processing of cane needed 20-hour days during the harvest season. == Fugitive slaves in Spanish territories==

Since 1623, the official Spanish policy had been that all slaves who touched Spanish soil and asked for refuge could become free Spanish citizens, and would be assisted in establishing their own workshops if they had a trade or given a grant of land to cultivate if they were farmers. In exchange they would be required to convert to Catholicism and serve for a number of years in the Spanish militia. Most were settled in a community called Gracia Real de Santa Teresa de Mose, the first settlement of free Africans in North America. The enslaved African Francisco Menéndez escaped from South Carolina and traveled to St. Augustine, Florida, where he became the leader of the settlers at Mose and commander of the black militia company there from 1726 until sometime after 1742. Since 1687, numerous African slaves who escaped from slavery in the Thirteen Colonies to Spanish Florida to take advantage of the policy. Many slaves also fled from Spanish colonies to nearby indigenous communities. In 1771, Governor of Florida John Moultrie wrote to the Board of Trade, "It has been a practice for a good while past, for negroes to run away from their Masters, and get into the Indian towns, from whence it proved very difficult to get them back." After the American Revolutionary War, slaves from the state of Georgia and the Low Country of South Carolina also escaped to Florida. The U.S. Army led increasingly frequent incursions into Spanish territory, including the 1817–1818 campaign by Andrew Jackson that became known as the First Seminole War. The United States afterwards effectively controlled East Florida (from the Atlantic to the Appalachicola River). According to Secretary of State John Quincy Adams, the US had to take action there because Florida had become "a derelict open to the occupancy of every enemy, civilized or savage, of the United States, and serving no other earthly purpose than as a post of annoyance to them.". ==Ending of slavery==

Support for abolitionism rose in Great Britain and elsewhere in Europe. Slavery in France's Caribbean colonies was abolished by Revolutionary decree in 1794, (slavery in Metropolitan France was abolished in 1315 by Louis X) but was restored under Napoleon I in 1802. Slaves in Saint-Domingue revolted in response and became independent following a brutal conflict. The victorious former slaves founded the republic of Haiti in 1804. As emancipation became more of a concrete reality, the slaves' concept of freedom changed. No longer did they seek to overthrow the whites and re-establish carbon-copy African societies as they had done during the earlier rebellions; the vast majority of slaves were creole, native born where they lived, and envisaged their freedom within the established framework of the existing society. The Spanish American wars of independence emancipated most of the overseas territories of Spain; in the Americas, various nations emerged from these wars. The wars were influenced by the ideas of the Age of Enlightenment and economic affairs, which also led to the reduction and ending of feudalism. For example, in Mexico on 6 December 1810, Miguel Hidalgo, leader of the independence movement, issued a decree abolishing slavery, threatening those who did not comply with death. In South America, Simon Bolivar abolished slavery in the lands that he liberated. There was also significant resistance to abolition—some countries, including Peru and Ecuador, reintroduced slavery for some time after achieving independence. The Assembly of Year XIII (1813) of the United Provinces of the Río de la Plata declared the freedom of wombs. It did not end slavery completely, but emancipated the children of slaves. Many slaves gained emancipation by joining the armies, either against royalists during the War of Independence, or during the later Civil Wars. The Argentine Confederation ended slavery definitely with the sanction of the Argentine Constitution of 1853. In the treaty of 1814, King Ferdinand VII of Spain promised to consider means for abolishing the Atlantic slave trade. In the treaty of September 23, 1817, with Great Britain, the Spanish Crown said that "having never lost sight of a matter so interesting to him and being desirous of hastening the moment of its attainment, he has determined to co-operate with His Britannic Majesty in adopting the cause of humanity". The king bound himself "that the slave trade will be abolished in all the dominions of Spain, May 30, 1820, and that after that date it shall not be lawful for any subject of the crown of Spain to buy slaves or carry on the slave trade upon any part of the coast of Africa". The date of final suppression was October 30. The subjects of the king of Spain were forbidden to carry slaves for anyone outside the Spanish dominions, or to use the flag to cover such dealings. On March 22, 1873, slavery was legally abolished in Puerto Rico but slaves were not emancipated; they had to buy their own freedom, at whatever price was set by their last masters. They were also required to work for another three years for their former masters, for other colonists interested in their services, or for the state in order to pay some compensation. Between 1527 and 1873, slaves in Puerto Rico had carried out more than twenty revolts. Slavery in Cuba was abolished by Spanish royal decree on October 7, 1886. == Asian indenture ==

As early as the 17th century, Chinese laborers were imported into European colonies to serve as cheap labor. Cuba became a major destination for such labor. In 1817 and 1835, Spain signed treaties with the United Kingdom which, in theory, made the Atlantic slave trade illegal. Spain did not enforce the ban until the mid-1860s, but these treaties increased the cost of slavery in the colonies significantly. Following the Haitian Revolution, Cuban planters also feared uprisings from large numbers of blacks on the island, and began to look for more non-African sources of labor. In the 30 years until 1874, an estimated 125,000 to 150,000 coolies were transported to Cuba to work, often on the same ships used in the Atlantic slave trade. Portuguese Macau was the center of coolie indenture: it was described as "the only real business" in Macao from 1848 to 1873, generating enormous profits for the Portuguese until it was banned due to pressure from the British government. The journey to the Americas, often known as the Pacific Passage, was risky, with high death rates. From 1847 to 1859, the average mortality rate for coolies aboard ships to Cuba was 15.2%. , where many Chinese labourers were shipped to foreign lands The trade flourished from 1847 to 1854 without incident, until reports began to surface of the mistreatment of the workers in Cuba and Peru. As the British government had political and legal responsibility for many of the ports involved – including Amoy – such ports were immediately closed. Despite these closures, the trade simply shifted to the more accommodating port within the Portuguese enclave of Macau. In Cuba, the centuries-old colonial government was powerful because the planters were willing to cede some of their power in exchange for maintaining their cheap sources of labor, with all the privilege and wealth such labor provided. This meant the Cuban colonial government allowed the exploitation of Chinese laborers to occur in order to retain its power. In both Spanish America, the Chinese were considered "white", in that they could not be enslaved and were entitled to certain rights and privileges not afforded to their African neighbors. The Spanish Monarchy had, in 1672, officially granted Asians the status of free vassals to the king, analogous to that of the indigenous people born in the Spanish Empire. Social attitudes to the Chinese were also more positive than to Africans in Spanish America, and now Peru, but the law tended to favor employers in disputes, meaning Chinese laborers' rights were often denied them. An 1860 decree in Cuba meant that coolies had to sign a new contract of indenture within two months of their prior contract expiring, or else leave the island or submit to forced public labor. Because few could afford home, this ensured they would be forced into further indenture. The coolies who worked on the sugar plantations in Cuba and in the guano beds of the Chincha Islands ('the islands of Hell') of Peru were treated especially brutally. 75% of the Chinese coolies in Cuba died before fulfilling their contracts. By 1870, labour contractors called enganchadores were used to manage and negotiate the contracts for coolies in organised labour squads called cuadrillas. The enganchador would act as a negotiator and manager for his cuadrillas, obtaining salary advances from planters, issuing tools, arranging food and accommodation, and assuming responsibility for the workers' behavior and performance. The enganchador had flexibility in the length of the coolies' recontract. The coolies were also able to negotiate their wages and sometimes even had the upper hand as the employer had to yield to market forces. New contracts often lasted only a year or two, with many signing for as three to six months. Salaries were also greater than the 4 pesos in the original contracts, and often significantly so. By 1874—after reports of abuse had become widespread—rising international pressure from China, America and the UK meant that the Portuguese closed their trade in coolies from Macao, shutting off a key source of indentured workers for Cuba and Peru. ==See also==