New World Plantations Colonialism Slavery Sugarcane Tobacco Cotton Coffee Cocoa World Markets

1. New World Plantations Colonialism Slavery Sugarcane Tobacco Cotton Coffee Cocoa World Markets Monocultivation Cash Crops

2. Voyages of Exploration • Economics • Trade (grains, spices, textiles…) • Lack of precious metals • Constantinople 1453 • Geo-Politics • Muslims (Ottoman Turks) pressure in the East and North Africa • Reconquista • Religion • Belief that Christendom is shrinking

4. Arrival to the Western Hemisphere • Columbus and The West Indies • A New World

5. A World Divided Tordesillas& the Doctrine of Discovery

6. Pre-Columbian History • Strong easterly winds and currents made the peopling of the Caribbean easier coming from East to West. That is, most of the people and fauna of pre-Columbian Caribbean came from what is now Venezuela and slowly moved North- West. • Caribs: Virgin Islands, Lesser Antilles and Northwestern Trinidad. • Siboney, Northwest tip of Cuba and Hispaniola, were the oldest group in the region and the less sophisticated. • Arawaks: (Tainos) Inhabited the Bahamas, the Greater Antilles and Trinidad.

7. They also grew peanuts, peppers, tobacco, yams and corn (maize), beans and squash. They complemented their diet with pineapples and guava and several other fruits that grew in these islands. Fishing and hunting provided protein for their diet (fish, sea-turtle, manatees, shellfish, birds and rodents). Both the Caribs and Arawaks utilized the Conuco system, which yield great amounts of Yucca which is high in starch and sugar. From this crop they made a flat bread call Cassava, and (at least the Caribs) prepared an alcoholic beverage.

8. Political OrganizationThe Arawaks divided their land into province-like units called Cacicazgos which were ruled by a Cacique. There were 5-6 of these in Hispaniola and maybe 18 in Puerto Rico. Cacicazgos were divided into districts and these into villages ruled by a headman who had almost absolute power unlike the Cacique who had more of a ceremonial role.Succession was Matrilineal. Bohios

9. Cemí Taíno deity

10. Ruins of Caparra near San Juan, P.R. Mining for gold was the first economic enterprise in the Caribbean islands. In 1519, the gold mines were declared depleted in Hispaniola. As the Caribbean became unprofitable the Spaniards started to look for a way to bypass it and reach Asia. Between 1518-1522, Fernando de Magallanes, sailing under the Spanish flag, circumnavigated the globe through what is known as the Strait of Magallanes (Tierra del Fuego) (modern southern tip of Argentina) and reached the Pacific Ocean, returning through the Cape of Good Hope. But by then America had become profitable as the Spaniards conquered the Aztecs and then the Incas stumbling in the process into a seemingly endless supply of gold and silver. Hernan Cortes’ adventure led to the conquest the vast Empire of the Aztecs or Mexica from the Valley of Mexico in 1521. This conquest and Francisco Pizarro’s conquest of the Quechuas in 1533 (ruled by the Inca) led to the rapid depopulation of the Caribbean, but for the important ports which were fortified, as more and more men went into the mainland to take part of the Conquista and gold and silver rush. The Caribbean was then relegated to serve as a gate to the continental lands and wealth.

11. Bypassing the Americas

12. From, http://www.aztec-history.net/tenochtitlan "All about us we saw cities and villages built in the water, their great towers and buildings of masonry rising out of it… When I beheld the scenes around me I thought within myself, this was the garden of the world. And of all the wonders I beheld that day, nothing now remains. All is overthrown and lost." – Bernal Diaz del Castillo, one of Cortes' men in The Conquest of New Spain. http://www.pbs.org/opb/conquistadors/mexico/adventure1/pop-tenochtitlan.htm

13. http://www.uncp.edu/home/rwb

14. http://www.historycambridge.com/default.asp?contentID=890 http://www.historycambridge.com/default.asp?contentID=890 The Potosi Mines. Engraving by Theodor de Bry. In: GirolamoBenzoni, Historia AmericaeSive Novi Orbis, pars sesta, 1596.

15. How were the Spaniards able to subdue such vast empires as the Aztec and Inca ? Traditional explanations: • the native’s ideological and psychological collapse brought about by the Spaniards’ cultural, psychological and religious superiority; the Spaniards’ superior weaponry and tactics • A better understanding of symbolic systems • The Conquistadors’ superior character. • flaws within their respective political system, • misguided war-making abilities • their belief that the Spaniards were gods.

16. The New School contends that: • the disruption of the agricultural system and thus, of the food supply was equally important in bringing about the defeat of the natives of the Americas • moreover, more often than not, the Spaniards would be aided by hundreds of thousands of Indians • and their opponents would be decimated by diseases brought by the Europeans.

17. Columbian Exchange and the Atlantic World Ecological Isolation, Exchange, Mestizos, Mulattoes, Creoles and Criollos, Peninsulares, Corn, Potatoes and Tomatoes, Slave Trade, The Middle Passage

18. Atlantic World, 1713, from, http://wwnorton.com/college/history/ralph/resource/atlantic.htm

19. Settling in the Americas • Part of the Columbian or Atlantic Exchange was people- not only Europeans came in great numbers but they also removed and or relocated millions of Indians and brought millions of Black African slaves to the Americas. • Disappearance of the Indians- Introduction of Black African Slaves • Fray Bartolomé de las Casas and the Black Legend

20. Spanish Brutality, Theodor de Bry. In: GirolamoBenzoni, Historia AmericaeSive Novi Orbis, pars sesta, 1596.

21. From, Jan Rogozinski, A Brief History of the Caribbean, 112

22. From, http://www.britarch.ac.uk/ba/ba94/feat1.shtml

24. What accounts for the different treatment of Black Africans? Why would they be directly enslaved regardless of status and religion? • Amerindians die off too quickly and had the means to escape and survive in the interior. • Humanitarian concerns regarding the natives. • Spanish monarchs were concerned with limiting the power of colonists- slavery gave them too much power. • The Crown, the Church, and The Colonists were all competing over control over the Indians and their labor. NOT THE CASE IN AFRICA • Slave trade already existed in Africa- although slavery was of a different nature. • Until the late 1800s Europeans had no means to take over African kingdoms • Geography, disease and African Kingdom’s military defenses • which means the Europeans could not pass laws or create systems to force the Africans to work for them as it was done in the Americas with the Indians. • For that reason, taking Africans from Africa was the only way to control them, even if to put them under control of the colonists. • Humans became cargo and commodity to be exported where needed- especially to the American colonies

25. Spanish Colonial Society Caste System The Oligarchical Elite i. Peninsulares, born in Europe, held most of the political posts and power ii. Criollos (Creoles), Europeans born in the Americas, held economic power, little political power, sought to marry their offspring to newly arrived Peninsulares to obtain political power and favor.

26. The Castas • Servile Labor (Middle and lower Sectors of Society) “Pardos” People of Mixed Ancestry • Mestizos; Indian and European, served as an in between. Their position in society varied depending on the number of Peninsulares and Criollos • Mulattoes; Black and European. Beyond the Caribbean Basin, were considered lower than the Mestizo. • Sambos; Indian and Black, shared the bottom of the caste system with Black Africans, if slightly above them.

27. Indians; After the 1600s were granted scores of special rights and were protected by Spanish laws. Still, Criollos found ways to circumvent those laws and exploit them. • Black Africans; Mostly slaves and as such were at the bottom of the ladder. Those who earned their freedom and/or were born to freed slaves were usually referred to as libertos or freed men. They were still close to the bottom of the racial hierarchy.

28. 1500s: Slave Plantations and Military Outposts Slavery and slave societies in the Caribbean are linked to sugarcane. Sugarcane, although important in the French and British Caribbean colonies, did not become an important crop in the Spanish Caribbean until the 1800s, even though the crop had been introduced in Hispaniola as early as 1493, and in Puerto Rico in the 1520s. 1523, first trapiche (sugar cane processing plant) built in Puerto Rico.

29. A result of the lack of manpower brought by the decline of the Indian population was the introduction of Black African slaves. By 1570 every island of the Caribbean was populated mostly by black Africans, free blacks and “coloreds”. Puerto Rico,1530 Census Slaves working at an ingenio

30. Different Types of Agricultural Enterprises

31. Main Characteristics of the Plantation System • Commercial production- producing to sell in international markets • Large scale operations. • Capital intensive— machinery, slaves, ground transportation and shipping • Labor intensive— slaves, indenture servants, some wage workers but they all relied on slave labor and a sharp racial division of labor • Combination of agricultural-industrial enterprise- the factory in the field • Monoculture of Cash Crops • sugar, tobacco, rice, indigo, cotton and coffee • Year round production • Plantation economy tied to world economy • Consists of large-scale growing of tropical crops for transport to temperate world. • Plantation economies and societies gave way to the Emergence of regional economic blocs

32. The Plantations in the New World were part Regional Economies within an Emerging Global Market • The Caribbean, North-East Brazil and the U.S. South were not-so- different. • In fact these areas put together have been called the “Extended Caribbean”. Sidney Mintz and Immanuel Wallerstein • Wallerstein’s notion of the extended Caribbean comprises the “coastal and insular region that stretched from what is now southern Virginia in the USA to the most eastern part of Brazil”. • He argues that historically, politically, and economically, the area shares a colonial past, the slave trade, and the cultivation and production of tobacco, sugar, and cotton

33. Origins of New World Plantations • Spanish colonists first established sugarcane plantations in Hispaniola but quickly abandoned them • The Portuguese tried their hand in Brazil • They had been cultivating it in the Azores, Madeira, and CaboVerde • Sugarcane originally from India and Asia. • Introduced to the Europeans during the Crusades. • The Portuguese quickly learned how to cultivate it • The Portuguese- were already involved in the slave trade • The crop became well established by the mid 1500s

34. Nature of New World Plantations The early plantation system in the New World was based on: • the Europeancolonization of the Americas • what they perceived as unlimited land, • slave labor, and • export to Europe

36. Socio-Economic Structure in pre-Independence Saint Domingue

37. Sugar Production The «factory in the field » Slaves treated as machinery- replaceable and expendable. It took- 18 Months from planting to harvest Field Work: Planting and Harvesting- most taxing From dawn till dusk, 6 days a week_ usually 10-12 hours 16-18 hours a day during harvest. Sugar Milling: Produced Moscovado «less-finished » type of sugar as hard as field work temperatures of over 120 degrees inside the mill Refining: mostly done in English North America and Europe The division into plots assured that hard work never ended in a sugarcane plantation. Slaves, in general, were expected to grow their own food.

38. Slaves in sugarcaneplantations wereseriouslymalnourished and overworkedwhichled to extremelyhighmortalityrates. • In Haiti, conditions wereso brutal thatsome plantations had to replace 10% of their slaves everyyear • ¾ of childrendiedbefore the age of 5 For this reasons, most slaves in the Sugarcane plantations of the Caribbean and Brazil- wereAfrican born as oppossed to American-born • By 1810- the 375,000 slaves importedto the U.S. hadgrownto 2,000,000 and (4 million by 1860) • In contrast, by 1810, the Caribbean, whichhadreceived over 3,500,000 million slaves had a slave population 2,000,000

39. Whywere the slaves able to reproduce in English North America but not in the Caribbean and Brazil ? • Cruel masters, point is profit- it was easier and cheaper to replace a slave worked to deaththan to care for him • Malnourishment (almost no protein available for slaves) • Poor housing- mostlyexposed to the elements • Intense workschedule, plot division and the factthatthereis no winterseason in the Caribbean- workintensevileyear round • Disease • Masters prefered to bring males slaves- as the work on the sugar cane fieldswereoverlytaxing

40. Unlike sugarcane- tobacco cultivation was more specialized- which accounts for the bringing of female slaves. • The slaves brought much know-how, making the masters dependent on them- so there was a bigger incentive for the tobacco planter to keep his skilled laborers alive than in a sugar cane plantation. • Also, since there was an actual winter season, the slaves in a tobacco plantations had more free time- somewhat better housing- and the time to procreate.

41. Virginia Tobacco Plantations • Tobacco was a native crop to the Americas. • The production of tobacco in colonial times also required much manpower. • The plants had to be grown from seeds in a cold frame, set out, weeded, tasseled, harvested, and cured. All of this work was done by man and beasts of burden. • Low birth rates among colonists and low prices for tobacco were some of the reasons for bringing slaves to work in the tobacco fields. • With slave labor, profits from tobacco cultivation exceeded any other plant that could be grown in what is now the Southern US. • Tobacco, although intensive required more skill than sugar-cane cultivation so the slaves brought from Africa to Virginia and who knew of tobacco-(as the crop had been tried in Africa) enjoy certain leeway because of their much needed skills. • On a typical plantation of more than 20 slaves, the capital value of the slaves was greater than the capital value of the land and implements. • Tobacco became so important in Virginia’s economy, that it even acted as currency. • According to the U.S. 1860 Census figures, 25% of families in Virginia owned slaves.

43. Tobaco plantation in colonial Virginia; web.mac.com/charness1/West_to_Ohio/Slavery_issue.html

44. Tobacco Slaves in Colonial Brazil

45. Legacy of Plantation Societies • Led to the creation of rigidly-structured societies with Europeans and their American offspring acting as a neo-aristocracy and with Black African slaves at the bottom. • Continues to have an effect on these place’s socio-economic structures even to this day. • 8-10 million black Africans brought to the Americas, many more die during capture, holding and the middle passage. • Underdevelopment of Africa- as whole generations of men were stolen • Underdevelopment of the areas that hosted plantation societies • Persistent racial inequality and discrimination