Enslaved Native Laborers at Potosi
Since the Spanish crown received one-fifth of all revenues from the mines of New Spain, as well as maintaining a monopoly over the mercury used to refine the silver ore into silver, it had an important stake in ensuring the mines' productivity. To this end, the crown granted colonial mine owners the right to conscript native peoples and gave them considerable freedom when it came to the treatment of the workers. This account, dated to about 1620, describes the conditions endured by these native laborers at Potosi (also discussed in Chapter 12).
Ccording to His Majesty's warrant, the mine owners on this massive range [at Potosi] have a right to the conscripted labor of 13,300 Indians in the working and exploitation of the mines, both those [mines] which have been discovered, those now discovered, and those which shall be discovered. It is the duty of the Corregidor [municipal governor] of Potosi to have them rounded up and to see that they come in from all the provinces between Cuzco. . . and as far as the frontiers of Tarija and Tomina. . . .
The conscripted Indians go up every Monday morning to the. . . foot of the range; the Corregidor arrives with all the provincial captains or chiefs who have charge of the Indians assigned him for his miner or smelter; that keeps him busy till 1 p. m., by which time the Indians are already turned over to these mine and smelter owners.
After each has eaten his ration, they climb up the hill, each to his mine, and go in, staying there from that hour until Saturday evening without coming out of the mine; their wives bring them food, but they stay constantly underground, excavating and carrying out the ore from which they get the silver. They all have tallow candles, lighted day and night; that is the light they work with, for as they are underground, they have need for it all the time. . . .
These Indians have different functions in the handling of the silver ore; some break it up with bar or pick, and dig down in, following the vein in the mine; others bring it up; others up above keep separating the good and the poor in piles; others are occupied in taking it down from the range to the mills on herds of llamas; every day they bring up more than 8,000 of these native beasts of burden for this task. These teamsters who carry the metal are not conscripted, but are hired.
Source: Antonio Vazquez de Espinosa, Compendium and Description of the West Indies, trans. Charles Upson Clark (Washington, DC: 1968), p. 62.
Questions for Analysis
1. From the tone of this account, what do you think was the narrator's purpose in writing? Who is his intended audience?
2. Reconstruct the conditions in which these laborers worked. What would you estimate to be the human costs of this week's labor? Why, for example, would a fresh workforce be needed every Monday?
Would be traded to distillers who used the sugary syrup to make rum. Loaded up with a consignment of rum, the slaver would return to the African coast to repeat the process. An alternative triangle might see cheap manufactured goods move from England to Africa, where they would be traded for slaves. Those slaves would then be shipped to Virginia and exchanged for tobacco, which would be shipped back to England to be processed and distributed.
Although the transatlantic slave trade was theoretically controlled by the governments of European colonial powers—Britain officially entered this trade in 1564, the year of William Shakespeare’s birth—private entrepreneurs and working-class laborers were active at every stage of the supply chain: in the ports of West Africa, where captured slaves cast their eyes on their homelands for the last time; on the ships where these captives were imprisoned; and in the slave markets of the Americas, as agents for the landowners and merchants who bid against one another to purchase the human chattel that had survived the terrible voyage.
Many other branches of the economy in Europe and the Americas were also linked to the slave trade: from the investors in Amsterdam, London, Lisbon, and Bordeaux who financed the slave trader’s journey, to the insurance brokers who negotiated complex formulas for protecting these investments, to the financial agents who offered a range of credit instruments, to those seeking to enter into the expensive and risky business of transatlantic trade. And this is to say nothing of the myriad ways in which the everyday lives of average people were bound to slavery. All those who bought the commodities produced by slave labor, or who manufactured the implements and weapons that enabled enslavement, were also implicated. The slave trade was not, as is sometimes assumed, a venture carried forward by a few unscrupulous men. It created wealth and prestige for every sector of European society, not merely for those who had direct contact with it. It was the engine that created the modern globalized economy.
Counting the Human Cost of the Slave Trade
The Portuguese were the first to bring African slaves to their sugarcane plantations in Brazil, in the 1540s. By this time, slavery was already crucial to the domestic economies of West African kingdoms. In the following decades, however, the ever-increasing demand for slaves would cause the permanent disintegration of political order in this region, by creating an incentive for war and raiding among rival tribes. Moreover, the increased traffic in human beings called for more highly systematized methods for corralling, sorting, and shipping them. At the end of the sixteenth century, accordingly, the Portuguese government established a fortified trading outpost on an island known as Luanda on the central African coast (near what is now Angola). Additional trading posts were then established at multiple places along the coast, to assist in processing the increasing number of captives.
On board ship, enslaved humans were shackled below decks in spaces barely wider than their own bodies, without sanitary facilities of any kind. It might seem surprising that the mortality rate on these voyages was relatively low: probably 10 or 11 percent. But this was only because the slaves chosen for transport were healthy to begin with, and slave traders were anxious to maintain their goods so as to sell at a profit. Those Africans who were actually transported, then, were already the hardy survivors of unimagi-
HOW SLAVES WERE STOWED ABOARD SHIP DURING THE MIDDLE PASSAGE. Men were "housed" on the right, women on the left, children in the middle. The human cargo was jammed onto platforms six feet wide without sufficient headroom to permit an adult to sit up. This diagram is from evidence gathered by English abolitionists and depicts conditions on the Liverpool slave ship Brookes.
Nable hardships. For in order to place the above statistic in a larger context, we need to consider how many would have died before the ships were ready to transport them. One historian has estimated that 36 out of 100 people captured in the African interior would perish in the six-month-long forced march to the coast of Angola. Another dozen or so would die in the prisons there. Eventually, perhaps 57 of the original 100 captives would be taken on board a slave ship. Some 51 would survive the journey and be sold into slavery on arrival. If the destination was Brazil’s sugar plantations, only 40 would still be alive after two years. In other words, the actual mortality rate of these new slaves was something more like 60 percent—and this doesn’t begin to account for their life expectancy.
The people consigned to this fate struggled against it, and their initiatives helped to shape the emerging Atlantic world. When the opportunity presented itself, slaves banded together in revolt—a perpetual possibility that haunted slave owners and led to draconian regimes of violence and punishment (as in ancient Rome; see Chapter 5). When revolt was impossible, there were other forms of resistance, among them suicide and infanticide. Above all, slaves sought to escape. Almost as soon as the slave trade escalated, there were communities of escaped slaves throughout the Americas. Many of these independent settlements were large enough to assert and defend their autonomy. One such community, founded in 1603 in the hinterlands of Brazil’s Pernambuco Province, persisted for over a century and had as many as 20,000 inhabitants. Most others were much smaller and more ephemeral, but their existence testifies to the limits of imperial authority at the fringes of the new American colonies.
CONFLICT AND COMPETITION IN EUROPE AND THE ATLANTIC WORLD
Most of Europe had enjoyed steady economic growth since the middle of the fifteenth century. The colonization of the Americas seemed to promise prosperity for the decades to come, while providing an outlet for European expansion and aggression. But in the second half of the sixteenth century, prolonged political, religious, and economic crises destabilized Europe. These crises were, in essential ways, the product of long-term developments within and between Europe’s most powerful states, but they were exacerbated by these same states’ imperial ambitions. Inevitably, then, European conflicts spread to European colonial holdings. Eventually, the outcome of these conflicts would determine which European powers were best positioned to enlarge their presence in the Atlantic world—and beyond.
New World Silver and Old World Economies
In the latter half of the sixteenth century, an unprecedented inflation in prices profoundly destabilized the European economy. And because nothing on this scale had ever happened before, even during the Roman Empire’s turbulent third century (see Chapter 6), it caused widespread panic. Although the twentieth century would see more dizzying inflations than this, skyrocketing prices were a terrifying novelty in this era, causing what some historians have termed a “price revolution.”
Two developments in particular underlay this phenomenon. The first was demographic. After the plague-induced decline of the fourteenth century (see Chapter 11), Europe’s population grew from roughly 50 million people
PEASANTS HARVESTING WHEAT, SIXTEENTH CENTURY.
The inflation that swept through Europe in the late sixteenth century affected poorer workers most acutely as the abundant labor supply dampened wages while at the same time the cost of food rose because of poor harvests.
POPULATION GROWTH c. 1600. ¦ In what regions did the population grow more rapidly? ¦ Why were the largest gains in population on the coasts? ¦How would urbanization affect patterns of life and trade?
In 1450 to 90 million in 1600: that is, it increased by nearly 80 percent in a relatively short span of time. Yet Europe’s food supply remained nearly constant, meaning that food prices were driven sharply higher by the greater demand for basic commodities. Meanwhile, the enormous influx of silver and gold from Spanish America flooded Europe’s previously cash-poor economy (see Chapter 12). This sudden availability of ready coin drove prices higher still.
How? In just four years, from 1556 to 1560, about 10 million ducats’ worth of silver passed through the Spanish
Port of Seville: that is roughly equivalent to 10 billion U. S. dollars in today’s currency. (A single gold ducat, the standard unit of monetary exchange for long-distance trade, would be worth nearly a thousand dollars.) Consequently, the market was flooded with coins whose worth quickly became debased because there were so many of them. And still silver poured in, cheapening the coinage even more: between 1576 and 1580, the amount of imported silver had doubled, becoming 20 million ducats; and between 1591 and 1595 it more than quadrupled. Because most of this money was used by the Spanish crown to pay its armies and the many creditors who had financed its imperial ventures, a huge volume of coinage was put quickly into circulation through European banks, making the problem of inflation even more widespread. Since some people suddenly had more money to pay for goods and services, those who supplied these commodities could charge higher and higher prices. “I learned a proverb here,” said a French traveler in Spain in 1603: “Everything costs a lot, except silver.”
In this climate, aggressive entrepreneurs profited from financial speculation, landholders from the rising prices of agricultural produce, and merchants from increasing demand for luxury goods. But laborers were caught in a vice. Prices were rising steeply, but wages were not keeping pace owing to the population boom that kept labor relatively cheap. As the cost of food staples rose, poor people had to spend an ever-greater percentage of their paltry incomes on necessities. In Flanders, for example, the cost of wheat tripled between 1550 and 1600; grain prices in Paris quadrupled; and the overall cost of living in England more than doubled in Shakespeare’s lifetime. When disasters such as wars or bad harvests drove grain prices out of their reach, as they frequently did, the poor starved to death.
The price revolution also placed new pressures on the sovereign states of Europe. Inflation depressed the real value of money, so fixed incomes derived from taxes and rents yielded less and less actual wealth. Governments were therefore forced to raise taxes merely to keep their revenues constant. Yet most states needed even more revenue than before, because they were engaging in more wars and warfare was becoming increasingly expensive. The only recourse, then, was to raise taxes precipitously. Hence, governments faced continuous threats of defiance and even armed resistance from their citizens, who could not afford to foot these bills.
Although prices rose less rapidly after 1600, as both population growth and the flood of silver began to slow, the ensuing decades were a time of economic stagnation. A few areas—notably the Netherlands (see below)—bucked the trend, and the rich were usually able to hold their own, but the laboring poor made no advances. Wages continued to rise far more slowly than prices. Indeed, the lot of the poor in many places deteriorated further, as helpless civilians were plundered by rapacious tax collectors, looting soldiers, or sometimes both. In England, peasants who had been dispossessed of property or driven off once-common lands were branded as vagrants, and vagrancy itself became a criminal offense. It was this population of newly impoverished Europeans who became the indentured servants or deported criminals of the American colonies.
The Legacy of the Reformation:
Compounding these economic problems were the wars that erupted within many European states. As we began to observe in Chapter 9, most medieval kingdoms were created through the colonization of smaller, traditionally autonomous territories—either by conquest or through marriage alliances with ruling families. Now these enlarged monarchies began to make ever-greater financial claims on their citizens while at the same time demanding religious uniformity among them. The result was regional and civil conflict, as local populations and even elites rebelled against the centralizing demands of monarchs who often embraced a different religion than that of their subjects. Although the Peace of Augsburg (1555) had established that each territory would follow the religion of its ruler, in an effort to end civil strife (see Chapter 13), it was based on the premise that no state can tolerate religious diversity. This was a dangerous precedent, considering the rapid spread of new religious ideas throughout Europe and their export to the New World.
France was the first of these monarchies to be enflamed by religious warfare. Calvinist missionaries from Geneva had made significant headway there (Calvin himself was French), assisted by the conversion of many aristocratic Frenchwomen, who in turn converted their husbands. By the 1560s, French Calvinists—known as Huguenots (HEW-guh-nohz)—made up between 10 and 20 percent of the population. But there was no open warfare until dynastic politics led factions within the government to break down along religious lines, pitting the (mostly southern) Huguenots against the (mostly northern) Catholic aristocracy. In some places, mobs incited by members of the clergy on both sides used this opportunity to settle local scores.
While the Huguenots were not strong enough to win any major scuffle, there were too many to be ignored, and in 1572 the two sides almost brokered a truce: the presumptive heir to the throne, Prince Henry of Navarre— who had become a Protestant—was to marry the Catholic sister of the reigning king, Henry III. But the compromise was undone by the Queen Mother, Catherine de Medici, whose Catholic faction plotted to kill all the Huguenot leaders while they were assembled in Paris for her daughter’s wedding. In the early morning of St. Bartholomew’s Day (August 24), most of these Protestant aristocrats were
HENRY IV OF FRANCE. The rule of Henry of Navarre (r. 1589-1610) initiated the Bourbon dynasty that would rule France until 1792 and ended the bitter civil war between Catholic and Huguenot factions.
Murdered in their beds, and thousands of humble Protestants were slaughtered in the streets or drowned in the Seine. When word of the Parisian massacre spread to the provinces, local massacres proliferated.
Henry of Navarre escaped, along with his bride, but the war continued for more than two decades. Finally, Catherine’s death in 1589 was followed by that of her son, Henry III, who had produced no heir to supplant Henry of Navarre. He became Henry IV, renouncing his Protestant faith in order to placate France’s Catholic majority. Then, in 1598, Henry made a landmark effort to end conflict by issuing the Edict of Nantes, which recognized Catholicism as the official religion of the realm but enabled Protestants to practice their religion in specified places. This was an important step toward a policy of religious tolerance: for the first time, French Protestants were allowed to hold public office and to enroll in universities and work in hospitals, and they were even allowed to fortify some towns for their own military defense. And because the religious divide in
France had a regional component, the edict also reinforced a tradition of regional autonomy in southwestern France, in spite of the monarchy’s centralized power. The success of this effort can be measured by the fact that peace was maintained in France even after Henry IV was assassinated by a Catholic in 1610.
The wars of religion may be one reason that France did not enter the competition for Atlantic wealth until the seventeenth century, despite their early involvement in North American explorations. It was not until 1608 that French colonial settlements received much royal support, after which Catholic (but not Huguenot) immigration to “New France” was encouraged. Meanwhile, there were three failed attempts to establish French outposts in Portuguese Brazil, the last of which (in 1612-15) resulted only in the export of six Amazonian villagers to France, where they aroused great curiosity in an organized tour of French towns. The Brazilians’ Catholic hosts even arranged for them to be publicly baptized as part of an attempt to bolster support for the Catholic cause: an episode that further illustrates the strong connection between the expansion of European influence abroad and the politics of religion at home.
The Revolt of the Netherlands and the Dutch Trading Empire
Warfare between Catholics and Protestants also broke out in the Netherlands during this period. Controlled for almost a century by the same Habsburg family that ruled Spain and its overseas empire, the Netherlands had prospered through intense involvement with trade in the Atlantic world. Their inhabitants had the greatest per capita wealth in all Europe, and the metropolis of Antwerp was northern Europe’s leading commercial and financial center. So when the Spanish king and emperor Philip II (r. 1556-98) attempted to tighten his hold there in the 1560s, the fiercely independent Dutch cities resented this imperial intrusion and were ready to fight it.
This conflict took on a religious dynamic because Calvinism had spread into the Netherlands from France. Philip, an ardent defender of the Catholic faith, could not tolerate this combination of political and religious disobedience. When crowds began ransacking and desecrating Catholic churches throughout the country, Philip dispatched an army of 10,000 Spanish soldiers to wipe out Protestantism in his Dutch territories. A reign of terror ensued: some 12,000 people were rounded up on charges of heresy or sedition, thousands of whom were convicted and executed for treason.
PROTESTANTS RANSACKING A CATHOLIC CHURCH IN THE NETHERLANDS.
Protestant destruction of religious images provoked a stern response from Philip II. ¦ Why would Protestants have smashed statuary and other devotional artifacts?
These events catalyzed the Protestant opposition. A Dutch aristocrat, William of Orange, emerged as the antiSpanish leader and sought help from religious allies in France, Germany, and England. Organized bands of Protestant privateers (that is, privately owned ships) began harassing the Spanish navy in the waters of the North Atlantic. In 1572, William’s Protestant army seized control of the Netherlands’ northern provinces. Although William was assassinated in 1584, his efforts were instrumental in forcing the Spanish crown to recognize the independence of a northern Dutch Republic in 1609. Once united, these seven northern provinces became wholly Calvinist; the southern region, still largely Catholic, remained under Spanish rule.
After gaining its independence, the new Dutch Republic emerged as the most prosperous European commercial empire of the seventeenth century. Indeed, its reach extended well beyond the Atlantic world, targeting the Indian Ocean and East Asia as well. In general, the Dutch colonial project owed more to the strategic “fort and factory” model of expansion favored by the Portuguese than to the Spanish technique of territorial conquest and settlement. For example, the Dutch established a colony on the Cape of Good Hope at the southern tip of Africa, which facilitated the eastward spread of their influence. Many of its early initiatives were spurred by the establishment of the Dutch East India Company, a private mercantile corporation that came to control Sumatra, Borneo, and the Moluccas (the so-called Spice Islands). This meant that the Dutch had a lucrative monopoly on the European trade in pepper, cinnamon, nutmeg, mace, and cloves. The company also secured an exclusive right to trade with Japan and maintained military and trading outposts in China and India, too.
In the Atlantic world itself, the Dutch did not have much of a significant presence. However, they did establish an outpost in North America, the colony known as New Amsterdam—until it was surrendered to the English in 1667, when it was renamed New York. Their remaining territorial holdings in the Atlantic were Dutch Guyana (present-day Surinam) on the coast of South America, and the islands of Curasao and Tobago in the Caribbean. But if the Dutch did not match the Spanish or the English in their accumulation of land, the establishment of a second merchant enterprise, the Dutch West India Company, allowed them to dominate the Atlantic slave trade with Africa after 1621.
In constructing this new transoceanic trading empire in slaves and spices, the Dutch pioneered a new financial mechanism for investing in colonial enterprises: the joint-stock company. The Dutch East and West India Companies were early examples, raising cash by selling shares to individual investors whose liability was limited to the sum of their investment. These investors were not part of the company’s management, but they were entitled to a share in the profits. Originally, the Dutch East India Company intended to pay off its investors within ten years, but when the period was up, they convinced investors who wanted to realize their profits immediately to sell their shares on the open market. The creation of a market in shares—we now call it a stock market—was an innovation that spread quickly. Arguably, stock markets now control the world’s economy.
The Struggle of England and Spain
Religious strife could spark civil war, as in France, or political rebellion, as in the Netherlands. But it could also provoke warfare between sovereign states, as in the struggle between England and Spain. In this case, religious conflict was entangled with both dynastic claims and economic competition in the Atlantic world.
The dynastic competition came from the English royal family’s division along confessional lines. The Catholic queen Mary (r. 1553-58), eldest daughter of Henry VIII and granddaughter of Ferdinand and Isabella of Spain (see Chapter 13), had married her cousin Philip II of Spain in 1554 and ruled at a time of great strife between Catholics and Protestants
THE NETHERLANDS AFTER 1609. ¦ What were the two main divisions of the Netherlands? ¦ Which was Protestant, and which was Catholic? ¦ How could William of Orange and his allies use the geography of the northern Netherlands against the Spanish?
In England. After Mary’s death, her Protestant half sister Elizabeth (r. 1558-1603) came to the throne, and relations with Spain rapidly declined. They declined further when Catholic Ireland—an English colony—rose in rebellion in 1565, with Spain quietly supporting the Irish. Although it took almost thirty bloody years, English forces eventually suppressed the rebellion. Elizabeth then cemented the Irish defeat by encouraging intense colonial settlement in Ireland. Somewhat ironically, she did so in conscious imitation of Spanish policy in the Americas, sending thousands of Protestant English settlers to occupy land in Ireland in the hopes of creating a colonial state with a largely English identity. Instead, these measures created the deep ethnic and religious conflicts that still trouble the island.
England’s conflict with Spain, meanwhile, was worsened by the fact that English economic interests were directly opposed to those of Spain. English traders were making steady inroads into Spanish commercial networks in the Atlantic, as English sea captains such as Sir Francis Drake and Sir John Hawkins plundered Spanish vessels on the high seas. In a particularly dramatic exploit lasting from 1577 to 1580, prevailing winds and a lust for booty propelled Drake all the way around the world, to return with stolen Spanish treasure worth twice as much as Queen Elizabeth’s annual revenue.
After suffering numerous such attacks over a period of two decades, King Philip finally resolved to fight back after Elizabeth’s government openly supported the Dutch rebellion against Spain in 1585. In 1588, he dispatched an enormous fleet, confidently called the “Invincible Armada,” whose mission was to invade England. But the invasion never occurred. After an indecisive initial encounter between the two fleets, a fierce storm—hailed as a “Protestant wind” by the lucky English—drove the Spanish galleons off course, many of them wrecking off the coast of Ireland. The shattered flotilla eventually limped home after a disastrous circumnavigation of the British isles, with almost half its ships lost. Meanwhile, Elizabeth took credit for her country’s miraculous escape. In subsequent years, continued threats from Spain and sporadic skirmishes nurtured a renewed sense of English nationalism and also fueled anti-Catholic sentiment in that realm.
In the early decades of the seventeenth century, the English challenge to Spanish supremacy in the Atlantic began to bear fruit. Unlike New Spain, England’s North American colonies had no significant mineral wealth; instead, as we noted above, English colonists sought to profit from the establishment of large-scale agricultural settlements in North America and the Caribbean. The first permanent colony was founded at Jamestown, Virginia, in 1607. Although this settlement was not particularly successful, more than twenty autonomous settlements were planted over the next forty years by a total of about 80,000 English immigrants.
Many of these were motivated by a desire for religious freedom—hence the name we still give to the Pilgrims who landed at Plymouth, Massachusetts, in 1620. These radical Protestants were known as Puritans, and because they were also political dissidents they were almost as unwelcome as Catholics in an England whose church was, after all, an extension of the monarchy. Strikingly, however, English colonists showed little interest in trying to convert Native American peoples to Christianity. Missionizing played a much larger role in Spanish efforts to colonize Central and South America and in French efforts to penetrate the North American hinterlands.
Another difference between Spanish and English colonialism is the fact that these English colonies did not
THE DUTCH EAST INDIA COMPANY WAREHOUSE AND TIMBER WHARF AT AMSTERDAM. The substantial warehouse, the stockpiles of lumber, and the company ship under construction in the foreground illustrate the degree to which overseas commerce could stimulate the economy of the mother country.
THE "ARMADA PORTRAIT" OF ELIZABETH. This is one of several portraits that commemorated the defeat of the Spanish Armada in 1588. Through the window on the left (the queen's right hand), an English flotilla sails serenely on sunny seas; on the right, Spanish ships are wrecked by a "Protestant wind." Elizabeth's right hand rests protectively-and commandingly-on the globe. ¦ How would you interpret this image?
Begin as royal enterprises. They were private ventures, farmed either by individual landholders (as in Maryland and Pennsylvania) or managed by joint-stock companies (as in Virginia and the Massachusetts Bay Colony). Building on their experience in Ireland, where colonies had been called “plantations,” many English settlers established plantations— planned communities—that attempted to replicate as many features of English life as possible. Geography largely dictated the foundation locations of these English settlements, which were located along the northeast Atlantic coast and on rivers and bays that provided good harbors. Aside from the Hudson, however, there were no great rivers to lead colonists very far inland, so the English colonies clung to the coastline and to each other. The densely populated corridor along the Atlantic seaboard is a direct result of these early settlement patterns.
Since most land in the Old World was owned by royal and aristocratic families, the accumulation of wealth through the control of land was a new and exciting prospect for small-and medium-scale landholders in the new English colonies. This helps to explain their rural, agricultural character—in contrast to the great cities of New Spain. But this focus on agricultural holdings also resulted from the demographic catastrophe that had decimated native populations in this region, as in so many others: by the early seventeenth century, a great deal of rich land had been abandoned simply because there were so few native farmers to till it. As a result, indigenous peoples who had not already succumbed to European diseases were now under threat from colonists who wanted complete and exclusive control over their lands.
To this end, the English soon set out to eliminate, through expulsion and massacre, the former inhabitants of the region. There were a few exceptions; in the Quaker colony of Pennsylvania, colonists and Native Americans maintained friendly relations for more than half a
PLYMOUTH PLANTATION. An English settlement was established at Plymouth in the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1620. This image shows a reconstruction of the village as it might have looked in 1627. Although speculative, this reconstruction captures something of the plantation's diminutive fragility and isolation.
Century. But in the Carolinas, by contrast, there was widespread enslavement of native peoples, either for sale to the West Indies or to work on the rice plantations along the coast. In another contrast to the Spanish and French colonies, intermarriage between English colonists and native populations was rare, creating a nearly unbridgeable racial divide in these North American colonies.
THE THIRTY YEARS' WAR AND THE RISE OF FRANCE
With the promulgation of the French Edict of Nantes in 1598, the end of open hostilities between England and Spain in 1604, and the truce between Spain and the Dutch Republic of 1609, religious warfare in Europe came briefly to an end. In 1618, however, a new series of wars broke out in Central Europe, in some of the German-speaking lands that had felt the first divisive effects of the Reformation and Counter-Reformation (see Chapter 13). Not only was this period of warfare one of the longest in history, it was one of the bloodiest and most widespread, engulfing most of the European continent before it ended thirty years later, in 1648. Although it began as a religious conflict, it quickly became an international struggle for dominance in which these initial provocations were all but forgotten. In the end, some 8 million people died and entire regions were devastated by the rapacity of criss-crossing of armies. The populations of several provinces never recovered and most of the great powers who had fought the war were impoverished
And weakened. The exception was France, which became a preeminent power in Europe for the first time.
The Beginnings of the Thirty Years' War
Like the number and variety of the combatants it involved, the causes of the Thirty Years’ War are complicated. On one level, it was an outlet for deeper aggressions and tensions that had been building up since the Peace of Augsburg in 1555 (see above and Chapter 13). On another, it grew out of even longer-standing disputes among rulers and territories (Catholic and Protestant) in the patchwork of provinces that made up the Holy Roman Empire, disputes into which allied powers were drawn. On still another, it was an opportunity for players on the fringes of power to come into prominence.
The catalyst came in 1618, when the Austrian Habsburg (Catholic) prince, Ferdinand, who also ruled Hungary and Poland, was named as heir to the throne of Protestant Bohemia. This prompted a rebellion among the Bohemian aristocracy. A year later, the complex dynastic politics of Central Europe resulted in Ferdinand’s election as Holy Roman Emperor. This gave him access to an imperial (Catholic) army, which he now sent in to crush the Protestant revolt. The Bohemians, meanwhile, were bolstered by the support of some Austrian nobility, many of whom were also Protestant and who saw a way to recover power from the Habsburg ruling family.
In 1620, the war escalated further when the Ottomans threw their support behind the Protestants and in so doing touched off a war with the staunchly Catholic kingdom of Poland, whose borders the Muslim army would need to cross in order to get to Prague. The Poles won and the Ottomans retreated. Meanwhile, Ferdinand’s Habsburg cousin, the Spanish king and emperor Philip IV, had renewed the war against the Protestant Dutch Republic, which had won its independence from Catholic Spain in 1609; an alliance between the two Habsburg rulers made sense. It led to a major pitched battle between united Protestant forces and a Spanish-led Catholic army (including the young French philosopher, Rene Descartes) just outside of Prague. The Habsburgs were victorious, and Bohemia was forced to accept Ferdinand’s Catholic rule.
World History
