Now, without a doubt, Spain was the grand pooha of imperial powers in the Americas from 1491 to6007. So, let's visit with these rascally colonizers for a spell and see how they became the great lidless colonial eye of Sauron. Should be fun. So, if you're ready to get them brain cows milked, let's get to it. Now, hopefully you recall from the last couple of videos that the first European state to roll the dice and try to access Asian markets by sailing west across the Atlantic was Spain. And here's a fun little rhyme about that. In 1492, Columbus sailed the ocean blue and established Spain's claim to conquer everybody's crap, too. Anyway, Columbus ended up making no less than four trips to the Caribbean over the course of about a decade. And he tried to get the Spaniards who were with him to build houses and towns, over which Columbus aimed to rule as governor. But, as it turned out, those Spaniards just wanted gold. And when the indigenous groups cut off trade with them, the colonizers began taking it by force. Oh, by the way, if you want note guys to follow along with this video and all my videos, you can check that link in the description. Anyway, not long after that, the Spanish went ahead and conquered and subjugated various islands in the Caribbean. But wouldn't you know it, they got lusty for even more wealth. So, Spain sent more concistadors to the mainland to see if anything needed conquering over there. And they sure found some eligible societies. And apparently, someone in the Spanish court decided that it was just rude to brutally subjugate a people without a proper explanation. So, King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella issued a legal document known as the Roqua Meento, which claimed that the Pope had given Spain biblical authority to rule in the Americas and threatened violence to any indigenous group that defied that order. And I'm sure when the indigenous people heard this read in their towns, they were like, "Oh, the Pope said so. That makes so much more sense to me now. Thank you for explaining it. It would help you conquer if we just like laid down or no." The indigenous people emphatically did not respond like that. First of all, because you know that's stupid. But second, and more importantly, the document was read out loud in Spanish. And as it turns out, they did not know Spanish. So this document was more of an example of the Spanish trying to justify to themselves that they had rights to conquer and pillage in the Americas. Anyway, by 1521, the concistador Hernand Cortez had toppled the mighty Aztec Empire and claimed it for Spain. And even though he had relatively few Spaniards with him, and the Aztecs eventually resisted the attack, Cortez had two advantages. First, Spanish diseases like smallpox weakened the Aztecs, including some of their vital leadership, and that made them vulnerable to attack. Second, Cortez allied with several indigenous groups who had been under the authority of the Aztecs and fought with the Spanish to secure their own liberation. Anyway, a few years later, another concisador by the name of Francisco Pizarro used similar tactics to defeat and conquer the Inca Empire in South America. And because of the metric buttloads of gold and silver Spain was gaining from these two empires, they went ahead and cranked their colonization efforts up to 11. Okay, so now that the Spanish got their initial windfall of wealth from their American colonies, they needed to figure out how to keep that boom boom flowing reliably. And so they introduced the incomienda system which by definition was a system of coerced labor in which the Spanish crown granted tracks of land to Spanish incomanderos who forced the indigenous people within its borders into mining and plantation-based agriculture. And to be fair, the Spanish themselves wouldn't say they forced anyone into labor. Now by their reckoning, there was a mutual benefit to encomando. Yes, the encomandos required indigenous people to work for them, but in return the encouanderos had to provide protection and Christianization. And to the Spanish, that was a great deal for those primitive indigenous folks. But to be absolutely clear, and comedend is just a fancy word for the Spanish flavor of slavery. It's easy to get lost in all the jargon like coerced labor, but as my grandpappy used to say, if it looks like a duck and quacks like a duck, it's probably slavery. Anyway, the Spanish used the encoma system as their main way to extract wealth from their colonies. And there were two sources of that wealth. First was mining for gold and silver, and the second was the export of cash crops like sugarcane and tobacco and cotton. Now, we'll talk more in unit 2 about the brutality of Spanish and comeenda and some reforms that were made. But for now, you just need to remember that in order to extract wealth from their colonies, the Spanish enslaved Native Americans to mine and farm within the bounds of Spanish territory. And then here's where I tell you that Spanish reliance on indigenous labor began to break down for two reasons. First, enslaved indigenous workers knew the land much better than the Spanish on account of, you know, like their ancestral home and all, and that made escape an increasingly frequent phenomenon. Second, indigenous slaves kept dying from Spanish diseases. So, as the Spanish considered that development, it was a real moment of contemplation and introspection. You know, our workers are dying and running away, and we've destroyed the very fabric of their ancient societies. And it really makes you think about whether we're doing the right thing or not. See? Hey, are you guys thinking what I'm thinking? See? Okay, let's say it together on three. 1 2 3. Leave the Americas for Africans to do the work. Oh, see. And that's how the Spanish solved their indigenous labor problem. Namely, by increasingly relying on the importation of enslaved Africans to work the mines and the plantations. So, Spanish merchants and other colonial powers as well partnered with West African groups in order to trade goods. Guns being the most desirable good for enslaved laborers from the African interior. And many of those African groups involved in the trade became wealthy and powerful owing to the superior weaponry they gained in trading with the Europeans. However, I should mention that the African slave trade had existed for centuries before this period. The slaves usually being prisoners of war and local conflict. Europeans simply tapped into this system and in doing so drove the demand for African slaves way up and thus increased the necessity for African warfare and the capture of slaves. Anyway, once purchased, Africans were shipped across the Atlantic via the notorious middle passage. The people were crammed onto these ships like cargo and the death rate was somewhere around 20% on these ships owing to the rapid spread of disease and malnutrition. And once they arrived on the American shores, they were sold to the Spanish. And this arrangement solved both of their labor problems. First of all, Africans were from, you know, like Africa and so they didn't know the land in the Americas and thus were less likely to escape. And second, Africans had been in contact with smallox and measles and other diseases for centuries and had better immunity and thus were more reliable for, you know, like not dying. And so for those reasons, African slavery gradually became the dominant coerced labor system in the Americas. Okay. Now, the final feature of Spanish America that you need to know is how the Spanish imposed a completely new and foreign social structure in the Americas. is known as the Spanish cast system, but in other classes you may have heard it called the casta system, but you know, it's the same thing. Don't get confused. Now, if I had to guess, when you hear cast system, you most likely think of India, and you'd be right to do so. In South Asian history, the cast system has divided their society into rigid layers at birth. The people at the top were generally wealthy and powerful, while the people at the bottom were treated as disposable and held no social power in the system. And until recently, there wasn't really any way a person can move from one level to the other without, you know, like dying and being reborn. Anyway, the Spanish cast system in the Americas resembled this scenario in a lot of important ways. You see, almost none of the traditional Spanish nobility who held wealth and power in Spain migrated to the new world. Therefore, the most powerful concisadors who established Spain's empire in the new world worked to impose a new social hierarchy on the peoples there so that they might drink liberally from the cup of wealth and power that they were denied in the homeland. The result was the casta system which organized colonial society into a ranked social hierarchy that was based on race and heredity. Basically, the more white blood a person had, the more social power they had, and the less white blood, the less social power. So, not surprisingly, the pure Spanish themselves were at the top. And then the indigenous Americans, and the Africans were at the bottom. And then contact between these groups resulted in something like 40 separate divisions on the hierarchy that the Spanish used to organize and define the social categories of their colonial possessions. You see, prior to the imposing of the cast system, native peoples were part of a wide variety of linguistic and cultural groups. But the cast system erased much of that cultural complexity and ordered their society by the standards of a small minority of Spanish elite. And then whatever category a person found themselves in dictated the kind of education they could receive or the kinds of occupations or even the amount of tribute or tax payments they were responsible for. And then this system also altered the spatial makeup of towns and villages. For example, Spanish settlements had a church and a town hall in the center which was home to those in the upper levels of the social hierarchy and then those who were on the lower levels were forced to live on the outskirts of the settlement. And by these means the Spanish consolidated control over all their American possessions. Well, okay. You can click here to watch my other topic videos for unit one, or you can click here to grab my video note guides, which is going to help you get all the contents of this course firmly crammed into your brain folds. I'm glad you came around and I'll catch you on the flip-flop.