Slavery in the Spanish New World colonies | Wikipedia audio article
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Date: 2018-12-02

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Slavery in the Spanish New World colonies

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SUMMARY
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Slavery in the Spanish American colonies was an economic and social institution central to the operations of the Spanish Empire - it bound Africans and indigenous people to a relationship of colonial exploitation. The Spanish colonists provided the Americas with a colonial precedent for slavery. Early on, however, opposition from the enslaved Indians and  influential Spaniards moved the Crown to limit the bondage of indigenous people, and initiated debates that challenged the idea of slavery based on race. Spaniards regarded some indigenous people as tribute under  the encomienda system during the late 1400s and part of the 1500s.Spanish slavery in the Americas did not diverge drastically from that in other European colonies. It reshuffled the Atlantic World's populations through forced migrations, helped transfer American wealth to Europe, and promoted racial and social hierarchies (castas) throughout the empire.  Spanish enslavers justified their wealth and status earned at the work of the mines at the expense of captive workers by considering them inferior beings with limited capacities and holding them as personal property (chattel slavery), often under barbarous conditions. In fact, Spanish colonization set some egregious records in the field of slavery. The Asiento, the official contract for trading in slaves in the vast Spanish territories was a major engine of the Atlantic slave trade. When Spain first enslaved Native Americans on Hispaniola, and then replaced them with captive Africans, it established unfree labor as the basis for colonial mass-production. And in the mid-nineteenth century, as most countries in the hemisphere moved to disallow chattel slavery, Cuba and Puerto Rico - the last two remaining Spanish American colonies - maintained slavery the longest.Enslaved people challenged their captivity in ways that ranged from introducing non-European elements into Christianity (syncretism) to mounting alternative societies outside the plantation system (Maroons). The first open black rebellion occurred in Spanish plantations in 1521. Resistance, particularly to the enslavement of indigenous people, also came from Spanish religious and legal ranks.  The first speech in the Americas for the universality of human rights and against the abuses of slavery was also given on Hispaniola, a mere nineteen years after the first contact.  Resistance to Amerindian captivity in the Spanish colonies produced the first modern debates over race and the legitimacy of slavery. And uniquely in the Spanish American colonies, laws like the New Laws of 1542, were enacted early in the colonial period to protect natives from bondage. To complicate matters further, Spain's haphazard grip on its extensive American dominions and its erratic economy acted to impede the broad and systematic spread of plantations similar to those of the French in Saint Domingue or of the British in Jamaica.  Altogether, the struggle against slavery in the Spanish American colonies left a notable tradition of opposition that set the stage for current conversations about human rights.