Matthew Restall - Latin America in Colonial Times

Few milestones in human history are as dramatic and momentous as the meeting of three great civilizations on American soil in the sixteenth century. Latin America in Colonial Times presents that story in an engaging but scholarly new package, revealing how a new civilization Latin America emerged from the encounter. The authors give equal attention to the Spanish and Portuguese conquerors and settlers, to the African slaves they brought across the Atlantic, and to the indigenous peoples whose lands were invaded. From the dawn of empires in the fifteenth century, through the Conquest age of the sixteenth, to the end of empire in the nineteenth, Latin America in Colonial Times combines broad brushstrokes with the anecdotal details that bring the era to life.

Matthew Restall is Edwin Erle Sparks Professor of Latin American History at Pennsylvania State University. His areas of specialization include colonial Yucatn and Mexico, Maya history, the Spanish Conquest, and Africans in Spanish America. Since 1995 he has published some forty articles and essays and a dozen books, including 2012 and the End of the World: The Western Roots to the Maya Apocalypse (2011), The Black Middle: Africans, Mayas, and Spaniards in Colonial Yucatan (2009); Mesoamerican Voices (Cambridge, 2005); and Seven Myths of the Spanish Conquest (2003). Professor Restall also serves as coeditor of the journal Ethnohistory .

Kris Lane is France V. Scholes Chair of Colonial Latin American History at Tulane University. He has published widely on slavery, witchcraft, mining, and piracy in the Andes region of South America and is the author or editor of multiple books, including Defense of the Western Conquests (2010), Colour of Paradise: Emeralds in the Age of Gunpowder Empires (2010), and Quito 1599: City and Colony in Transition (2002). Professor Lane has served as Visiting Professor at the National University of Colombia, Bogot, and the University of Leiden, Netherlands, and currently edits the interdisciplinary journal Colonial Latin American Review .

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We are grateful to the many colleagues and scholars who have contributed to the development of this book. Although we used primary archival sources for many of our examples and case studies, we have inevitably drawn on the works of dozens of other historians for most of our information. Because the textbook format does not allow for individual citations, please accept this as a general acknowledgment (you know who you are: thank you!).

We have greatly enjoyed and appreciated working with Eric Crahan and his colleagues at Cambridge University Press; thank you for your patience and hard work.

We also thank Rob Schwaller and his Penn State students in History 178 (spring 2006) and Mark Christensen and his Penn State students in History 178 (fall 2008) for their feedback on earlier drafts of the book.

Finally, we raise our glasses to James Lockhart and Stuart Schwartz, in whose footsteps we have sought to tread in numerous ways (this book being but one), and to whom the book is a humble tribute.

CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS SAILED FROM SPAIN, wrote one Spaniard in the sixteenth century, to mix the world together and give to those strange lands the form of our own. That mixing of the world together, or the discovery of the new world, as Europeans of the day put it, was characterized by the Paduan philosopher Buonamico in 1539 as the greatest achievement of human history, comparable not only to Antiquity, but to immortality. In various forms that sentiment has been repeated many times during the past five centuries; one historian recently called the European discovery and conquest of America and its native peoples the most astonishing encounter of our history.

With as many motivations as there were individuals, men and women sailed across the Atlantic Ocean seeking power, wealth, social status, religious mission, scientific knowledge, and personal adventure. At the same time, they often failed to recognize that the lands they claimed as their own were already occupied. Tens of millions of Native Americans had over thousands of years developed sophisticated societies from which the newcomers could learn a great deal. Yet despite European attempts to reshape the Americas into known forms, Native Americans and the millions of Africans brought against their will by Europeans contributed as much as willing newcomers did to the formation of colonial societies. Native American foods, meanwhile, such as maize, potatoes, chocolate, and chili peppers, quickly revolutionized world cuisine and spurred population growth.

This book tells the story of that astonishing encounter among Iberians, Africans, and Native Americans and then examines the many regional stories and general social and economic patterns that developed in its aftermath. But the book does more than simply tell stories about colonial Latin America. Our concern is also with the question that has been raised as often as the discovery has been called history's greatest event the question of how. How had Europeans come to think that they could simply give to those strange lands the form of their own? How were so few Spaniards able to conquer the great and powerful empires of the Aztecs and the Incas? How were small numbers of Spanish and Portuguese settlers able to build, maintain, and defend such vast colonies across three hundred years?