Colonial Societies [2015]

Chapter 11

Colonial So cieties

Gabriel Paquette

The colonial settlements established and developed by European states and their sub-jects in the early modern period were characterized by remarkable heterogeneity, both in their individual composition and when viewed comparatively against one another. In large measure, this heterogeneity emerged from the mixing and melding pell-mell of diverse peoples of varied geographical and cultural provenance. From this chaotic milieu emerged new cultural forms and norms, phenotypes, and identities, which resembled and drew upon the original, pre-contact models while metamorphosing in unprecedented ways. The forging of colonial societies did not involve the mere replica-tion of European societies in the tropics, even if in self-consciously ameliorated form. Hybridity went beyond exchanges of genetic material, diet and customs, but extended to the domain of religion, where syncretic practices often resulted from the collision of belief systems, chiefly through conversion efforts. Also contributing to the divergence of colonial societies from their original models, and from each other, were differences of terrain, climate, disease, and a host of other ecological and epidemiological factors, many of which were unknown in Europe and to which European colonists were com-pelled to adapt. Law and governmental institutions, which often departed radically from European models and norms, also shaped the development of colonial societies.

Any treatment of early modern European colonial societies must begin by drawing strict boundaries. Nominally European enclaves, coastal trading fortresses, territorial toeholds beyond continental Europe and its adjacent islands, proliferated in the late fourteenth century and their numbers exploded in the fifteenth century and thereafter.1 By the early sixteenth century, in part due to navigational advances and auxiliary inno-vations, such as shipboard cannon, they dotted the littorals of Africa and parts of Asia. But rarely did they amount to much more than trading posts with a garrison and a fluid constituency of merchants, artisans, seamen, and administrators. In Asia, for example, the Dutch East India Company (VOC) had 11,000 employees at its zenith (c. 1690), with the lion’s share based on the island of Java. But these employees were dispersed across the Indian and Pacific Oceans. The total number of soldiers, seamen, artisans, and admin-istrators based at the largest fortress, Batavia, was 2,700.2 Of course, these outposts were

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far from transient beachheads. Indeed, they proved pivotal to the processes encapsu-lated by the evocative term ‘proto-globalization’. Sometimes they exerted tremendous influence in the African and Asian societies with which they came into contact, whether through the slave trade or ‘legitimate commerce’.

Yet in spite of their longevity and influence, they were marked by impermanence of a different sort: the absence of government beyond executive fiat; scant cultural or insti-tutional complexity; the presence of few women, children or kinship structures; scarce territorial settlement; and paltry urbanization. Such flux rarely favoured the creation, let alone efflorescence, of colonial societies. These forays and beachheads, even those of long duration, are therefore excluded from this brief survey of early modern European colonial societies. Occasionally, such coastal trading fortresses became the base for future incursions into the interior and the foundation of colonies with more diversified social structures, greater European population, multi-faceted economic activity, elabo-rated customs, and other markers of society. The case of the Dutch in South Africa offers a prime example of such an initially unplanned trajectory. The VOC wished to create a refreshment station to victual passing ships with fruits and vegetables, and not until 1707 were Dutch settlers (freeburghers) designated the sole supplier to Cape Town and the ships which anchored there en route to/from the East.3

Much more frequently, however, Europeans, even where their governments lustily, if naively, laid claim to dominion, remained on the peripheries of larger African and Asian polities. The scope of their activities was limited by the parameters those politi-cal entities permitted them, whether traders, mercenaries, or missionaries. European ascendancy, ephemeral in the most optimal of circumstances, remained largely con-tingent on the acquiescence or collaboration of non-Europeans. Even the Portuguese Estado da ĺndia, in one historian’s phrase, was ‘no more than a collection of territorial niches and mercantile networks, the latter peopled by traders who were often anxious to keep the state at arm’s length’ at the end of the seventeenth century.4 It would have been impossible, of course, for contemporaries to conjecture which of these European nodes were harbingers of fully fledged imperial ventures and would result in the establishment of colonies of settlement instead of remaining stunted trading posts. Nevertheless, this survey confines itself to those places, chiefly in the Americas, where European states, or their agents, came to claim and exercise sovereignty, however shaky, on a grand scale and, furthermore, where complex colonial societies emerged.

The territories claimed by European states in what are now the Americas greatly exceeded their effective dominion, from the beginning until the end of the colonial period. Just after Columbus’s landfall in the Caribbean yet prior to European contact with mainland northern South America, the Iberian Monarchies, Spain and Portugal, divided the territories they believed they would find (but had not yet found) along a meridian 370 leagues (approximately 2,061 kilometres) west of the Cape Verde islands. According to the Treaty of Tordesillas (1494), Spain would exercise sovereignty to the west of that line of demarcation, with Portugal exercising sovereignty over territory to the east of it. After Portugal landed on the eastern coastal fringe of what is now Brazil in 1500, South America became divided between Portugal and Spain. Spain’s claims


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282 Gabriel Paquette

extended to North America, too, but its capacity to exert control over territories north of modern Mexico remained slight.

Other European nations rejected these claims and contested Iberian hegemony. France sponsored settlements in modern-day Canada (particularly Quebec) and also claimed several Caribbean islands, most notably Saint-Domingue. Following the Reformation, the ascendant Protestant powers, England and the Dutch Republic, launched their own imperial ventures in the New World. The more permanent fruits of a century of conflict were, for Britain, a chain a colonies along the eastern seaboard of North America, with population and economic centres in Virginia and Massachusetts, a string of islands in the Caribbean, of which the most important were Jamaica and Barbados, and a foothold on the northern coast of South America (Guyana). As for the Dutch Republic, transient conquests of the northeast of Brazil and settlements in what is now New York State had evaporated by the middle of the seventeenth century, leav-ing it with several Caribbean islands, notably Curaçao, and a South American toehold, Suriname.

By 1700, the outlines of settlement were clearly defined. There was an Ibero-sphere in South America, Meso America, and parts of what is now the North American West. There was an Anglosphere in the eastern fringes of North America, with a further zone of dominance to the north, in modern Canada, shared with France. The circum-Caribbean was a territorial hodgepodge, with France, Spain, Britain, and the Dutch Republic hold-ing a shifting portfolio of islands and mainland footholds. But the grand claims to sov-ereignty could be misleading: before 1750, European territorial settlement in North and South America was largely confined to the littorals and isolated population centres in the interior, usually developed around mines yielding precious metals. Whether due to Amerindian dominance, population scarcity, disease, or the absence of economic incentives, effective dominion eluded Europeans in many of the territories they ruled according to international law.

This chapter begins with an overview of the founding of colonial societies and their subsequent development, focusing on how they emerged from the interaction, often through economic activities, of indigenous peoples, Europeans, and Africans. It then turns to mature colonial societies, with an emphasis on urban planning, civic life, evolving tastes (aesthetic and dietary), and defence. Those communities, often quite significant in scale and scope, which existed outside of the boundaries of the colony, such as refugee slave and pirate societies, are also discussed. The attention of the chapter then shifts to the forced labour regimes which existed in colonial societies. While in important ways colonies resembled (and often replicated) met-ropolitan Europe’s economic activities and labour practices, imperialism gave rise to forms which diverged abruptly from those of Europe, whether judged by their severity, scale, or scope. The chapter concludes with a discussion of the rise of ‘cre-ole consciousness’ which, combined with intensified interference from metropolitan authorities, generated conflicts that contributed to the dissolution of the European empires in the New World at the end of the eighteenth century and the beginning of the nineteenth.


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The Growth of Colonial Societies

The emergence of colonial societies occurred in the crucible of the Atlantic World, first in the Eastern Atlantic archipelagos of the Canary Islands, Madeira, the Azores, São Tomé and Principe, and Cape Verde. Subsequently, colonial societies were established in the Caribbean and the Americas. The island chains of Cape Verde and São Tomé were uninhabited before the arrival of the Portuguese, who brought Africans as slaves from the mainland while also using the islands as a dumping ground for convicts and other ‘undesirables’ in Portugal. The emergent societies were marked by processes of transcul-turation and the emergence of hybrid cultural forms.

In their enclaves dotting the littorals of both Africa and America, however, accul-turation proved crucial to the creation and sustenance of colonial societies. Given the minuscule number of Europeans who faced vast, populous, and powerful African kingdoms, European accommodation was inevitable. Both in America and Africa, the Portuguese relied heavily on what have been termed ‘go-betweens’ (in Brazil) and ‘trans-frontiersmen’ (in Africa). These terms refer to Europeans who crossed frontiers and acculturated to the local dominant culture. In Brazil, European men who ‘went native’ thereafter served as conduits between European and indigenous societies, often facilitating transactions for valuable commodities. In Brazil, such go-betweens were largely responsible for the flourishing of the early brazilwood trade.5 In Senegambia and the Upper Guinea Coast, such lançados were equally vital. Portuguese males—often fugi-tives from the law, religious persecution or creditors—settled, married African women, and raised children, who would come to identify themselves as Portuguese. In Angola, go-betweens, called Quimbares, were equally influential, forming a floating population of Luso-Africans, who occupied the liminal space between European and African societies.

In East Africa, there were efforts to turn conquistas into colonias in the sixteenth cen-tury, but the activities of the Portuguese men who left the confines of the coastal for-tresses were both ad hoc and largely unmonitored. Some of these individuals came to acquire land from various chiefs in the Zambesi, whether by outright purchase or in exchange for military service. These Portuguese men then sought to bolster their pro-prietary claims by seeking the Portuguese crown’s recognition of their land title. The crown complied, but it limited inheritance of the title to three generations and required a small quit-rent in addition to the right to press the owner’s slaves into military service. The name of these estates were prazos da coroa. The prazo holders, however, became fully enmeshed in African society, through intermarriage, dependence on African aux-iliaries for defence, and reliance on tribute from Africans residing in his territories in order to subsist. Over subsequent generations, though clinging tenaciously to the title of prazo holder, they became integrated steadily into African society. Their link to Portugal attenuated precipitously.6 All of these cases gesture at acculturation’s role in the forma-tion of colonial societies, including the obstacle it presented to the coalescence of such societies. Europeans often remained at the margins, unable to press their claims to sov-ereignty over large territorial tracts without intermediaries.


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Unlike in Africa, the arrival of Europeans in the Americas provoked demographic disaster for indigenous societies. Depopulation, and the trauma and dislocation such annihilation brought in its wake, altered the dynamics of the formation of colonial societies. It made ‘conquest’ possible. Long before European colonies were definitively established, the epidemiological impact of cross-cultural contact reverberated through-out the New World. On the eve of Columbus’s voyages of 1492, conservative estimates suggest that there were between 46.8 and 53.8 million inhabitants in the Americas, with the lion’s share in Mexico (34 per cent of the total) and Andean South America (28 per cent).7 The decimation of Amerindian population was wrought by the intro-duction of new diseases which were not necessarily lethal in Europe or Africa, but rav-aged New World peoples without previous exposure, to say nothing of immunity, to them. At least five of these diseases—smallpox, measles, influenza, scarlet fever and yel-low fever—were unknown in the Americas and some medical historians believe that mumps, rubella, pneumonia, anthrax, bubonic plague, malaria, and typhus, too, were introduced by Europeans and Africans. The results of this contact with Old World dis-eases proved catastrophic. By the mid-seventeenth century, the Amerindian population in Spanish America had sunk to between 5 and 10 per cent of levels in 1500 whereas the indigenous population of Brazil stood at no higher than one quarter of its pre-1500 size. In the Caribbean, a miniscule percentage of the original Amerindian population sur-vived. In North America, historians estimate that 90 per cent of Algonquian speakers in Southern New England perished from epidemic disease by 1639.

Beyond violent dispossession (often accompanied by coercive labour practices, discussed subsequently in this chapter) and microbial menace, forces unleashed by European colonization wrought more subtle transformations within Amerindian socie-ties. In Spanish America, the monetization of the economy and privatization of prop-erty (marketization) provoked seismic shifts, most notably by triggering large-scale Amerindian migration to cities, where waged work could be found and onerous tribute avoided.8 In Franco–British North America, the rise of the fur trade ultimately had a deleterious effect on the Iroquois. The lure of the fur hunt disrupted well-entrenched patterns of shifting seasonal activities, particularly agricultural ones, and the division of labour within Iroquois society.

The social composition of the Europeans who populated the peripheries of the New World differed by colony, depending in large measure on the manner in which they were colonized. Almost all European powers sought to lure sturdy labourers, skilled tradesmen, and earnest, God-fearing folk. But lack of interest from prospective colo-nists who met these exalted criteria compelled the chartered companies and other inter-mediaries European states sub-contracted for the purposes of colonization to resort to a less appealing demographic cohort. The Virginia Company, for example, recruited ex-convicts, the poor, decommissioned military veterans, and other perceived unde-sirables. Contracts of indenture were required, both to persuade prospective colonists who could not support themselves financially to cross the Atlantic as well as to secure a semi-stable labour force. These contracts gave the holder full right to labour for a fixed period of time in exchange for subsistence, and sometimes stipulated a land grant at the


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end of the term of service as well. Perhaps 60 per cent of the emigrants to British colonies travelled under some form of labour contract while in some places, like the Chesapeake in the seventeenth century, 75 to 85 per cent of settlers were indentured servants, 40 per cent of whom died before completing their term of service.9

In addition to contracts of indenture, European states (normally via their inter-mediaries and agents) resorted to forced migration to populate their colonies. In the Portuguese empire, for example, degredados (convicts condemned to exile or jail) were dispatched to various colonies. In the late-fifteenth century, 2,000 Jewish children were baptized and transported to São Tomé and the Portuguese government routinely dis-patched orphaned girls to Brazil, to offset the imbalance between men and women and to encourage procreation and hence population growth. At first, Britain resisted shipping convicts to the colonies, but soon came to resemble its rivals. Fifty thousand convicts were transported to its American colonies over the course of the eighteenth century. Many more were bound for the Antipodes before the dawn of the nineteenth century, when Botany Bay, Australia, received its first fleet filled with convicts in 1788.

Viewing the formation of colonial societies through the dual prism of mercantilism and latter concepts of nationalism contributes to distortions regarding the provenance, customs, and identities of the inhabitants. Certainly, there were ‘English’, ‘French’, or ‘Portuguese’ colonies in the sense that more or less well-defined territorial units were claimed by individual European states, which claimed to exercise sovereignty over them against rival contestants. But within those territories, heterogeneity prevailed. Early ‘British’ North America, for example, was inhabited by a ‘mixed multitude’ drawn from many European territories and linguistic–cultural groups. Even those from England fitted no distinct socioeconomic or cultural pattern, reflecting seventeenth-century England’s own diversity. New Netherland, too, was marked by a hybrid population due to ethnic and linguistic diversity. In 1658, there were so many French speakers that offi-cial documents were printed in French as well as in English and Dutch. By 1665, a full quarter of all marriages in the Dutch Church were exogenous ones.10 The polyglot, inter-cultural nature also resulted from the number of territories changing hands as a result of imperial rivalry. St. Croix and St. Lucia, for example, were swapped multiple times as chips in peace negotiations, while Jamaica was seized from Spain by England as part of Cromwell’s mid-seventeenth-century ‘Western Design’. The Dutch conquered and held the northeast of Brazil, as well as Luanda (Angola), for almost three decades in the sev-enteenth century before being dislodged by the Portuguese. In the eighteenth century, great swathes of New France passed from French to British sovereignty as a result of warfare while other morsels, such as Louisiana, came under Spain’s sway as compensa-tion for its ill-fated alliance with France in the Seven Years War. In all of these cases, the conflicts arising from differences in language, customs, and law were legion and the transitions were often protracted and contentious.

Patterns of settlement, and the characteristics of the society which developed after set-tlement, also depended in large measure on the terms and circumstances under which the colony was founded. In Maryland, for example, the charter given by the English crown to Lord Baltimore in 1632 not only presented him with an enormous territory, but


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endowed him with massive, nearly absolute administrative latitude. He was empowered to recruit subjects of his own choosing, which prompted the influx into Maryland of Catholics, then under duress in Britain. Lord Baltimore’s charter was not dissimilar to the instrument of proprietorships, or donatory captaincies, employed in Brazil a cen-tury earlier. Nobles were granted huge tracts of land with unencumbered authority to develop and settle them, though with poor results in most parts of Brazil. In addition to colonies entrusted to a single lord, various European states resorted to chartered companies either to foster or maintain colonies of settlement. In exchange for agree-ing to settle 4,000 French Catholics in Canada within fifteen years, Richelieu made the Compagnie de la Nouvelle-France the seigneur of all lands claimed by France in North America, granting it a monopoly over all trade except fishing. Its first expedition (1628), however, was a failure, leading to other approaches to the peopling of New France.11 The chartered company model would be tried by other powers, including the Dutch, Spanish, and British, to populate overseas territory and generate economic growth with mixed results. The English East India Company, for example, struggled to attract and retain settlers. It was forced to introduce creatively coercive measures in the late seven-teenth century. After 1671, for example, any man seeking a marriage licence in Bombay had to sign an indenture, committing to remain in India for seven years.12 These later developments notwithstanding, it is crucial to remember that at their inception these companies received sizable concessions, however temporally or contractually limited and offset by huge financial risks these ventures involved, which amounted to the exer-cise of sovereignty over enormous territories and across vast distances.

The nature of the economy was perhaps the single greatest factor influencing the development of a colonial society. The colonies experiencing significant population growth were normally organized around extractive industries, whether export-oriented monoculture or mines. New World bullion provided the Spanish monarchy with at least a fifth of its overall revenue and made up most of the value of exports from Spanish America to the Iberian Peninsula in the early seventeenth century. Mineral strikes in Zacatecas (1546) and Guanajuato (1550) in Mexico and in Potosí (1545) in Peru encour-aged the emergence of new population centres, regional markets, and a host of subsidi-ary activities, even though less than 15 per cent of the population was directly involved in mining.13 Gold and diamond strikes in the interior of Brazil after 1695 prompted a mas-sive, swift migration to the region that was soon renamed ‘Minas Gerais’, or the General Mines. Some of this wealth would remain in the densely populated mining towns, such as Vila Rica de Ouro Preto and Mariana, soon bejewelled with lavishly adorned churches in New World Baroque style.

Not all colonies were established for chiefly economic motives, though. The Massachusetts Bay Colony offers a prime example of how religious impulse shaped the settlement and cultural patterns. The Puritans founded this New England colony in the third decade of the seventeenth century as a society to live apart from what they consid-ered the irredeemable corruption of the Old World. Though Puritan efforts to realize their goal of creating an authoritarian theocracy failed, religion remained at the heart of social life, with the congregation forming the centre of the community and the local


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Church imposing doctrine on its members. Puritanical precepts further shaped the col-ony’s social composition, as the stewards of this emergent New England society showed themselves hostile to titles of nobility and the hierarchy of social ranks inherited from Europe.

Regardless of the reasons underpinning their foundation, there were several com-mon constraints on the growth of New World colonies. Slow increase in the size of colonial societies sometimes was attributable to scarce resources. In New Netherland (present-day New York), for example, the colony did not produce enough victuals to feed its inhabitants until 1635, more than a decade after its founding.14 Population was stunted by the skewed sex ratio which prevailed in most newly founded colonies and which persisted in those organized around extractive economies. In the seventeenth century, male immigrants to the Chesapeake colonies outnumbered women three to one. Population growth was hampered also by horrifically high mortality rates. Of the 8,000 men, women, and children brought to Virginia under the Company, a mere 1,218 survived after a few years. In 1622 alone, more than 1,000 perished of disease, starvation or as a result of Native American attacks. In neighbouring Maryland, infant mortality reached 30 per cent while 47 per cent of the population died before reaching the age of twenty.

Eventually, less precarious food supplies, immunity, and the emergence of tobacco—a principal cash crop destined for export—permitted the conditions necessary for demo-graphic stability and growth. Between 1640 and 1670, the total European population in the Chesapeake leaped from 8,000 to 38,500, an annual growth rate of 7.5 per cent.15 There were 74,000 French in the Americas in 1730, six times the number of sixty years earlier. Even in the French Caribbean, settlements became permanent and nuclear families proliferated: between 1665 and 1680, the percentage of free men who supported families rose from 57 per cent to 73 per cent. There was great variation in migration pat-terns across empires, with Britain transporting many more colonists from its shores than Spain. In the first century of British Atlantic colonization, 530,000 emigrants left, amounting to at least twice and perhaps four times as many as forsook peninsular Spain for its New World colonies.16

The experience of women varied enormously across colonial societies, but every-where it was characterized by subordination to men and patriarchal legal and social norms. Whether married or single, women in British America were excluded from the system of private property, the underlying basis of most other forms of political and economic participation. Ironically, and tragically, widowhood provided women with an economic identity, as the law entitled her to one-third of her late husband’s estate.17 In New France, at least in its early decades, there was a dearth of European women, to the extent that the French crown actively intervened, sending 1,000 women to Canada in the 1660s. The absence of many other social institutions, from guilds to associations, combined with the physical isolation of settlers, due to the availability of land, and a self-sufficiency imposed by the absence of markets, contributed to make the role of the familial unit and family life central. Though these circumstances enhanced women’s roles in society in certain respects, it perpetuated other forms of exclusion. Educational


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opportunities were available for some women, as the Ursulines provided children of wealthy families with education, though beyond the reach of most women in New France. In Spanish America, the experience of women differed, though there were numerous analogous exclusions from public life. Marriage was far from universal. Many women did not marry and residency in a convent proved a better option for many. Ten per cent of Lima’s population lived in convents in the early eighteenth century (3,865 women). Not all were nuns, for convents served as temporary residences for women of all ages deemed in need of protection, shelter, and support.

Concubinage also was widespread in Ibero–America, partly because of the ubiquity of relations across lines of class and race, transgressions which the Church refused to countenance legally. Furthermore, the costs, including fees and dowry, associated with formal, legally sanctioned marriage were prohibitive for many, prodding the poor to prefer consensual unions out of wedlock, with couples sharing bed and board. It should be noted that women (as well as men) with social pretensions of any sort did not accept concubinage: it stripped them of honour, status, and respectability. Still, for many women (and men), there were few viable options. As a result, the rate of illegiti-macy was astronomical, even if children were brought up within a de facto nuclear fam-ily: in Lima in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, it hovered between 20 and 40 per cent; in Buenos Aires, it reached 37 per cent; in the Mexican mining town of San Luís de Potosí, it reached 51 per cent. Portuguese America was marked by similar rates of illegitimacy, reaching almost 40 per cent in São Paulo in the mid-eighteenth century. Though sometimes a father was present (if not officially acknowledged), just as often they were not. About one-quarter of households in both Mexico City and São Paulo were female-headed. Unsurprisingly, many illegitimate children were abandoned and were transferred to foundling hospitals, where mortality rates were horrendously high.18

As the preceding discussion of concubinage and legitimacy suggests, colonial authorities often sought to keep individuals of different geographical provenance, ‘race’, or ‘ethnicity’ separated from one another. This effort took several forms. The most sustained segregation initiative was that undertaken by the Spanish to divide their subjects into two ‘republics’: a Republic of the Spaniards, which also included free and enslaved Africans and ethnically mixed castas, and a Republic of Indians. Initially, from the 1530s, Spanish colonizers sought to physically separate the two republics from each other. This policy entailed the forced relocation of Amerindians as part of a pol-icy of reducción or congregación, intended to concentrate sometimes dispersed popu-lations into clearly demarcated (and highly regulated) settlements. In all cases, these communities were situated a fair distance from the towns inhabited by Spaniards. They later became the pool of labour deployed for the extraction of commodities, chiefly sil-ver. Eventually, the notion of the ‘two republics’ was embraced by those who sought to protect Amerindians from the depredations of the conquistadors, and their descend-ants, and to hasten their conversion to Christianity by eliminating purportedly cor-rupting outside influences.

But such efforts to cordon off Amerindians permanently from Spaniards, whether fuelled by exploitative or paternalist ambition, were doomed to fail. Spanish reliance


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on Amerindian artisans, construction workers, domestic servants, and vendors of staple goods necessitated frequent contact and some quarters of certain cities, such as Lima, quickly became multi-ethnic. Nevertheless, Spaniards clung to the legal fiction of the two republics and it permeated many aspects of everyday life. A royal order as late as 1573, for example, declared that no Indian should enter a Spanish city until it was completely built ‘so that when the Indians do see it they are amazed … and they will fear [the Spanish] and will not dare offend them, and they will respect them and wish to have their friendship’.19 Later, the laws separating the two republics were honoured in the breach, particularly in the seventeenth century. In New Spain (Mexico), where schools were established by crown decree for the education of Indian youth, the curricu-lum specified instruction in reading and writing in Spanish, thus recognizing de jure the mixing which existed de facto.

Notwithstanding the strenuous efforts of colonial authorities, romantic relations, many involving various degrees of coercion, quite frequently occurred across ‘ethnic’ or ‘racial’ lines (both remarkably slippery, unstable and perpetually shifting concepts and descriptions in this period). Spanish America offers a clear illustration of these tendencies. Initially, it appears, exogamy was as much official policy as it was de facto practice, at least in part due to the preponderance of vagabond European men and the scarcity of European women. To justify and legitimate this practice, the Spanish crown formally sanctioned inter-ethnic marriage in the Caribbean in 1514. In some cases, mar-riage to women who formed part of the indigenous nobility could bring with it signifi-cant advantages, including power over land and tribute. Elsewhere, such as in South Africa, the shortage of European women led Dutch authorities to remain silent on the consummation of relations and marriages between European men and free black women. Similar patterns can be found across the fringes of Portuguese empire, includ-ing in São Tomé where Portuguese traders and soldiers married African women. The Luso–African progeny described themselves as ‘children of the land’ (filhos da terra). In the early Chesapeake, there was black–white intermarriage in spite of prohibitions against it. Fragmentary evidence suggests that a significant proportion of the children without acknowledged fathers born to white women in seventeenth century Virginia were inter-racial. In short, across European colonial societies, especially in early stages and on the geographical periphery, inter-racial and inter-ethnic unions were the norm and often met with acquiescence, if not grudging approval, from authorities.

In most places, however, such early policies of permissiveness favouring the crea-tion of an organic society, in some form, gave way to proscriptive measures to achieve separation and exclusion. This shift often entailed attempts to curtail inter-ethnic and inter-racial unions. Authorities increasingly sought to ban and punish such unions, often with great ferocity. Soon ancestry became one of the major cleavages in colo-nial society. Intermediate legal categories were created to classify children born from inter-ethnic and inter-racial unions. For example, the child of a Spaniard and an Amerindian was defined as a mestizo; a child whose parents were creole and black was a mulatto; the child of a union between someone of African ancestry and an Amerindian was a zambo. The permutations multiplied, but they were lumped together under the


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collective noun casta, which referred to those of mixed parentage but smacked of ille-gitimacy, or suspicion of it, due to African ancestry. The overall framework is known to historians as the sistema de castas.

Official efforts at categorization of this sort were fraught with ambiguity. There was some ambivalence, too, whether mestizo or mulatto referred exclusively to perceived physical characteristics or features, or if it also incorporated additional behavioural fac-tors, such as judgements concerning the depth of commitment to Christian spiritual-ity and piety. Nevertheless, classification increasingly was based on phenotype, colour specifically, where relative ‘whiteness’ defined one’s place in the social hierarchy, deter-mining access both to education and vocation. Similar racialized taxonomy existed in the Portuguese colonial world, where children of inter-racial unions commonly were marginalized socially and occupationally. Such relationships continued to preoccupy authorities. In 1726, Portuguese King Dom João complained that the inhabitants of the mineral boom region of Minas Gerais ‘are not in the habit of marrying … it is not easy to force them to renounce their black and mulatto concubines and for this reason every family is becoming tainted by the mixture of bloods’.20 Hierarchies of race and class, while bearing important resemblance to and generally reinforcing each other, did not overlap completely. As an historian of colonial Brazil has noted, colonial authorities struggled ‘to reconcile the discrepancy between a society of class and stratification by race’.21

Urbanization and Defence

Though rural societies existed, as in New France, cities were the framework in which colonial societies developed, even those colonies premised on plantation-based econ-omies. The urban spaces of colonial societies were predictably heterogeneous. French colonial cities were notably small and unsophisticated. As late as 1726, Saint-Pierre, Martinique, was the largest French city in the Americas with a mere 8,000 inhabitants (of whom only 2,356 were classified as white). In spite of its diminutive size, Saint-Pierre was 2.5 times as populous as Quebec and Cap Français. Urban planning reflected seventeenth-century French tastes and styles and many cities—Fort Royal, Louisbourg, and later New Orleans among them—were laid out on rectilinear grids by military engi-neers. Most French colonial cities and towns boasted buildings indicative of the Catholic Church’s omnipresent function in social life, including convents, monasteries, schools, hospitals, and poor houses.

Spanish colonial cities could not have been more different than those of New France or the Antilles. In 1600, Mexico City, which had been built atop the ruins of the Aztec capital, had over 100,000 inhabitants, with imposing urban planning characterized by plazas and wide avenues. Spaniards tended to build their residences in the compact urban core, with a central plaza as the city’s indisputable civic centre, ringed by munici-pal and other public buildings. Interestingly, the use of a plaza in Spanish America


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predated the use of such public squares in both Italy or Spain, another indication that New World city planners were not nostalgic imitators of the Old World, but important innovators. In the Americas, most cities adhered to this model of urbanization, whether a new settlement or a city built upon the ruins of indigenous capitals, like Mexico City or Cuzco, formerly the Incan capital. Other cities experienced enormous growth trig-gered by economic stimuli. There were, for example, 120,000 people resident near the cerro rico silver mine of Potosí in 1580. Not all Spanish colonial cities, however, were as populous as these cities. In the Philippines, Manila, itself built on the site of a captured palisades and situated near a flourishing population cluster predating Spanish arrival, possessed a European population of a mere 3,000 in the 1620s.

Portuguese colonial cities originated, by and large, as a fortified port which then expanded into an agricultural hinterland. Given their commercial and military origins, it is hardly surprising that unlike Spanish America, but like Portugal itself, Brazilian cit-ies lacked central squares (praças). Salvador da Bahia, in Brazil’s northeast, and the most important city in Brazil before its gradual eclipse by Rio de Janeiro in the mid-eighteenth century, is a prime example of this tendency. There was frequent interaction between the far from self-sustaining sugar and tobacco plantations, situated in semi-tropical and remarkably fertile Rencôncavo, and the city of Salvador, where tools, supplies, and food were obtained and where the scions of the landed elite occupied the most important civic posts.

Britain’s continental colonies grew at a tremendous pace, with population increasing at 2.6 per cent per year after 1660 and Gross National Production galloping along at 3.2 per cent per year. Cities expanded as a result, particularly in the middle decades of the eighteenth century. On the eve of the revolution, in 1775, Philadelphia boasted a popu-lation of 40,000 and New York 25,000, while burgeoning regional trading centres like Charleston and Newport each had between 9,000 and 12,000 inhabitants.

Colonial cities teemed with associational life and culture, both high and low. Ibero–Atlantic cities were enriched by thriving associations, initially centred on guilds and a spectrum of religious sodalities and brotherhoods, which provided venues for social interaction, medical assistance, and arranged for such end-of-life necessities like funeral services and the execution of wills. In Brazil, they often served as major social welfare providers, of which a notable example was Salvador da Bahia’s elite and omni-present Santa Casa da Misericórdia. But other brotherhoods catered to needs of their members, including those focused on ameliorating the predicament of blacks (enslaved and free) and persons of mixed-race backgrounds, including raising funds to purchase the freedom of kin who remained enslaved. Many brotherhoods did not discriminate on the basis of birth, wealth or social class.22 In British North America, no single pattern for social life took hold. In seventeenth-century Virginia, for example, perhaps due to the relative isolation fostered by plantation life and combined with rather primitive towns, associational life was sluggish and churches failed to pick up the slack. Historians have pointed to the ‘highly materialistic’, ‘competitive’, and ‘exploitative’ ethos that developed in the Chesapeake, perhaps offering a further explanation for the thinness of communal life. New England, by contrast, was characterized by its dense civic life, entwined closely


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with religious establishments, aided undoubtedly by an egalitarian wealth structure reinforced by a cereal agriculture based economy.23

Cities also were home to universities and print culture. Higher education became a hallmark of Spanish America and later of British America. The first university was founded at Santo Domingo in 1538 and several other universities, notably those of Lima and Mexico City, soon followed. There were nineteen universities in Spanish America by 1700. Mexico boasted a printing press by 1539 whereas Lima had one by 1583. Portuguese America, it should be noted, had neither a university nor a printing press until 1808. Those aspiring to a career requiring advanced training were forced to cross the Atlantic to study at the University of Coimbra, or pursue a degree at a university outside of the Lusophone world altogether. In British North America, the first print-ing press was installed in Cambridge, Massachusetts in 1638, while the first universities, Harvard College and William & Mary, were founded in 1636 and 1693, respectively. By the 1720s, at least one newspaper was published in all of the major northern ports and by 1750 some cities had three or even four newspapers. By the 1760s, each colony north of Delaware possessed a university. The British Caribbean, by contrast, never had a uni-versity. In New France, a Jesuit college was founded in the seventeenth century, but there was neither a newspaper nor a printing press while it remained a French colony.

Apart from universities and the printing press, natural sciences and political economy were diffused through institutions resembling the academies and learned societies then coming into existence in Europe. In cities of Spanish America from the mid-eighteenth century, for example, ‘economic and patriotic societies’ and merchant guilds (consula-dos) provided venues for literate exchange and inculcated forms of sociability which we now associate with the Enlightenment.24 More informal access to new ideas in British America was gained through the establishment of public libraries as well as subscription libraries. Benjamin Franklin established the Library Company of Philadelphia in 1731 and it soon had 100 subscribing members, leading Franklin to boast that ‘these libraries have improved the general conversation of Americans, made the common tradesmen and farmers as intelligent as most gentlemen from other countries …’. This model spread and there were at least sixty-four subscription libraries on the eve of the American Revolution.25

Whether situated in cities, hinterlands, or distant peripheries, all colonial societies confronted similar challenges. Faced with enormous differences in climate, flora, and fauna, most early colonists sought to reproduce closely European habits in the New World. Dietary and consumption preferences illustrate this tendency clearly. Spanish settlers, for example, sought to import or grow Old World foods in the Americas, partic-ularly olive oil, wine, and wheat (for bread). Together with breeding European livestock to which they were accustomed (above all, pork and lamb), Spaniards believed that the consumption of such familiar foods would protect them against the hostile climate to which they were not yet inured. Spanish colonists also imported vast quantities of wine across the Atlantic before vineyards were established in Chile, Peru, and Argentina. During the early sixteenth century, all ships leaving Spain for the Americas were man-dated to carry on board animals, plant cuttings, and seeds in an effort to recreate Old


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World agriculture. Not all efforts of this type yielded results, but livestock flourished in this new environment, thus permitting colonists to purchase meat at lower prices than Spaniards could in Madrid. By the end of the sixteenth century, then, colonists were able to supply for themselves the staples which they had previously acquired from Spain. They even engaged in import substitution avant la lettre by replacing olive oil with lard for cooking.26

Preference for the comforts of Old World staples and luxuries, however, did not pre-clude the adoption of New World foods. The embrace of cacao, the chief ingredient of chocolate, suggests the adaptability and expansion of the European palate fairly early in the history of American colonization. Tobacco, which like chocolate, quickly became the rage both in Europe and its colonial societies, provides a second pertinent exam-ple.27 These examples, though, should not disguise the conflicts which arose as a result of efforts by metropolitan authorities to monitor and modify colonial habits of consump-tion. Towards the middle of the eighteenth century, as metropolitan-periphery tensions escalated across the New World, there were attempts by authorities to regulate the con-sumption practices of colonists, including restrictions placed on luxuries, which had no counterpart in the Old World. In Brazil, for example, sumptuary laws were enforced which prohibited colonists from using velvet, gold, silk, or silver in their dress.28 Throughout Ibero–America, such restrictions fell more heavily on free blacks and those of multiracial backgrounds. In British North America, including the Caribbean, colo-nists often emulated everything from metropolitan sartorial style to interior design to alcohol preferences, perhaps in an effort to ‘Anglicize’ their societies. Toward the end of the colonial period (c. 1770s), and only at the end, this tendency gave way to more of a ‘creole’ sensibility: colonists displayed displeasure with the Navigation Acts and other restrictive mercantilist trade measures by rejecting imported tastes and striving to nur-ture a self-consciously distinct American style.

Colonial societies faced numerous security threats, whether from hostile European navies in wartime, unvanquished Amerindians, pirates, or rebellious indentured serv-ants and slaves. Defence and safety therefore were major preoccupations of colonial societies and significant facts in the organization of both economic and social life. Spanish America furnishes perhaps the most complete example of how colonial socie-ties responded to threats, both internal or external. Spanish coastal cities were under constant duress from corsairs, with at least 100 raids recorded by 1585, and subsequently full scale assaults, which sometimes resulted in the temporary capture and sacking of port cities, such as 1668 capture of Portobello, or Havana and Manila in 1762–63. These defeats, however, were the exception, and an extensive network of fortifications, patrols, armed convoys and intelligence collection, which could consume upwards of 60 per cent of the colonial treasury’s total expenditure, as in New Spain (Mexico), in the late sixteenth century were devised to protect against such an occurrence.

Notwithstanding the ubiquity of the threats, there were very few full-time soldiers in Spain’s New World colonies, with most of these on the frontiers, whether northern New Spain, southern Chile, or the interior of modern Argentina (then the Río de la Plata). The Spanish crown relied heavily, therefore, on militias to pick up the slack from as early


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as 1640. At first militia service was limited to whites only, but quickly their ranks were filled with mestizos and free blacks. Though Amerindians were largely excluded from military and militia service, they were incorporated into the auxiliary companies that emerged in the latter phases of the colonial era, especially on the frontier. Spain’s reli-ance on militias would lessen somewhat in the aftermath of the Seven Years War, as pen-insular officers increasingly were brought in. Nevertheless, the number of militiamen far outstripped regulars until the end of the colonial period. Militia service was a defin-ing feature of colonial life for men, affording creoles as well as those of mixed ancestry opportunities for social prestige, reward, and advancement. Status could be enhanced, for example, through the purchase of an officer’s commission. For those in the regular army, only open to white creoles, the benefits were greater still, with the enjoyment of the military fuero (the judicial right for officers, soldiers, and their dependents to be heard by a military rather than civil court) a coveted distinction.29

Societies Beyond the Bounds of Empire

In part, defence was an ongoing preoccupation not only due to international warfare, but because colonial authorities believed they faced threats from an ‘enemy within’, those communities bordering the colony that they could not control. Many Amerindians, however devastated by microbes and violence, remained beyond the grasp of the Spanish state altogether, constituting a society apart never to be absorbed. Even in the late 1700s, independent Native Americans still held effective dominion over at least half of the actual landmass of what is today continental Latin America (from southern Chile to the Mexico’s northern border with the United States). Furthermore, 2.7 million inde-pendent Indians, amounting to more than 20 per cent of the total population of Spanish America, resided within the territory nominally claimed by Spain but independent of Spanish authority. On the peripheries of empire, the situation was even more dra-matic: in Chile, for example, two-thirds of all Amerindians did not recognize Spanish sovereignty as late as 1780. 30 In Comanche country (Comanchería), in what is now the southwestern quadrant of the United States, the Comanches carved out an empire that was larger than Central America and exceeded the amount of European-controlled territory north of the Río Grande River. Their presence effectively precluded Spanish expansion beyond San Antonio and demonstrated, in the words of a recent historian, that ‘the fate of indigenous culture was not necessarily an irreversible slide toward dispossession, depopulation, and cultural declension’.31 In British and French North America, Amerindians remained outside of the bounds of colonial societies while still exercising significant influence over them. The fur trade, for example, locked European and Native Americans into habits of mutual dependency. Europeans often had to accept Amerindian trade protocols, keep prices in check so as not to alienate their trade part-ners, and cultivate alliances in order to trade at all. Furthermore, the Five Nations Iroquois retained both autonomy and sovereignty by maintaining a balance of power


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between the French and British in eastern North America, sometimes through neutral-ity but sometimes through alliance with one of the two powers. As a New Englander remarked, Iroquois delegations were ‘courted and caressed like the potentates of the earth’. This situation would change only after the eclipse of New France in 1763.32

Since the tentacles of the feeble European colonial state could not reach far before the first decades of the eighteenth century, many colonial societies were able to spring up and evolve far from the interference of colonial authorities. On uninhabited islets and marshy estuaries, pirates flourished, especially during the ‘golden age’ of piracy (c. 1650 until 1730), when up to 2,000 roamed and wreaked havoc in the Caribbean. Pirates constructed a multinational, multiracial social order which brazenly defied and delib-erately subverted the concepts of justice, financial reward, and authority prevailing within colonial societies.33 Elsewhere, the cattle ranchers of the rugged interior of the Brazilian northeast (sertão) throve. Their self-sufficiency and geographical isolation put them beyond the colonial state’s reach. In the interior of São Paulo, to the south, set-tlement quickly moved beyond the official bounds of the colony. It was multinational (with Portuguese intermingling with Spaniards, Italians, and Northern Europeans) and multilingual, where língua geral, a mixture of Portuguese and Tupi Guarani, was more commonly spoken than European Portuguese.

Not all slaves remained within the legal bounds of the New World colonies into which they or their African ancestors had been forcibly brought and sold as chat-tel. A small minority, though still a substantial number, of slaves managed to escape captivity and form fugitive communities beyond the grasp of the colonial state. Such self-emancipating slaves were referred to by various names, but the Spanish term cima-rrón or French marron and English maroon, the latter two derived from the Spanish, were the most common terms.34 The communities they forged went by multiple names. In Spanish, such communities were referred to as palenques, manieles, cumbes, or mocambos. In Portuguese, there were four terms to designate such communi-ties: mocambos, ladeiras, magotes, and quilombos. Of these, mocambo was the most com-monly used, taken from a Mbundu word for ‘hideout’.

In Brazil, fugitive slave communities varied widely in population size, from the eleven to 20,000 quilombo of Palmares, located in the remote interior in northeast-ern Brazil, to a few hundred individuals, as in the mocambos of southern Bahia. Most mocambos were situated close to farms and town, but others, like Palmares, were in remote, inaccessible locations. Those closer to colonial settlements were, as a leading historian of Brazilian slavery has noted, ‘often parasitic, based on highway theft, cattle rustling, raiding and extortion’. Though sometimes evolving into agricultural commu-nities, ‘rarely did mocambos become wholly self-sufficient’. Palmares, by far the largest and longest-surviving fugitive slave community, existed for almost the entirety of the seventeenth century and its political organization relied heavily on traditional African forms. Like many quilombos, Palmares was under constant attack before it was over-run and razed. Colonial authorities were rarely content to permit these communities to exist undisturbed, often mounting extermination campaigns against them, relying on special units, headed up by bush-captains (capitães-do-mato) to extirpate fledgling


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communities before they could lay down deep roots.35 Punishments were often ghastly, involving a range of horrific forms of torture, including castration. These punitive campaigns notwithstanding, there were a surprising number of instances across the Americas, notably in Jamaica, in which European colonists were forced to sue for peace with maroon communities and to acknowledge the freedom they had won and the terri-tory they controlled.

Forced Labour Regimes

Over the course of the early modern period, several labour regimes existed simultane-ously and overlapped in colonial societies. While free labour—whether self-supporting artisan, iron master, plantation owner, or yeoman farmer—was most common in some societies, coerced labour predominated in others, particularly those organized around extractive and export-oriented industries, like mining and plantation agriculture. This section focuses on the coerced labour regimes which existed in most colonial societies, often at variance with European practice.

While indentured servitude was an institution that existed in the Old World, its New World guise was significantly harsher, resembling, in some places, chattel slavery. In Barbados, for example, planters ‘quite freely bought, sold, gambled away, mortgaged, taxed as property, and inherited in their wills indentured servants’ before the imple-mentation of a master–servant code in 1661.36 Though not quite so numerous, French indentured servants constituted a majority of French migrants to the Caribbean, with perhaps as many as 30,000 to 40,000 arriving over the course of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Most of these servants, primarily young men between fifteen and thirty years of age, did not intend to settle in the Caribbean permanently, and some contracts of indenture even stipulated that payment for services would take place in France itself, not the Antilles, suggesting the anticipated transient quality of their sojourn.37 These differences aside, indentured servants enjoyed few rights and little recourse from abuse.

In addition to European indentured servants, Europeans’ voracious demand for labour portended the invention of new labour regimes or else the survival, expansion, and perversion of forms of pre-Columbian Amerindian servitude and coerced labour practices. These took several forms. The encomienda system, though derived from Iberian precedent, was recast in Spanish America. It allotted groups of Amerindians to an encomendero, typically a conquistador, who gained control over their labour and purportedly responsibility for their spiritual welfare and protection. In spite of efforts by the Spanish crown to rein them in, notably through the 1542 New Laws, the largest enco-menderos formed what amounted to a colonial aristocracy for the first decades after the conquest of Peru and Mexico: Hernan Cortés, for example, received an encomienda for 115,000 natives, though the average size of an encomienda in the Valley of Mexico aver-aged 6,000 in 1530.


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In the Andes of South America, the coerced labour regime known as the mita was taken from a Quechua word to describe the annual labour service demanded by the Inca and organized by local lords loyal to him. The Spanish continued this practice, though with more exacting brutality, forcing Indians to provide labour on a rotational basis in mines, agriculture, and textile factories. In the mines of Potosí, one-seventh of the adult population was made to work one year out of every seven, which led to devastating population dislocations. The vast majority, around 80 per cent, of labour-ers in the mines of Potosí and Zacatecas at the zenith of their productivity (1550–1650) were indigenous. Some of these indigenous people who toiled in the mines were not mitayos, but rather worked for a wage, and these were known as mingas. Europeans devised other methods of extracting indigenous labour besides the encomienda, mita, and tribute. The Jesuits offer one example. In 1610, the Jesuits moved their operations to Paraguay, where they attracted Amerindians fleeing from inward-moving set-tlers seeking their labour. They sought and received refuge in the Jesuit missions. The Guaraní Indian mission population swelled to 30,000 by 1649 and reached between 80,000 and 120,000 by 1700. In exchange for accepting baptism and observing Catholic rites, the Guaraní received protection to work family plots as well as com-munal fields.

Ready access to Amerindian labour, whether through the encomienda, mita, or other coercive and semi-coercive mechanisms, meant that there was little incentive for the owners of silver mines in Spanish America to purchase African slaves, at least initially. Even in less lucrative and less extractive industries, exploitation of Indian labour was the norm. In Brazil, particularly in the rugged interior and the frontier of European settle-ment, far from the Atlantic-oriented, sugar-producing plantation zones, colonists relied on Indian labour for the cultivation and harvest of basic foodstuffs. Amerindian serv-ants were treated as property, but not evaluated as slaves, as Indian enslavement was nominally illegal, even if their condition differed little from bondage.38

The growth of population, and the emergence of colonial societies, was also linked to export-oriented agriculture. Mounting demand for tobacco, and the success of the crop, helps to explain the influx of settlers into the Chesapeake colonies while European taste for sugar helped to spawn massive plantations in the Caribbean, Brazil, and beyond. In Brazil, the number of sugar mills leaped from sixty in 1570 to 200 by 1610.39 The estab-lishment of large-scale plantations was linked to increasing reliance on African slave labour, though there were other factors which led to the preference for African labour. These factors included special skills which some Africans possessed, such as equestrian prowess or diving ability (for the pearl-fishing industry); emergent European ideologies of race which equated darker phenotypes with debasement; and the colonial state’s abil-ity to control, tax, or generate revenue from the slave trade.40

Regardless of the underlying rationale, the transition from either Amerindian coerced labour or European indentured servants (depending on the empire in ques-tion) to African slave labour occurred at different times, even if most of these systems overlapped and cannot be neatly separated sequentially. The importation of enslaved Africans into Spanish America averaged 1,250 per year in the sixteenth century, almost


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3,000 in the seventeenth, and nearly 6,000 in the eighteenth century. In Brazil, an aver-age of 1,000 enslaved African disembarked in Portuguese territory per year in the six-teenth century. This number swelled to 5,600 in the seventeenth century, and nearly 19,000 in the eighteenth. In Ibero–America, the Society of Jesus was the single largest owner of slaves. In the case of the British Caribbean, the transition to slave labour com-menced in the middle of the seventeenth century. In Barbados, the number of white indentured servants declined from 13,000 to 3,000 between 1650 and 1680 while the enslaved black population grew to three times the size of the total white population by 1700.41 In the French Caribbean, the massive, disproportionate influx of African slaves occurred slightly later. While in 1700 the number of black slaves was just slightly higher than white inhabitants, slaves were four-fifths of the population of the French West Indies by 1730. By 1790, the number of black slaves was ten times the number of white inhabitants.42 On the mainland, the disparity was not as great, but nevertheless slaves comprised one-fifth of Virginia’s population in the first decade of the eighteenth century. Not all slave-dependent agriculture, however, was plantation based. In South Africa, for example, almost one-half of the free male population owned at least one slave in a chiefly agrarian society, meaning that slave-ownership trickled down the social lad-der to small-holders.

Even within the plantation system, the slave experience was quite varied, often shaped significantly by the crop cultivated. Even in Jamaica, an important sugar-producing col-ony, monoculture never prevailed and as late as the 1770s, four out of every ten slaves were employed in some facet of production other than sugar and half of plantation space was devoted to raising livestock, and cultivating foodstuffs for local consumption.43 Neighbouring regions of mainland British North America offer a glimpse into the dif-ferences in slave experience resulting from the crop around which their labour was organized. In the South Carolina Low Country, large landholdings devoted to the cul-tivation of rice, a primary staple, which did not exhaust the nutrients of the soil, meant that slaves and their descendants had a greater likelihood of remaining on the planta-tion than they did elsewhere, in spite of the labour-intensive, back-breaking nature of the work. In the Chesapeake, by contrast, the cultivation of tobacco, which quickly exhausted the soil, often resulted in the break-up of slave families and communities as planters either relocated in search of untapped lands to exploit or sold off their slaves after their land no longer yielded tobacco.44 In the northern continental colonies, by contrast, though most slaves lived in the countryside, many worked in highly capital-ized rural industries—tanneries, salt works, and iron-furnaces—and iron masters were commonly the largest slaveholders in some areas. Where slaves did work the land, it was on farms that produced provisions for export to the Caribbean sugar islands. As the pro-visioning trade did not support the plantation regime found in either the Chesapeake or Carolina Low County, most of these northern, farm-based slaves never laboured in large gangs and performed a variety of tasks, as hyper-specialization was less prevalent than it was farther south.

Though unrelenting brutality and dehumanizing ‘social death’ was common to all slave societies, the nature of slavery and slave society varied widely across the Atlantic


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World. Not all slavery was rural or plantation-based. In the Spanish empire, especially, urban slavery was ubiquitous and between 10 and 25 per cent of the populations of Lima, Mexico City, Quito, Cartagena, and Santa Fe de Bogotá were enslaved.45 Urban slavery was also common to the middle colonies of British North America, where slavehold-ing became almost universal among the elite, and even within the reach of the middle classes, particularly in port cities like Boston, New York, Newport, and Charleston. In all of these seaboard metropolises, slaves went from being on the periphery of urban activ-ity, as servants in wealthy households, to the centre, labouring as workmen in the shops of artisans. By the 1760s, for example, Philadelphia’s white artisans and tradesmen had become major slaveholders. On the eve of the American Revolution, three-quarters of the Boston’s wealthiest quartile of families were slaveholders.46

The everyday experience of enslaved Africans in New World societies was marked by physical violence, rape, and dehumanizing terror. Various slave, or black, codes were introduced in the Americas. The 1685 French Code Noir was meant to require masters to provide for the basic sustenance of slaves and to extricate them from forced labour on Sundays and religious feast days. Most of the beneficent provisions were blatantly ignored whereas stipulations for corporal punishment were assiduously enforced. While permitting slaves to be baptized and to marry, the Code Noir denied them civil status, thereby depriving them of rights enjoyed by whites to own property, practise a trade, or give evidence in a trial. In Spanish America, the situation of slaves was mar-ginally better, largely because slaves could seek, and sometimes found, assistance in the courts. As a result of the legacy of medieval Iberian law codes, especially the Siete Partidas, slaves had legal means to gain their freedom, including self-purchase. One response to the harsh brutality of slavery was escape. Very few slaves, however, managed to join the sort of fugitive communities described earlier. Large-scale slave rebellions, too, were rare, though occurred with greater frequency in the Caribbean during the Age of Revolutions, including in the middle and latter phases of the Haitian Revolution. But everyday acts of resistance, including sabotage, work slow-downs, temporary absentee-ism without permission—in short, a range of subtly subversive behaviours which are sometimes lumped together by historians as petit marronnage—were common. Their ubiquity is indicative of the complexity of slavery in colonial societies in the early mod-ern period.

Not all people of African descent, of course, were enslaved. The population of free blacks as well as inter-racial persons expanded through both manumission and natural increase. Even for those nominally free blacks, however, social and economic options remained severely limited. Even in the northern colonies of British America, there were all sorts of proscriptive statutes passed which impinged on the liberties of free blacks, barring them from voting, militia membership, and jury service. There were even laws which threatened re-enslavement for free blacks who lacked regular employments and were accused of loitering. In Portuguese America, the mechanical trades were domi-nated by whites and licences were exceedingly difficult for free blacks to obtain. Such restrictions meant that blacks in Brazil, both free and enslaved, were reduced to menial and low-prestige livelihoods, including that of ‘barber’ (barbeiro), sanctioned to bleed,


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scarify, and apply leeches, presumably with the intention to heal. Some such barbers also obtained a further licence as a tooth-puller (tiradentes). In Spanish America, militia service offered free blacks the possibility for limited social mobility. Earlier restrictions, such as a 1551 law forbidding blacks from bearing arms, soon gave way in the face of the urgent need to defend coastal cities. In some regions particularly vulnerable to attack by either corsairs or foreign navies, there existed entire militia companies composed of free blacks, including at the officer level.47

Colonial Identities and Imperial Revolutions

The concept of creole had emerged very early in the colonial period, though cre-ole identity took shape somewhat later. Originally, it was derived from a Portuguese word, crioulo (in turn derived from verb criar, to grow), which referred to descendants of Africans born in the Americas, distinguishing them from bozales, African-born slaves. From Portuguese, it was adopted in Spanish, as criollo, where its meaning mutated. The first appearance in print of ‘creole’ in a form resembling its core common modern usage was in Spanish royal chronicler Juan López de Velasco’s Geografía y Descripción Universal de las Indias (1570), where the author claimed that Spaniards born in the America ‘who are called creoles [criollos] turn out like the natives even though they are not mixed with them [by] declining to the disposition of the land’.48 Creole, though referring initially to children of Spaniards (and their progeny) born in America, thus carried unmistakably pejorative connotations. At first, however, in Spanish usage, it was less of a racial epithet than a geographical or cultural designation which referred to place of birth or habitation. Increasingly, how-ever, as cross-cultural sexual relations produced children with darker phenotypes, creole came to connote someone of mixed ancestry as much as a Spaniard born in America. Iberian purity of blood (limpieza de sangre) statutes originally used to dis-criminate against descendants of Jews and Muslims were expanded to encompass those with some degree of African descent, thus barring many creoles from many bureaucratic and ecclesiastical posts.

Some American-born Spaniards nevertheless embraced the term and fashioned a multi-faceted identity around it, often incorporating some element of local patriot-ism. What historians have termed ‘creole consciousness’ further coalesced in response to what these American-born Spaniards perceived as unfair metropolitan bias, which equated difference with inferiority, and often resulted in exclusion from offices and other patterns of resentment-generating differential treatment. Particularly after the Seven Years War, which was a debacle for Spain, creole participation in the colonial bureau-cracy and judicial system was curtailed drastically. Simultaneously, peninsular-born officials flooded Spanish America and infringed upon the relative autonomy previously


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enjoyed by creoles. At this point, the older notion of the Spanish Monarchy as a collec-tion of kingdoms, and not colonies, began to break down.

These changes also heightened pre-existing creole–peninsular rivalry and gave a nudge to incipient creole patriotism. Previously confined to expressions of local pride, an identification with place, and a loose sense of being different from Europeans, cre-ole patriotism morphed and pushed some Spanish Americans to envisage a future outside of the Spanish Atlantic Monarchy. Other factors prodded colonists towards a similar conclusion. The first was the economic boom fuelled not only by transatlantic trade but by the emergence of a robust internal market. Increased prosperity led elites to recognize the de facto semi-independence of their local economies and to resent the ‘mercantilist’ restrictions on colonial commerce, precisely at the moment when metro-politan Spain was attempting to bind Spanish America closer to itself. The second factor fuelling the agitation was the presence of new ideologies swirling through the Atlantic World with hurricane-like force. Republicanism and political–economic critiques of the ‘Old Colonial System’ encouraged Spanish American creoles to imagine a different, new political arrangement. Sporadic conspiracies were uncovered, but, with the notable exception of the Comunero rebellion in New Granada (modern Colombia) in the early 1780s, these resulted in very little change.

Yet creoles were not the only group disgruntled with the forms of heightened state interference that historians call the ‘Bourbon Reforms’. There were hundreds of Amerindian revolts in the eighteenth century, of which the wide-scale Andean insur-rection of the early 1780s, known as the Túpac Amaru rebellion, was most unnerv-ing to colonial authorities. While many expressions of discontent never amounted to more than local tax revolts, the Túpac Amaru rebellion was unprecedented. While refraining from overt criticism of the overarching structure of the Spanish Monarchy or Catholicism, the rebellion was galvanized by a novel combination of Incan symbol-ism, anti-European prejudice, and a political imagination that foresaw the removal of meddling Spanish bureaucrats and the recovery of Amerindian political autonomy in the Andes.

None of this subversive activity, however, threatened at first to crescendo into a sepa-ratist rebellion. It was only when French armies occupied the Iberian Peninsula, from 1808, and deposed the Bourbon monarchy that a crisis of legitimacy and sovereignty unfolded which resulted in the independence of Spanish America from Spain by the early 1820s.49 There were many divergent responses to this tumult, but one attracting a significant number of adherents was the idea that sovereignty had reverted to the people, now conceived as belonging to and being territorially rooted in the various local regions in America, without connection to Spain. Peninsular attempts to reinte-grate these recalcitrant subjects by force back into the transatlantic monarchy failed, though only after a decade of unrelenting, disruptive warfare. Out of the wreckage of empire—indeed forged in the crucible of separatist warfare and civil war—emerged new entities, the nation states of independent Spanish America.

Portuguese America faced several small-scale dissident conspiracies in the last dec-ades of the eighteenth century, with the most important one occurring in Minas Gerais.


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But the separatist fire such manifestations of dissent enkindled were snuffed out by the relocation of the royal family from Lisbon to Rio de Janeiro during the Napoleonic Wars in 1807–08. The Braganzas, Portugal’s ruling dynasty, transformed Rio de Janeiro into a ‘Tropical Versailles’ between 1808 and 1820, replete with European political and cul-tural institutions, refashioning it into the centre of a global monarchy. Brazil eventually gained its independence from Portugal in 1822, largely as a result of oafish (if justified) Portuguese efforts to restore Lisbon to its former status as capital, which the Brazilians rejected as ‘recolonization’. But Brazilians did not reject everything from Europe and remained a Monarchy (headed by the same dynasty, the Braganzas,), a system that was preferred as it was thought to favour the preservation of Brazil’s territorial integrity and the slave system. Despite several secessionist revolts, Brazil did not fragment, as Spanish America had. The Monarchy survived until 1889, outliving the institution of slavery, abolished in 1888, by a year.50

The genesis of new identities occurred perhaps more slowly in the Anglophone colo-nies, where the word ‘creole’ only ever carried pejorative connotations. But geopoliti-cal crises and the government reform programmes they spawned generated tensions between American-born subjects and metropolitan Britain, as it had in the Iberian world. The Seven Years War fuelled the resentment of American colonists who felt restricted and hampered by mercantilist trade laws that precluded intercourse with their traditional markets. Colonial frustration was heightened still further by a spate of new taxes foisted upon them in the aftermath of the conflict. Some of the grievance stemmed from the fact that colonists believed they had already contributed heavily to the war effort through soldiers and funds. Now they would be taxed for the mainte-nance of a greatly increased number of soldiers garrisoned in the colonies. To onerous taxes was added political strife. Colonial elective assemblies were increasingly ignored by crown-appointed governors and, in the 1770s, as the conflict escalated, Britain substi-tuted a nominated assembly for an elected one, including in the colony of Massachusetts. The ensuing military conflict ended in 1781 and in 1783 the peace treaty was signed. In many regards, this was the beginning of a new process, as loyalists to the British crown left the nascent United States and joined other British colonial societies, in Canada, the Bahamas, Sierra Leone, and India, presaging the subsequent nineteenth-century reor-ientation of British colonial ambitions toward the Mediterranean, Indian Ocean, and Pacific Worlds.51 In the nascent United States, a federal system took root, enshrined in the 1787 Constitution, though under constant duress from ‘Anti-Federalists’ who pre-ferred more authority vested in the individual states. Furthermore, though the revolu-tionary war had spawned a new identity, Americans struggled to wean themselves from British customs, tastes, and habits, and to forge a distinctive culture. Indeed, the process of ‘becoming un-British’ took decades.

In all of these cases, separatist sentiments and movements arose from a combusti-ble mixture of several elements: mature, increasingly self-sufficient colonies; metro-politan reform initiatives perceived to be heavy-handed, exploitative, exclusionary, and anachronistic; an emerging consciousness concerning a vast cultural gulf separating Europe from America, with a valorization of America; the spread of political ideologies


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imbued with new notions of sovereignty, emphasizing self-government and increas-ingly out-of-step with the policies of imperial government; and, particularly in the case of Saint-Domingue (Haiti), pent-up disgust with and rejection of the system of chattel slavery.

The first great wave of decolonization of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth cen-tury, of course, was incomplete: Spain retained Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines; Portugal clung to Angola and Mozambique; and Britain remained ascendant in Canada and much of the Caribbean. Nor did it herald the demise of the colonial idea, as contem-poraneous British expansion in South Asia and French incursions in North Africa attest amply. But in most of the Americas, the first settlements, so dependent on Europe in all senses, had become laboratories, often violent and coercive ones to be sure, of new iden-tities through processes of ethnogenesis, religious syncretism, and cultural hybridity. As their populations grew and their economies expanded, the colonies became increasingly self-sufficient. The gulf between metropolitan fiscal–military requirements (as well as the models of political authority prevailing in Europe) and colonial aspirations became an unbridgeable chasm. After protracted conflict, colonial societies transitioned from the subordinate status of ultramarine appendages to independent polities, fully fledged participants in the international community of states.

Notes

1. Felipe Fernández-Armesto, Before Columbus: Exploration and Colonization from the Mediterranean to the Atlantic, 1229–1492 (Philadelphia, 1987).

2. Jonathan Israel, The Dutch Republic: Its Rise, Greatness, and Fall (Oxford, 1995), 939. 3. Richard Elphick and Hermann Giliomee, ‘The Origins and Entrenchment of European

Dominance at the Cape, c. 1652–c. 1840’, in Elphick and Giliomee, eds., The Shaping of South African Society, 1652–1840, 2nd edn. (Middletown, CT, 1988), 530–531.

4. Sanjay Subrahmanyan, The Portuguese Empire in Asia, 1500–1700: A Political and Economic History (New York and London, 1993), 276.

5. Alida Metcalf, Go-betweens and the Colonization of Brazil 1500–1600 (Austin, 2005), 59. 6. Malyn Newitt, A History of Mozambique (London, 1995), 126, 129. 7. Amy Bushnell Turner, ‘Indigenous America and the Limits of the Atlantic World,

1493–1825’, in Jack P. Greene and Philip D. Morgan, eds., Atlantic History: A Critical Appraisal (Oxford, 2008); for the classic overview of these processes, see Alfred W. Crosby, The Columbian Exchange: Biological and Cultural Consequences of 1492 [30th Anniversary Edition] (Westport, CT and London, 2003).

8. Karen Graubart, With Our Labor and Sweat: Indigenous Women and the Formation of Colonial Society in Peru, 1550–1700 (Stanford, 2007), 188.

9. J. H. Elliott, Empires of the Atlantic World: Britain and Spain in the Americas, 1492–1830 (New Haven, 2006), 55.

10. Bernard Bailyn, The Barbarous Years. The Conflict of Civilization, 1600–1675 (New York, 2012), xiv, 261.

11. W. J. Eccles, The French in North America 1500–1783, revised edn. (East Lansing, 1998), 29–30.


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12. Philip J. Stern, The Company State: Corporate Sovereignty and the Early Modern Foundations of the British Empire in India (Oxford, 2011), 35–38.

13. Stuart Schwartz, ‘The Iberian Atlantic to 1650’, in Philip D. Morgan and Nicholas Canny, eds., The Oxford Handbook of the Atlantic World, c. 1450–1850 (Oxford, 2011), 157.

14. Jaap Jacobs, The Colony of New Netherland: A Dutch Settlement in Seventeenth-century America (Ithaca, NY, 2009), 220.

15. Bailyn, The Barbarous Years, 111, 170. 16. Elliott, Empires of the Atlantic World, 56. 17. Mary P. Ryan, Womanhood in America: From Colonial Times to the Present, 3rd edn.

(New York, 1983), 24. 18. Susan M. Socolow, The Women of Colonial Latin America (Cambridge, 2000), 39–77. 19. Quoted in Graubart, With Our Labor and Sweat, 13. 20. Quoted in A. J. R. Russell-Wood, The Black Man in Slavery and Freedom in Colonial Brazil

(New York, 1982), 31. 21. Stuart B. Schwartz, ‘Cities of Empire: Mexico and Bahia in the Sixteenth Century,’ in

Joyce Lorimer, ed., Settlement Patterns in Early Modern Colonization, 16th–18th Century (Aldershot, 1998), 243.

22. A. J. R. Russell-Wood, Fidalgos and Philanthropists. The Santa Casa da Misericórdia of Bahia, 1550–1755 (Berkeley and LA, 1968).

23. Jack P. Greene, Pursuits of Happiness: The Social Development of the Early Modern British Colonies and the Formation of American Culture (Chapel Hill and London, 1988), 26–27.

24. Gabriel B. Paquette, Enlightenment, Governance and Reform in Spain and its Empire, 1759–1808 (Basingstoke and New York, 2008), 127–151.

25. Louis B. Wright, The Cultural Life of the American Colonies, 1607–1763 (New York, 1957), 148.

26. Material in the preceding paragraph drawn from Rebecca Earle, The Body of the Conquistador: Food, Race and the Colonial Experience in Spanish America 1492–1700 (Cambridge, 2012), 67–75.

27. Marcy Norton, Sacred Gifts, Profane Pleasures: A History of Tobacco and Chocolate in the Atlantic World (Ithaca and London, 2008).

28. A. J. R. Russell-Wood, ‘Centers and Peripheries in the Luso-Brazilian World, 1500–1808’, in Christine Daniels and Michael V. Kennedy, eds., Negotiated Empires. Centers and Peripheries in the Americas, 1500–1820 (New York and London), 105–142.

29. Mark A. Burkholder and Lyman L. Johnson, Colonial Latin America, 5th edn. (New York, 2004), 176–181, 323.

30. David Weber, Bárbaros: Spaniards and their Savages in the Age of Enlightenment (New Haven, 2005), 12, 61, 72.

31. Pekka Hämäläinen, The Comanche Empire (New Haven, 2008), 7. 32. Alan Taylor, American Colonies (New York, 2001), 92–93, (quotation at 291). 33. Marcus Rediker, Villains of All Nations: Atlantic Pirates in the Golden Age (Boston, 2004),

16–17, 29. 34. As Richard Price elucidated, in a New World context, cimarrón originally referred to

domestic cattle that had taken to the hills of Hispaniola and soon to Indian slaves who had escaped from the Spaniards. But by 1530, it was applied to African slaves who had absconded and carried strong negative connotations. See Richard Price, ‘Introduction: The Maroons and their Communities’, in Price, ed., Maroon Societies: Rebel Slave Communities in the Americas, 2nd edn. (Baltimore, 1979), 1–2, fn 1.


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35. Stuart B. Schwartz, Slaves, Peasants and Rebels: Reconsidering Brazilian Slavery (Urbana and Chicago, 1992), 104–125 (quotation at 109).

36. Hilary McD. Beckles, ‘Plantation Production and White ‘Proto-Slavery’: White Indentured Servants and the Colonisation of the English West Indies, 1624–1645’, in Lorimer, Settlement Patterns, 166.

37. Philip Boucher, France and the American Tropics to 1700. Tropics of Discontent? (Baltimore, 2008), 145, 149.

38. Alida Metcalf, Family and Frontier in Colonial Brazil. Santana de Parnaíba, 1580–1822 (Austin, TX, 1992), 45, 53.

39. On Brazilian sugar, see the masterwork by Stuart B. Schwartz, Sugar Plantations and the Formation of Brazilian Society: Bahia, 1550–1835 (Cambridge, 1985).

40. These factors are discussed in John Thornton, Africa and Africans in the Making of the Atlantic World, 1400–1800, 2nd edn. (Cambridge, 1998), 135–137.

41. Joyce Chaplin, ‘The British Atlantic’, in Morgan and Greene, Oxford Handbook, 222. 42. James Pritchard, In Search of Empire: The French in the Americas 1670–1730 (Cambridge,

2004), 70; Silvia Marzagalli, ‘The French Atlantic World in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries’, in Morgan and Greene, Oxford Handbook, 241.

43. Greene, Pursuits of Happiness, 160. 44. Philip D. Morgan, Slave Counterpoint: Black Culture in the Eighteenth-century Chesapeake

and Low Country (Chapel Hill, 1998), 44, 101. 45. Elliott, Empires of the Atlantic World, 104, 100. 46. Ira Berlin, Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in North America

(Cambridge, MA, 1998), 179. 47. Ben Vinson III, Bearing Arms for His Majesty: The Free-Colored Militia in Colonial Mexico

(Stanford, 2001). 48. Quoted in Ralph Bauer and José Antonio Mazzotti, ‘Introduction: Creole Subjects

in the Colonial Americas’, in Bauer and Mazzotti, eds., Creole Subjects in the Colonial Americas: Empires, Texts and Identities (Chapel Hill, 2009), 4.

49. Jeremy Adelman, Sovereignty and Revolution in the Iberian Atlantic (Princeton and Oxford, 2006); for an overview of the historiography, see Gabriel Paquette, ‘The Dissolution of the Spanish Atlantic Monarchy’, Historical Journal, 52:1 (2009), 175–212.

50. Kenneth R. Maxwell, Conflicts and Conspiracies: Brazil and Portugal 1750–1808 (Cambridge, 1973); Gabriel Paquette, Imperial Portugal in the Age of Atlantic Revolutions: The Luso-Brazilian World c. 1770–1850 (Cambridge, 2013).

51. A convincing and useful treatment may be found in Patrick Griffin, America’s Revolution (New York and Oxford, 2012); Maya Jasanoff, Liberty’s Exile: American Loyalists in the Revolutionary World (New York, 2012).

Bibliography

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Bethencourt, Francisco and Diogo Ramada Curto, eds. Portuguese Oceanic Expansion, 1400–1800 (Cambridge, 2007).

Boxer, Charles Ralph. The Dutch Seaborne Empire: 1600–1800 (New York, 1970).


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Brading, David A. The First America: The Spanish Monarchy, Creole Patriots and the Liberal State 1492–1867 (Cambridge, 2001).

Burkholder, Mark A. and Lyman L. Johnson. Colonial Latin America, 5th edn. (New York and Oxford, 2004).

Canny, Nicholas and Anthony Pagden, eds. Colonial Identity in the Atlantic World 1500–1800 (Princeton, 1987).

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McFarlane, Anthony. The British in the Americas 1480–1815 (London and New York, 1992).Newitt, Malyn. A History of Portuguese Overseas Expansion, 1400–1688 (London and

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