Columbian Exchange: Food and agriculture of the Aztecs

Before the Spanish invasion, the diet of the Aztecs of Mexico was dominated by vegetables and fruit, although wild game was also important (rabbits, fish, birds, salamanders, frogs and insects). Their most important staple was maize, eaten in a gruel and made into dough for tortillas and tamales. Other common foods were amaranth, beans, squash, chili peppers, tomatoes, potatoes and peanuts. Blue-green algae was harvested from Lake Texcoco and dried and cut into bricks which could be stored up to a year. They ate lots of fruit including avocados, guavas, papayas, custard apples, pineapple, prickly pear (tuna), chirimoyas and zapotes. They also snacked on popcorn. Popular flavors were vanilla and cocoa.

The cocoa beans were fermented, roasted in the sun, ground into powder and mixed with hot water and made frothy with whisks. This drink was often flavored with maize, vanilla, chili peppers, herbs, and honey. Cocoa was so esteemed across Mesoamerica that its beans were used as currency and commonly demanded as tribute.

The Aztecs not only grew crops in their fields but also ornamentals. Flower gardens were found all across Tenochtitlan. The most famous was Moctezuma’s exotic garden at Huaxtepec, but most of the upper class had their own pleasure gardens.

Culture and Land Use

In Aztec society, land was either owned by communities and allocated to families for farming or was privately owned by the King and farmed by tenants (other Aztec nobles or warriors given land for services rendered). These tenants paid rent to the king through intermediaries. There was a hierarchy of agricultural workers – landless laborers and slaves who worked the Kings land and other specialized horticulturalists who managed the farms.

Common people could not own land themselves, but they had access to land through neighborhood wards called calpulli. These were led by a single nobleman and a council of local elders. Although the calpulli were run by nobles, the commoners were permitted to elect a neighborhood leader (calpullec) to manage the distribution of the land. This land was given to individual families, and generally stayed with the family unless it went uncultivated for two years or the family moved away. If this occurred, the unused land would then be redistributed to other families.

Aztec were great record keepers and much information about agricultural methods and timing was maintained in the “tonalamatl almanacs”. This rich heritage was lost forever when it was destroyed by the Spanish after conquest to remove all records of the Aztec pagan heritage.

Eco-geography and agricultural practices

The Aztec Empire spanned almost all the agroecological zones of Mesoamerica. Including the hot and humid Gulf Coast Plains, the temperate lands of the coastal piedmont and the Mesa Central, and the high reaches of the Sierras separating the basins.

The Gulf Coastal Plain and Piedmont were populated by the Totonac, who cultivated the well-drained, rainfed, often sloping terrain. They incorporated terraces with rock-walls and earthen embankments, and they planted along the margins of wetlands as they receded during the dry periods. They also developed canals to irrigate wide areas. Two types of orchard-gardens were grown by the Aztecs – household gardens where maize was intercropped with beans, squash, cotton, tuna (cactus) and root crops, and orchards where cocoa and other fruits were grown for commercial purposes and tribute.

In the Mesa Central, a large Totonac population was present, organized around city-states that paid tribute to the Aztec. Small villages were scattered across the hinterlands of the City States. The Mesa Central was made up of broad, flat floored basins surrounded by towering volcanoes and broad slopes. The upper and lower reaches were covered by flights of gradually sloping semi-terraces anchored by cacti at their brims. Maize, beans, and squash predominated in the region, but amaranth, tomatoes and chiles were also grown.

Rainfed agriculture dominated on the slopes, but in the lower regions weirs and dams were built to collect run-off and spring water, and canals were dug to distribute the water. In some cases, seasonal and permanent wetlands were transformed with canals into farmland where agriculture could be conducted year-round.

Wetland cultivation was a high art in the Basin of Mexico, where chinampas or “floating gardens” occupied thousands of hectares in the freshwater lakes of Chalco and Xochimilco. Chinampas were narrow artificial islands (30 x 2.5m) constructed of dredged muck and biotic material in marshy areas and anchored by trees on their edge. Canals were maintained between each plot that could be traveled by canoe. The water levels were controlled by a complex array of aqueducts, dikes, dams, canals, and sluice gates that could also be used to irrigate the surrounding agricultural fields. The chinampas were state owned and controlled, and produced tremendous amounts of food, feeding perhaps 200,000 in the Aztec capitol of Tenochtitlan.

Agricultural tools and implements

Aztecs used relatively primitive tools for farming and did not have plows, as there were no large, domesticated animals in Mesoamerica to pull them. Copper and bronze were used for basic farming tools or weapons, such as sharp sticks for digging, club-heads, knives with curved blades, axes, chisels, needles, and pins. They used a cord to bear a load on the back called a Mecapalli. Perhaps the most important tool in Aztec farming was a wooden digging-stick, called uictli.

Illustration:

Page 13 of the Codex Borbonicus of the Aztec sacred calendar (tonalpohualli). The goddess Tlazolteotl, is portrayed wearing a flayed skin, giving birth to Cinteotl. (Licensed under the Creative Commons Attribute – Share Alike 3.0 Unported)

Bibliography:

Cartwright, M. (2014). Aztec Food & Agriculture. World History Encyclopedia. Retrieved from https://www.worldhistory.org/article/723/aztec-food–agriculture/

Coe, M.D., Urcid, J. and Koontz, R. (2019) Mexico: From the Olmecs to the Aztecs. Thames & Hudson, New York.

Hancock, J. F. (2022) World Agriculture Before and After 1492: Legacy of the Columbian Exchange | SpringerLink

Whitmore, T. M., & Turner, B. L. (1992). Landscapes of cultivation in Mesoamerica on the eve of the conquest. Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 82(3), 402-425.

Columbian Exchange: Early Spanish crop and livestock introductions into Mesoamerica

Soon after the conquest, Cortez began a push to transfer the agriculture of old Spain to the New World.  In 1524, he wrote a letter to the King in which he begged him to order that the royal trading monopoly, the Casa de Contratacion of Seville, should not let any ship sail for the Indies without carrying crop plants and seed. Such an order was issued in 1532, and it required every ship to bring not only seeds and plants but also domesticated animals.  

Cortes requested seeds and livestock from Madrid to plant in the Mexican highlands, on the assumption that these highlands were like the interior Spanish plateaus. This proved to be true in the case of the warmer, irrigated valleys but across most of the region, fall and spring rains were more unpredictable than in Spain, and hard fall frosts were more common. It wasn’t until the late 1560s that wheat production began meeting market demand. Fruit trees did poorly, with only quince and peach being hardy enough. Olives could not be grown. Sevillian grapes would work if grafted onto indigenous rootstocks but produced poor wines and were restricted to the table as fresh fruit. In their house gardens, the Spanish were able to hold onto their fava beans, cabbage, chickpea, lettuce, radish, and onion.  

In 1531, a major farming and ranching community was established at Puebla de Los Angeles, about 70 miles east of Mexico City, midway along the Road to Veracruz. It began with cattle ranching but soon became a great wheat production area. Three crops could be produced a year in the Valley of Mexico surrounding the capital. By 1535, Mexico was exporting wheat to the Antilles and Tierra Firme, and “by mid-century bread in Mexico City was as good cheap as in Spain” … by the last quarter of the century, Atlixco Valley alone [southeast of Mexico City] was producing 100,000 fanegas (156,000 bushels) of wheat a year” (Crosby, 1972 – pg. 70). 

The first cattle arrived in Veracruz around 1521.  It only took a few decades until the lowland plains along the Gulf of Mexico had vast herds of cattle in an environment very similar to Andalusia. By 1580, there were 62 cattle estancias around the port of Veracruz, containing about 150,000 cows and mares. Cattle ranching was very popular among the conquistadors, as a third of the original 400 that sailed with Cortes came from provinces bordering Las Marismas – Seville, Huelva and Cadiz – where cattle were grazed in great herds.

Antonio de Mendoza, the first viceroy of New Spain, was particularly active in the importation of Old World crops and livestock.When the Mixton war against the Caxcan people of northwestern Mexico ended in 1542 and opened up vast stretches of grazing lands, the viceroy himself became one of the leading ranchers in the new region.

It was also in Northwest Mexico “that the vast herds of horses celebrated in American legend burst into the history of the New World “.  In the coast and highlands around Mexico City, horses did reasonably well, but their populations literally exploded when the opening of new mines moved the Spanish frontier further North. “By the end of the century wild horses were running free in Durango …. and the area between the Rio Grande and Nueces River was so full of horses that their trails make the country, utterly uninhabited by people, look as if it is the most populated in the world” (Crosby, 1972 – pg 94). 

As the Spanish frontier advanced northward, it moved out of the well-watered region of the Aztec empire and moved into the rugged highlands of the central plateau of Mexico, where the climate and topography made agriculture difficult, but there was excellent forage for cattle and sheep. There was a ready market for their meat when the rich silver strikes were made at Zaeateeas in 1546 and Guanajuato in 1554.

“San Juan de los Rios became the center of most livestock movements. Centrally located and conveniently situated at a ford of the river, it became a point of registration where herds being moved south or north were counted and had the brands checked and verified by appointed justices. By 1582 it was estimated that more than 100,000 cows, 200,000 sheep, and 10,000 horses were grazing on a range 9 leagues square north of San Juan …. While these ranches were primarily stock-grazing ventures, supplementary farming on a commercial scale accompanied them wherever there was enough rainfall and most of the cattlemen raised foodstuffs for their family and retainers” (Morrisey, 1957 – pg 27).

Painting: Hernan Cortez, who was the first to push for a transfer of the agriculture of old Spain to the New World. Unknown artist. Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando. Wikimedia.  

 Bibliography:

Crosby, A.W. (1972) The Columbian exchange: Biological and cultural consequences of 1492. Greenwood Press, Westport, CT.

Hancock, J.F. (2022) World agriculture before and after 1492: The legacy of the Columbian exchange. Springer, New York.

Morrisey, R. J. (1957). Colonial Agriculture in New Spain. Agricultural History, 31(3), 24-29.

Sluyter, A. (1996) The Ecological Origins and Consequences of Cattle Ranching in Sixteenth-Century New Spain. Geographical Review 86: 161-177

Whittaker, A.P. (1929) The Spanish contribution to American agriculture.  Agricultural History 3(1):1-14.

Columbian Exchange: Crop and livestock introductions into the Caribbean

To acclimatize the European population to the new lands, Columbus imported most of the widely grown European crop species. As Crosby (1972 – pg. 67) tells it: “The history of European horticulture in the Americas really begins with the second voyage of Columbus, when he returned to Española with seventeen ships, 1,200 men and cuttings for the planting of wheat, chickpeas, melons, onions, radishes, salad greens, grape vines, sugarcane, and stone fruits for the founding of gardens”. It was clear to Columbus and his sovereigns that to persist, the colony had to be self-sufficient in its food production and would prefer the crops and livestock they grew up with. After their successful introduction, there would be no further expense to the peninsular treasury.

In the Caribbean and Pacific Coastlands, very few of the crops in the Mediterranean crop assemblage turned out to be adapted because they required a cold temperature signal for regular growth and reproduction. Wheat failed, along with grapes and olives. However, if the colonists could live without their bread, wine, and oil, many of the other garden and orchard plants flourished. In Oviedo’s chronicle Historia general de las Indias (1523), he remarks that there were growing in the colony “countless groves of orange trees, citrons, limes and lemons, both sweet and sour which equaled the best of Sevilla and Cordova, and many fig and pomegranate trees” (Morrisey, 1957 – pg. 24).

The first group of livestock was brought to the Americas by Columbus on his second voyage in 1493. It consisted of horses, dogs, pigs, cattle, chickens, sheep, and goats. This European livestock absolutely thrived in the New World. As Crosby (1972 – pg. 75) relates: “One who watched the Caribbean Islands from space during the years from 1492 to 1550 or so might have surmised that the object of the game going on was to replace the people with pigs, dogs, and cattle. Disease and ruthless exploitation had, for all practical purposes, destroyed the Indigenous people of Española by the 1520s …. and in their place were incredible numbers of livestock.” Particularly successful were the pigs, numbering in the tens of thousands within a decade.

“The animals, preyed upon by few or no American predators, troubled by few or no American diseases, and left to feed freely upon the rich grasses and roots of wild fruits reproduced rapidly”. Pigs proved extremely well adapted to the Caribbean, and soon were running wild in the thousands. Cattle also flourished – a stray herd of 30 – 40 animals could grow 10 folds in 3 to 4 years.  Great numbers of pigs and cattle were soon roaming free across the Antilles, including Espanola, Cuba, Puerto Rico, and Jamaica.

The first horses to exist in America since the Pleistocene also arrived with Columbus in 1493. “The transatlantic voyage was not an easy one for horses… But the price for getting them to America was worth paying, and many of them were loaded on vessels bound for Espanola.” Columbus established ranches to be run by stockmen he had included among his colonists. “By 1501, that Island had twenty or thirty [horses], and by 1503, there were at the very least, no fewer than sixty or seventy (Crosby, 1972 – pg. 80).” When Cortez sailed in 1519 to the coast of Yucatán to invade the Aztec Empire, he had 16 horses from this stock.

Illustration: Herrera y Tordesillas, Antonio de. 1725. The Manner of Hunting on ye Continent of America. Accession no. 07324b. The John Carter Brown Library at Brown University.

Bibliography:

Crosby, A.W. (1972) The Columbian exchange: Biological and cultural consequences of 1492. Greenwood Press, Westport, CT.

Hancock, J.F. (2022) World agriculture before and after 1492: The legacy of the Columbian exchange. Springer, New York.

Morrisey, R. J. (1957). Colonial Agriculture in New Spain. Agricultural History, 31(3), 24-29.

Columbian Exchange: Spread of the Spanish invaders across the Americas

In the 16^th century, the Spanish conquered and colonized the Americas at breathtaking speed. It took only about 75 years for them to implant an indelible footprint across most of the continent.

Unlike the conquistadors in Spanish America who followed him, Columbus made no large-scale conquest of the indigenous Taino people. Instead, he established a settlement at La Isabela, in today’s Dominican Republic, from which he explored the interior of the Island for gold and silver and imposed a brutal tribute system on the local Tainos. The Taino were sent out to pan for gold on the islands, and they were expected to produce food for the colonists. He also introduced European crops and livestock “to acclimatize the European population to the new lands and open a space for the cultivation of cash crops intended for European consumption” (Paravisini-Gebert, 2016 – pg. 11).

The Spanish trusts

From Hispaniola the Spanish conquest spread in two directions, one to Panama and then Mexico, and the other to Peru and then Chile.   The first thrush was into Mexico from 1509 forward. Hernán Cortés invaded Mesoamerica’s highly structured Aztec Empire with the aid of many indigenous allies. At that time, the Aztec Empire was a fragile confederation of city-states, and the Spanish were able to convince the frustrated leaders of the subordinate states and one unconquered one (Tlaxcala) to join them. Following an earlier expedition through the Yucatan lead by Juan de Grijalva,  Hernán Cortés began his campaign against the Aztec Empire in 1519 and with his coalition army captured the emperor Cuauhtémoc and the capital of the Aztec Empire, Tenochtitlan in 1521. The Spanish then campaigned against the Maya of the Yucatán Peninsula and Guatemala, the Tarascans (Purépecha) of northwestern Michoacan, and the Chichimec in northern Mexico.

The war of the Spanish against the mightiest empire in the Americas – the Inca of the Peruvian highlands – began a little later in 1531 and was a long and much more protracted affair. It began when Francisco Pizarro at Tumbes led his army up the Andes Mountains to Cajamarca. There Atahualpa, the emperor of the Inca, was enjoying the hot springs and preparing a march to Cuzco, his brothers kingdom. Pizarro with his Andean allies captured and deceitfully strangled the emperor after he paid a huge ransom in 1532, but the conquest of the Incas didn’t end for another 40 years until the last stronghold of Vilcabamba (1500 m northeast of Cusco) was conquered in 1572. The Spanish were greatly aided in their invasion by a civil war between the supporters the Emperor Atahualpa and his brother Huáscar, and the help of several Indigenous nations that had been historically repressed by the Incas. 

Pattern of Spanish colonization

As each new area of Mexico, Central and South America was opened by conquest, Spanish immigrants rapidly followed. By 1600, the Spanish had settled in a broad band across highland Mexico, a strip of the Gulf Caribbeans, the Andean and Central American highlands, Chile and Coastal Peru, and Argentina and Paraguay. Large scale migration north of Mexico would wait another 150 years.

In the 1500s, some 175,000 Castilian settlers had migrated into a large heterogeneous area stretching some 9500 kilometers and 88 degrees of latitude from New Mexico to the isle of Chiloe. By the time the English began settling Virginia, the total Spanish population of Hispanic America was 275,000 people, and Mexico City had some 40,000 Spanish inhabitants (Butzer, 1991).

The regions settled by the Spanish encompassed many different agricultural zones. Highland Mexico was temperate and montane – similar to the interior Spanish plateaus, the Meseta.  The Andean and Central American Highlands were also temperate and montane but warmer. The strip through the Gulf-Caribbeans consisted of humid tropical lowlands. Chile and Coastal Peru were arid to subhumid, coastal lowlands, that were the best ecological match for the Mediterranean agrosystem of Spain. Argentina and Paraguay were subtropical, subhumid lowlands (Butzer, 1995).

Engraving: The Inca–Spanish confrontation in the Battle of Cajamarca. Girolamo Benzoni (c. 1519—after 1572). 

Bibliography:

Butzer, K.W. (1991) Spanish Colonization of the New World: Cultural Continuity and Change in Mexico.  Erdkunde 45: 205-219.

Butzer, K. W.  (1995) Biological transfer, agricultural change, and environmental implications of 1492. In: R. R. Duncan (ed.). International germplasm transfer – Past and present. Crop Society of America, Madison, Wisconsin. 23:1-29

Hancock, J.F. (2022) World Agriculture Before and after 1492: Legacy of the Columbian Exchange. Springer

Paravisini-Gebert, L. (2016) Food, biodiversity, extinctions: Caribbean fauna and the struggle for food security during the conquest of the New World. Journal of West Indian Literature. 24:11-26

Colonial North American History: New England cod and the Revolutionary War

In the 17^th century, the New England colonies began trading heavily with both the British and French West Indies. These islands of the Caribbean focused heavily on plantation sugar production and became dependent on the American colonies for their staple foods and household necessities. The New England colonies shipped fish, horses, pine boards, cattle and candles to the Caribbean in return for mostly rum, molasses and sugar.

In the mid-1700s, Rhode Island and Massachusetts began to produce their own rum, which came to be the fulcrum of a “triangular trade’ associated with slaves. By the Revolutionary War, there were 140 rum distilleries in the thirteen North American colonies, 97 of which were in New England. To feed their factories, the colonists imported over 6.5 million gallons of molasses from the West Indies.

Dried cod was the primary commodity exchanged for the enormous quantity of molasses needed for the distilleries. When the American Revolution broke out, there were 10,000 fisherman in New England, about eight percent of the total adult male population.

Buildup to war

The British Parliament passed the Molasses Act in 1733, imposing a duty on molasses imported from outside the British colonies. It was enacted because the powerful British plantation owners in the Caribbean did not appreciate the British colonists buying from their French competitors. The colonial distillers, of course, cried bloody murder about the Molasses Act fearing it would dig deeply into their profits. However, the act was only weakly enforced and as a result had only minimal economic ramifications. Even so, the act was considered “taxation without representation” and was one of the first steps leading to the Revolutionary War.

In 1764, to replenish their war ravaged coffers after the French and Indian Wars, Parliament passed the Sugar Act to replace the Molasses Act. It placed a duty on sugar produced in the Caribbean islands, and a wide range of products imported into the colonies including indigo, coffee, wine, silks and linen cloth.  In addition, Parliament banned all trade with the French in North America.  

While the weak Molasses Act had been designed to collect revenue solely from molasses producers outside the British sphere, the sugar act encompassed all British generated sugar and was to be rigorously enforced. Now that the treat of attack by the French and Indians was gone in North America, the colonies were enraged by this new duty and actively resisted it.  To a large extent, the Sugar Act was the straw that broke the camel’s back and pushed the colonies to declare independence.

The Sugar Act meant that most of the dried fish caught and processed in New England could no longer be sold. A large part of their market had been the French Sugar Islands. In addition, it crippled their rum manufacturing and associate slave trade, by jacking up the price of British molasses and preventing its acquisition from the French colonies. Fishing vessels lay idle in Massachusetts harbors and the fishermen had to seek other employment.

Cod fisherman in the war

A substantial number of cod fisherman served during the Revolutionary War. As foot solders they laid siege to British forces at Boston, and they mounted guns on their fishing vessels to make them into warships. The former fishing fleets became privateers or part of state navies, harassing British shipping and taking supplies meant for their armies. Fish merchants like Marblehead’s Elbridge Gerry and Jeremiah Lee helped buy military supplies through their contacts in Spain and the West Indies.

The Fish merchant John Glover of Marblehead became one of the Revolutions greatest heroes. He worked with other Whigs in 1770 to take control of the town government from pro-British supporters.  He served on a Committee of Correspondence in 1774 that coordinated anti-British action across the colonies. He served in the local Committee of Inspection that enforced prohibitions on trade with England that was passed by the First Continental Congress.

Glover raised ten companies of 500 fishermen and sailors and was named a colonel in the 14th Continental Regiment, the “Marbleheaders”. Glover and his Regiment helped bottle up the British army in Boston and they built a series of forts along the Massachusetts coast to repel British attempts to press men and gather supplies. He led the effort to convert maritime vessels into warships, called “Washington’s Schooners”, the first American naval fleet. Clover and his men were also the ones who ferried Washington and the Continental Army over the Delaware River on Christmas Eve, 1776 to surprise the British at Trenton.

Illustration: Washington Crossing the Delaware by Emanuel Leutze, MMA-NYC, 1851

Bibliography:

Anonymous, (undated) A hero of 1776. St. Paul’s Church, National Historical Site, New York https://www.nps.gov/sapa/planyourvisit/overlooked-hero_a-hero-of-1776.htm

Harper, D. (2003) Slavery in the north. http://slavenorth.com/index.html

Kurlansky, M. (1997) A biography of the fish that changed the world: Cod. Vintage: Canada

Magra, C. P. (2009). The fisherman’s cause: Atlantic commerce and maritime dimensions of the American Revolution. Cambridge University Press.

For more histories of exploration and trade: https://www.worldhistory.org/user/geneticsofberries

Colonial North American History: How the cod fisheries built New England

When the English began to explore the coast of New England in the 1600s, the early explorers were astonished to find a sea teaming with cod. In 1602, Bartholomew Gosnold named a prominent peninsula Cape Cod after observing scores of fish along its shores. In his exploration of the coast of Maine in 1605, George Waymouth reported that there were huge, plentiful cods – some of which were “five foot long and three feet about”. After John Smith charted the New England coastline in 1614, he returned with a hold filled with 60,000 dried and salted cod. Gosnold, Waymouth and Smith had anticipated that the wealth of New England would be in gold and whales, but they found it’s early bounty to be its great schools of cod.

In 1616, Smith published a map and description of “North Virginia” based on his journeys. The Pilgrims who would settle in Plymouth in 1620 studied his map beforehand and were drawn to the area referred to as Cape Cod. Their leader William Bradford wrote: “The major part [of our party] inclined to go to Plymouth, chiefly for the hope of present profit to be made by the fish that was found in that country”.

Unfortunately, the Pilgrims arrived in the New World with no fishing tackle and no experience at all with fishing. Many starved that first winter even though fish, lobsters and mussels were plentiful in the seas around them.  Unbeknownst to them, the coast of New England was already supporting a European fishing fleet. English ships had begun fishing there in 1616, and in 1621, the year after the Pilgrims arrival, at least ten British ships were fishing for cod in New England waters. Another 37 came the following winter and in 1624, there were 50 British ships working off the coast.

Eventually, the Pilgrims “sent back to England for equipment and advice, and with the help of Englishman whom they referred to as merchant adventurers they gradually became fisherman.”  (Kurlansky, 1997 – pg 70). Successful fishing stations were soon established in Salem, Gloucester, Marblehead, and Penobscot Bay. By 1624, no less than 50 vessels from Gloucester fished with hand lines in the offing of Maine and Massachusetts. In 1640, the Massachusetts Bay Colony caught 300,000 cod.  

The New England colonies came to be built on cod. Only 25 years after the first Pilgrims had arrived, New Englanders were conducting a vigorous international trade in cod. They started trading with the Spanish Basque port of Bilbao and were soon shipping cod to the West Indies. The colonists sold their highest quality cod to Europe where they could get top dollar and their poorer quality to the Sugar Islands to feed the slaves. Back to the colonies from Spain came wine, fruit, iron and coal, and back from the Caribbean came sugar, molasses, tobacco, cotton and salt.  

In the early 1700s, a huge rum producing industry emerged in New England based on the molasses shipped from the Caribbean for cod. Tiny Rhode Island by itself had more than 30 distilleries, 22 of them in Newport. Some of the rum was for local use: rum was ubiquitous in lumber camps and on fishing ships. But primarily it became a leg in the infamous “Triangular Trade” where rum went to Africa from New England to buy slaves, which were sold in the Caribbean and Southern colonies.  

On the eve of the Revolution, the slave trade based on cod and rum was at the very core of the New England economy. The slave trade “wove itself into the entire regional economy. The Massachusetts slave trade gave work to coopers, tanners, sailmakers, and ropemakers. Countless agents, insurers, lawyers, clerks, and scriveners handled the paperwork for slave merchants … When the British in 1763 proposed a tax on sugar and molasses, Massachusetts merchants pointed out that these were staples of the slave trade, and the loss of that would throw 5,000 seamen out of work in the colony and idle almost 700 ships”.

Illustration: The Atlantic cod (Gadus morhua) 

Bibliography

Harper, D. (2003) Slavery in the north. http://slavenorth.com/index.html

Kurlansky, M. (1997) A biography of the fish that changed the world: Cod. Vintage: Canada

For more histories of exploration and trade: https://www.worldhistory.org/user/geneticsofberries

Columbian Exchange: Spanish conquest and rule in the Americas

Among the most important Spanish conquests in the Americas were those of Hernán Cortez against the Aztecs of Mexico, and Francisco Pizzaro against the Inca of Peru. In both these confrontations, proud empires were completely subjugated, and their people made serfs.  

Hernán Cortés invaded the Aztec Empire with the aid of many indigenous allies. At that time, the Aztec Empire was a fragile confederation of city-states, and the Spanish were able to convince the frustrated leaders of the subordinate states and one unconquered one (Tlaxcala) to join them. Cortés began his campaign against the Empire in 1519 and with his coalition army captured the emperor Cuauhtémoc and the capital, Tenochtitlan, in 1521. The Spanish then campaigned against the Maya of the Yucatán Peninsula and Guatemala, the Tarascans (Purépecha) of northwestern Michoacan, and the Chichimec in northern Mexico.

The war of the Spanish against the mightiest empire in the America – the Inca of the Peruvian highlands – began when Francisco Pizarro, with his Andean allies captured and strangled the Emperor, Atahualpa in 1532, but it didn’t end for another 40 years until the last Inca stronghold of Vilcabamba (1500 m northeast of Cusco) was conquered in 1572. The Spanish were greatly aided initially by a civil war between the supporters of the Emperor Atahualpa and his brother Huáscar, and the help of several indigenous nations that had been historically repressed by the Incas. 

The Spanish colonial economy 

To govern their New World lands, the Spanish organized colonists and native people into two distinct social orders or republics – Spaniards and Amerindians (la republica de los indios). The Spaniards would supervise the land, run the mines, and staff the colonial administrations, and the Amerindians would provide the labor to feed, house and clothe the Spanish. In return, the Amerindians were promised military protection and instruction about the saving grace of God. The Spanish enforced this system of stratification through three institutions: the requerimiento, the encomienda, and the repartimiento.

When soldiers first encountered the native peoples, they were supposed to read aloud in Spanish the requerimiento, which told the natives they had to submit to the authority of the Spanish crown and learn of Christ’s word or face the sword. The conquistadors charged with reading it usually did so in Spanish, which of course the indigenous people did not understand. Other conquistadors would read it from the decks of their ships, out of earshot. It was also read while standing outside of villages, with no villagers even in sight, or to their backs as they walked away.

Once the indigenous people were subjugated, hereditary ownership of their native land was awarded in huge swaths to nobles and officers who, through the encomienda, received tribute and labor from the Indian villages. The encomiendas included all the indigenous cities, communities and families that resided therein. The indigenous occupants were required to provide tribute of anything the land proved to hold – gold, crops, foodstuffs, and animals, and they also owed a portion of their time to work on plantations or mines. 

The encomienda system was thinly disguised slavery, and the encomenderos did everything in their power to strip the natives of their culture and worked them to the bone. The Ameridians were often forced to choose between fulfilling quotas and starving to death or not making the quotas and suffering from the often-lethal wrath of the overseers. The Crown passed laws to make it clear that the indigenous people were not meant to be slaves and were in fact Spanish subjects with certain rights, but these laws were met with great hostility and resistance.

In a major crown reform in 1542, known as the New Laws, encomendero families were restricted to holding the grant for two generations rather than in perpetuity, eliciting a huge cry. The widespread protest forced the crown to back down for a while, but in the early 1600s, the king replaced the encomienda with the repartimiento, where government officials (corregidor de indios) took over the regulation of indigenous laborers. The Amerindians were still drafted to work for cycles of varying lengths of time on farms, mines, workshops, and public projects, but at least there was some oversight of their wellbeing. A major reason for this move was that so many Amerindians had died from disease and oppression that vast stretches of land were now unoccupied and without any potential labor.

In the 17^th century another agricultural system called the hacienda evolved from the encomienda, where land was still granted to private individuals, but free labor had to be recruited on a permanent or casual basis. The desperate poor had little choice but to accept the pitiful compensation offered. The haciendas would grow in size, power and influence for 200 years, even as the political and ruling systems changed hands from the Spanish. It wasn’t until the 20^th century that land reforms abolished haciendas across most of Latin America.

Bibliography:

Batchelder, R.W. and Sanchez, N. (2013).  The encomienda and the optimizing imperialist: an interpretation of Spanish imperialism in the Americas. Public Choice 156: 45-60.

Lockhart, J. (1969). Encomienda and Hacienda: The Evolution of the Great Estate in the Spanish Indies. The Hispanic American Historical Review 49(3): 411–429.

Illustration:  The conquest of Mexico by Hernando Cortes – Nicolas Eustache Maurin (died in 1850)/Wikimedia Commons/Public Domain

For more histories of agriculture and trade: https://www.worldhistory.org/user/geneticsofberries

Early Modern: Rubber hits the road

The production of rubber products was a skill known to the ancient Aztecs, Incas, and Maya of Mesoamerica, Central and South America. The Mayans used latex from the castilloa-rubber trees blended with morning glory sap to produce a wide array of products including arrow quills, shoes, religious objects, breast plates and waterproofed clothing. They were known to dip their feet into the milky sap and allow it to harden over smoky fires to produce waterproof shoes. 

Balls were by far the most popular ancient rubber product. Games were played with them by indigenous people all across the Americas and they were traded thousands of miles from their origin. Columbus was the first European to report on rubber on his second trip to Haiti. He observed the natives playing with rubber balls that had a far superior bounce to the European leather and wood balls of his crew. Columbus noted that the strange, elastic substance was produced from the milky latex dribbling from lacerated trees and bushes.

Industrialization of rubber

While the Spanish and Portuguese explorers were the first to discover the use of rubber the New World, they didn’t see any great economic value to it and its widespread use in Europe laid dormant for centuries. This all changed in the 19^th century when innovators figured out how to use rubber to make waterproofing, gaskets and tires, and by the mid-1850s, the world could no longer run without it.  The source of that rubber came from trees of Hevea brasiliensis tapped across Amazonia in South America. During peak production from 1890 to 1920, over 60% of the world’s rubber came from an area about 2/3 the size of all of Europe. It encompassed parts of what are now Columbia, Ecuador, Peru, Bolivia, Brazil and Venezuela.

As demand for rubber grew, seeds of rubber trees were eventually smuggled out of Brazil and propagated, to establish rubber plantations all across the tropics of Southeast Asia. The first significant acreages were established at the turn of the 18^th century in Ceylon and the Malay Peninsula, and by 1912 there were over a million acres spread across Ceylon, Malaya, Sumatra, the Dutch West Indies, Borneo, French Indochina, and Australian New Guinea.  The wild Industry was effectively finished off by 1922, when its production fell below 10 % of the world’s rubber.

Ford’s big failure

The most herculean effort to obtain alternate rubber sources was undertaken by Henry Ford. He was convinced that he could tame the Amazon Forest, by clear cutting and replacing the native vegetation with rubber trees.  He set out on a massive scale in 1928, building a city called Fordlandia with a hospital, cinemas, cafeterias, shops of all kinds, paved streets, and tidy bungalows. He hired a work force of 3,000 local peasants to live in his city, remove the forest, mill the wood and set the new plantations. Ford provided them with free medical and dental care, gyms, fair prices on commodities and a good wage. Within a year almost 1,500 acres of rainforest were bulldozed and burned, and by 1934 another 9,000 acres had been removed. Tens of thousands of rubber seedlings were planted.  

Unfortunately, the whole operation was a dismal failure. The workers rioted over the Midwestern food and the rigid work schedule imposed upon them and at least 2/3 were fired or left. Most importantly, the rubber trees did poorly, and the vast majority died. By clear cutting the forest, a virtual desert was produced with little nutrients available in the thin tropical soil, and no protection from the tropical sun. Added to this, diseases and pests were able to rapidly hop from plant to plant, decimating huge surface areas rapidly.  Ford finally gave up in 1945, after investing 10 million dollars and never having visited the site himself.

World War II and rubber today

World War II turned the rubber Industry upside down. As the War progressed on the eastern front, the plantations of East Asia were eventually seized by the Japanese and essentially laid fallow while the workers were diverted into other jobs supporting the Japanese war efforts like the Burma Railroad. In response, the Germans and Americans learned to generate synthetic rubber.  

At the end of the World War II, the natural rubber plantations of Southeast Asia returned to producing huge quantities of rubber, picking up where they had left off. Overall demand for native rubber had  remained high because for many applications natural rubber is superior.  It is an extremely important component of tires, and most of the natural rubber now goes into tire production. Overall, natural rubber comprises 30 – 40 % of the rubber used worldwide today.

Adapted from: Hancock, J.F. (2017) Chapter 8. Rubber. Plantation crops: Power and plunder, Exploitation and evolution. Rutledge.

Photo: Kleingrothe, C.J. – Tapping of a 23-year-old rubber tree on a plantation in Malaysia – circa 1910

For more histories of agriculture and trade: https://www.worldhistory.org/user/geneticsofberries