A significant effect of the flood of silver from the americas into the european economy were:

Latin America is thought to be the world’s most biodiverse region, but as in the rest of the world, the number of species and the size of their populations is generally in sharp decline. Most experts consider agriculture to be the most important cause of biodiversity decline. At one extreme of policy argument regarding biodiversity conservation are those who argue that the only path to species protection is the establishment of many more and larger “protected areas” in which human activities will be severely restricted. On the remaining land agriculture will be carried out largely with the presently prevailing methods of “industrial agriculture,” including heavy reliance on synthetic pesticides and fertilizers, heavy machine use, large-scale irrigation schemes, limited crop diversity, and crops genetically engineered to maximize returns from these tools and techniques. Those who argue for these policies largely accept that industrial agriculture of this sort is severely hostile to biodiversity, but argue that the high productivity of such methods makes it possible to limit agriculture to a relatively small land base, leaving the rest for protected areas and other human activities. On the other side of the argument are those who argue that agricultural techniques are either available or can be created to make agricultural areas more favorable to species survival. They argue that even with a desirable expansion of protected areas, such reserves cannot successfully maintain high biodiversity levels if protected reserves are not complemented by an agriculture more friendly to species survival and migration. The policy arguments on these issues are of major human and biological importance. They are also very complex and depend on theoretical perspectives and data that do not provide definitive guidance. One way to enrich the debate is to develop a specifically historical perspective that illuminates the relationship between human actions and species diversity. In Latin America, humans have been modifying landscapes and species composition of landscapes for thousands of years. Even in areas of presently low human population density and extraordinarily high species diversity, such as remaining tropical rainforests, humans may have been active in shaping species composition for millennia. After 1492, human population levels in Latin America plummeted with the introduction of Old-World diseases. It is often assumed that this led to a blossoming of species diversity, but the historical evidence from 1492 to the present strongly suggests the combination of European technologies and the integration of agriculture into world markets meant more damaging use of soils, widespread deforestation, and subsequent decline in species numbers. The exploitation and consequent despoliation of Latin American resources were integral to colonialism and intensified later by national governments focused on rapid economic growth. High species diversity remained in areas that were too difficult to exploit and/or were used by indigenous populations or smallholders whose production techniques were often favorable to species survival. Many of these techniques provide clues for how agriculture might be reshaped to be more friendly both to biodiversity and social equity.

Basques formed a minority ethnic group whose diaspora had a significant impact on the history of colonial Latin America. Basques from the four Spanish or peninsular Basque territories—the Lordship of Vizcaya, the provinces of Álava and Guipúzcoa, and the Kingdom of Navarra—migrated to the New World in significant numbers; the French Basques were also prominent in the Atlantic, particularly in the Newfoundland fisheries. The population density of the Basque Atlantic valleys, which was the highest of any region in Spain, was an important factor that encouraged emigration. And, in response to demographic pressure, in the second half of the 15th century most villages and towns adopted an impartible inheritance system that compelled non-inheriting offspring to seek their fortunes outside the country. Castile was the immediate choice for the Basque émigré, but after 1492 America gradually became an attractive destination. Outside their home country, their unique language and sense of collective nobility (hidalguía universal) were to become two outstanding features of Basque cultural identity. The Basques’ share of total Spanish migration to the New World increased significantly in the second half of the 17th century. By the 18th century they were one of the largest and most influential peninsular regional groups in America. The typical Basque émigré was a young, single man aged between fifteen and thirty. In the New World they left their mark in economic activities that their countrymen had developed in their homeland for centuries: trade, navigation, shipbuilding, and mining. Furthermore, Basques’ collective nobility and limpieza de sangre (blood purity) facilitated their access to important official positions.

On 19 March 1812, representatives from across the Hispanic Monarchy put forward a constitution in the Spanish port city of Cádiz. This foundational document was a response to their king’s abdication in favor of Napoleon’s brother Joseph Bonaparte, obtained under pressure from invading French troops. The constitution aimed to address what they viewed as a lack of legitimacy because the monarch was captive, as the drafters expected it would be the basis of government in all the corners of the empire, from Madrid to Mexico and Manila. Written under the protection of the British fleet in the last bastion of the Peninsula that remained unoccupied, the constitution instituted a very extensive male suffrage, freedom of the press, national sovereignty, and the abolition of privileges for citizens from all parts of the vast empire. These measures were the reason why the men who debated the constitution were the first ones to be called liberal. The liberalism of the drafters at Cádiz must be considered in the context of the early nineteenth century. When in 1814 Ferdinand VII returned to Spain, he abolished the constitution. But in 1820 a mutiny of troops forced the king to accept it grudgingly. A constitutional monarchy was established lasting until 1823, when the so-called 100,000 sons of Saint Louis crossed from France to reinstate absolutism. This period came to be known as the Liberal Triennium. In 1836 the Progressives reinstated the Cádiz Constitution, albeit briefly when they passed a new charter in 1837. Until quite recently there was very limited scholarship on the Cádiz Constitution in English, and, as Roberto Breña shows, even the literature in Spanish had been mostly limited to the study of the text itself and its impact in the peninsula. In the past decade, Atlantic history and studies on the Enlightenment’s influence on revolution in general have led to renewed interest in the Spanish constitutional experience. The reevaluation of Spanish American independence movements in light of the Cádiz Constitution have also sparked debate among historians. François-Xavier Guerra (1992) and Jaime Rodriguez O. (1998)1 consider that it is impossible to understand the process of independence if attention is not paid to Cádiz and the enacting of the constitution. Guerra goes as far as to state that the election of deputies to Cortes was the revolution2 (1993) Bicentennial celebrations have led to a dramatic increase of publications on the constitution. Its importance, especially in influencing subsequent constitutions, is increasingly acknowledged today in academic circles. In this article I will discuss the calling of the Cortes, the elections that brought representatives from all over the empire to Cádiz, the demands made from far-away provinces, and major issues discussed in the constitutional debates. I conclude by assessing the constitution’s reception, as well as the way in which it influenced the advent of modernity in the Hispanic world and beyond. I begin by discussing the development of constitutional thinking in the late eighteenth century and the beginning of the nineteenth century. A revision of the events that led to the Peninsular War and the context in which the constitution was put forward follows. The article then analyzes the process through which the constitution was passed, the intellectual debates that surrounded it, the impact the charter had in the wider Atlantic world, as well as the role it played in the process of independence in Spanish America. Finally, it ends with a review of how liberalism developed in the Hispanic Monarchy and the long-lasting legacy of the Cádiz Constitution.

In 1528, the Welsers, bankers of Augsburg, received a capitulación (contract) from Charles V, Holy Roman emperor and king of Spain, to govern the Province of Venezuela for the Spanish Crown. The territory, located in the northwestern region of modern-day Venezuela, was ruled by a joint German-Spanish administrative team that was plagued by chaos and distrust. In addition to undertaking conquest expeditions, the Welsers engaged in both the African and the indigenous slave trade and experimented with the extraction and export of medical plants such as balsam. The Spaniards, anxious about the Welsers’ access to power in the conquest and colonization of the “Spanish” Indies, saw the Welser governors as Lutheran barbarians. Most of the Spanish historiography did the same. In any case, the colony ended officially in 1556, soon after Juan Carvajal tried to administer the colony and had Philipp von Hutten, the colony’s governor, and Bartholomäus Welser VI, the eldest son of the company’s boss, assassinated. The colony was mostly forgotten in Germany until the 19th century, when German imperialists used it as an example to further colonization in parts of Africa and the South Pacific. Venezuelans, after gaining independence from Spain, maintained a pro-Spanish view of the colonization of the nation’s western territory into the early 21st century.

Huguenots refer to the group of French Calvinists in France, those expelled from France into the wider European, Atlantic, and global diaspora, and those descendant from either of the first two groups. Driven by faith, religious factionalism, and dynastic rivalries, Huguenots enflamed the French Wars of Religion (1562–1598). Henri IV ended the war by extending a degree of toleration to the Huguenots in 1598 with the Edict of Toleration. Despite the king’s royal edict, the first wave of Huguenots (1530s–1660s) continued to leave France well into the 17th century. The second wave (1670s–1710s) occurred in the second half of the 17th century, when Louis XIV’s persecutory policies began to limit Huguenot communal activities, meeting spaces, available professions, and then with the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes (1685), the ability to be Calvinist legally at all. Following 1685, those who remained in France entered into what is often called the Désert period, when French Calvinists continued to practice their faith in clandestine settings, away from the French dragonnades. Those who rode the two waves out of France, settled in the Netherlands, Switzerland, Great Britain, Ireland, and many of the German states. Some used other European states to ride successive waves of diaspora movement out further into Europe and the Atlantic World, relocating to North America, the Caribbean, Suriname, Brazil, South Africa, and then later on into the Indian and Pacific oceanic worlds. Huguenots took advantage of Atlantic spaces in order to prove their value to the French state, but when France no longer proved safe for Huguenots, the Atlantic offered them a refuge, wherein a complex diaspora community emerged in the early modern period.

From the time that Columbus arrived in the Caribbean until Spain surrendered power over its mainland American colonies in the early 19th century, Spanish and Portuguese colonial mines poured forth vast amounts of bullion, including some gold and a far greater quantity of silver, both in terms of weight and its overall value relative to gold. Fiscal records indicate that Spanish Americans officially refined gold worth approximately 374,000,000 pesos, each consisting of 272 maravedís, whereas the amount of silver produced reached a value of 3,432,000,000 pesos (to these figures need to be added contraband output, estimated to have been around 17–20 percent). In other words, the colonies refined nine times more silver than gold. While Columbus, Cortés, and other earlier explorers may have fantasized primarily about gold, it was the flood of American silver that touched off the price revolution in Europe and monetarized the emerging world economy, especially because China had a voracious appetite for silver, not gold. At the same time in the American colonies, mining distorted economic life because of the incentives the industry received from a silver-hungry monarchy. Mining also had profound consequences for indigenous society, severely exploited to provide workers for the mines and refining mills. Colonial refiners used two methods to beneficiate their silver ores, smelting and amalgamation. Smelting was suitable for all types of American silver ores but required large amounts of fuel to heat the ovens. It remained widely used throughout Mexico during the entire colonial period. Amalgamation was a newer technology, adapted to American ores during the mid-16th century. Although it did not require large quantities of charcoal and other fuels, as smelting did, amalgamation depended on the availability of mercury. Nearly all quicksilver used in colonial Spanish American silver mining came from either Huancavelica (Peru) or Almadén (Spain), with occasional supplements from Idria (Slovenia). Whereas both smelting and amalgamation were used widely in Mexico, Andean mines relied on amalgamation.

On August 13, 1521, the Spanish conquistadors and their native allies seized Tenochtitlan, the capital of the Aztec empire. The Spaniards succeeded because they had forged alliances with the Tlaxcalans and other indigenous self-governing communities (altepetl) to fight the Aztecs. After the conquest these communities continued their traditions, and the Spaniards largely replaced Aztec leadership with their own. In addition, the friars and the secular church converted the natives to an extent, and together with the crown they foiled the conquistadors’ attempts to become liege lords with jurisdiction. The process culminated in the New Laws of 1542, which curbed the encomienda, a grant to Spaniards that comprised several Indian towns paying tribute. A society of social bodies evolved, composed of municipal councils, lay brotherhoods of churches, and others, complete with their own laws and jurisdictions. Then a series of silver strikes beginning at Zacatecas in 1546 drew settlers into the Bajío north of the former Aztec and Tarascan empires. The local natives resisted initially, and when peace came, they and the settlers created a dynamic early capitalist economy that invigorated other regions. The frontier expanded when animal herds moved further north beyond the mines, and the zone of Spanish influence grew to the south as well. In 1540 Spanish conquistadors and their indigenous allies began occupying the northwestern Yucatan Peninsula, and they took Tiho/Mérida in 1542. The Yucatan, the Bajío, and the other regions that composed colonial Mexico successively integrated into a global commercial network spanning Europe, Africa, and Asia. The crown and the merchant guild (consulado) in Seville sought to capture the burgeoning Atlantic commerce within the fleet shuttling between Seville/Cadiz and Veracruz and restrict the silver flowing from Acapulco to Asia via the Philippines. Yet market forces defied most of the rules they put in place. Merchants from Asia settled in Manila; Peruvians docked in Acapulco; and the Dutch, French, and English competed with fleet merchants or operated contraband trade from the Caribbean islands to New Spain. In the 18th century, the crown loosened trade regulations within the empire and continue curbing the autonomies of social bodies. A series of investigations (visitas) shook New Spain, and more compliant viceroys and officials appeared, while the friars lost over one hundred parishes (doctrinas) during the mid-century. The king expelled the Jesuits in 1767; registered ships sailing individually replaced the fleet in 1778; and in 1786 José de Gálvez introduced the intendants in New Spain. As the empire transitioned toward a territorial state, Napoleon imprisoned the Spanish king (1808). In 1810 Miguel Hidalgo and a popular following unleashed the War of Independence. As the conflict unfolded, the legitimacy of the old order crumbled, and the empire dissolved in 1821.

Mexico’s indigenous population developed urbanism on a large scale before Spanish invaders arrived. Indians constituted the majority in most Mexican cities through the colonial era and, in many cases, after independence. Tenochtitlan, reborn as Mexico City after the Spanish Conquest (1519–1521), remained one of the largest world metropolises and a home to millions of indigenous inhabitants. During the colonial period, migrants from ethnic groups throughout New Spain populated Mexico City, new cities founded by conquistadors, and smaller pre-Hispanic cities that survived the conquest. Though prohibited from residing in the 13-block central district (traza) of cities, indigenous urban residents lived in these nominally Spanish spaces, often as domestic workers. In surrounding barrios, they worked as craftsmen, artisans, and tradespeople. Barrios de indios enjoyed limited self-government under native cabildos. Independence brought about the erasure of racial classifications at the national level, but language, dress, and kin networks continued to set urban Indians apart from more racially ambiguous city dwellers in the 19th and 20th centuries. Rapidly expanding cities swallowed traditionally indigenous pueblos, absorbing their population into greater metropolitan areas. As pueblos originarios were absorbed into cities, such communities struggled to preserve their identities in an urban setting. Economic disruptions in the countryside also pushed migrants from indigenous rural pueblos into cities, a process accelerated during the 20th century. In new residences, urban Indians often worked as vendors, domestic workers, day laborers, and workers in the service industry.

European empires would have not existed absent private enterprise both licit and illicit. Private traders, in the first instance, sustained colonies by conveying the labor and merchandise that planters required in exchange for the exports that colonies produced. Moreover, those colonies would not have existed in the first place absent private initiatives since European states in the 16th and 17th centuries customarily lacked the administrative and fiscal resources and often the inclination to oversee such projects. Individual or corporate adventurers, though, did possess such resources and inclination; legitimate operators secured government authority for their activities pursuant to charters that drew upon medieval forms and granted extraordinary powers to their recipients. Under the terms of these documents, grantees pursued public purposes—as they would be called today—that their activities entailed in conjunction with their pursuit of profit. The results of this practice included the establishment of colonies that spanned the Atlantic basin from the Madeira Islands to Newfoundland to Brazil; the emergence of colonial leaderships who pursued their own agendas while they ingratiated themselves into trans-Atlantic political cultures; and incessant conflict over territorial and commercial agendas that involved indigenous people as well as Europeans. Other operators did not bother with legitimacy as they pursued smuggling, piracy, and colonizing ventures that also contributed profoundly to imperial expansion. The domestic and international friction generated by these activities ultimately brought increased state involvement in overseas affairs and increased state ability to direct those affairs.

From the moment the expedition of Magellan gave Patagonia its name, it became a land where European fantasies and fears dwelled. A no man’s land inhabited by giant anthropophagites located at the antipodes of civilization, this steppe swept by icy winds was not transformed into a colonial setting until the 19th century. The territory then became the object of an ongoing territorial dispute between the new states of Argentina and Chile, whose efforts to establish sovereignty as landowners languished until the late 1870s. Nomadic indigenous sovereignties had faced slow Western expansion on the continent; here, they were swiftly replaced by sheep. On the continent, the Tehuelche were displaced; on the island of Tierra del Fuego, the Selknam faced extermination. Sheep sovereignty, fully integrated into imperial networks, was the driving force behind local state building. Just as the British pastoral colonization of the Falkland Islands conditioned any possibility of permanent presence in the South Atlantic, the sheep industry, arriving swiftly in the shape of capital, persons, and animals, allowed for the Argentinization and Chileanization of what was once the frontier of civilization. In this sense, the occupation of the Falklands/Malvinas, Patagonia, and Tierra del Fuego may be considered successive colonial processes that form part of the same frontier drive as the Empire in capital.

Silver was the lifeblood of Spain’s early modern transatlantic empire. Transatlantic silver transfers affected the nature of shipping, credit, and trade in the Iberian Atlantic and, eventually, across the entire globe. Large-scale silver mining in Mexico and Perú began in the mid-16th century. To sustain trade and bullion transportation across the Atlantic, the Castilian Crown developed a convoy system known as the Carrera de Indias. This system of armed fleets that sailed between authorized ports on a regular schedule began in the 1560s and peaked between 1580 and 1620. During this period, Spanish silver peso coins of eight reales (known in English as pieces of eight) became a de facto international monetary standard because of their high proportion of high-purity metal. Silver circulated in the American colonies before departing for Spain, whether through trade or inter-colonial transfers. Bullion and coins also moved through channels beyond the Castilian monarchy’s control, most notably through unregistered remittances and unauthorized trade with other European interlopers. During the Habsburg era, the Castilian monarchy’s obligations to foreign bankers, particularly the Genoese, increased. By the 1650s, the convoy system’s efficacy, as well as the profitability of several mines, had significantly diminished. Although mining production slowly recovered during the second half of the century, silver smuggling out of Spanish American ports further reduced the volume of bullion remittances going through authorized channels. After 1720, the combined effect of administrative reforms, increased production in American mines, and the resurgence of Spanish power under the Bourbons revitalized transatlantic bullion transfers. The last peak in silver transfers from the New World to the Old began in 1780 and lasted until 1808, when the beginning of independence movements across the Spanish Americas dissolved the world’s largest monetary union. Estimates of the total volume of metal remittances and their effects on the global economy have been subject of historical debates for almost a century.

In the past, scholars of Latin America often assumed that Spanish colonists abandoned the Caribbean for the bullion riches of Mexico and Peru almost immediately after their conquest, while many Caribbeanists have imagined that Barbados, colonized by the British in the mid-1600s, was the “first black slave society.” Yet, in fact, more than a century earlier in the colony of Santo Domingo (then officially known as la Isla Española or simply la Española), European colonists built the first major American plantation economy and society made up mostly of enslaved people. Those held in chains on the island reached into the tens of thousands by the mid-1500s, and Santo Domingo became a pivotal crossroads in the early modern Atlantic. At first the enslaved population included thousands of people the Spanish called “Indians,” taken from other parts of the Caribbean and the Americas, and even an occasional enslaved person of European (Orthodox Christian or Muslim) descent. But after the mid-1500s slavery in Santo Domingo became isolated to people of African descent. This contrasted with the preexisting demography of slavery in southern Europe, where the enslaved were of more diverse geographic origins. Santo Domingo thus initiated a trajectory of racial and plantation slavery whose contours would shape the course of history in the Americas overall. Santo Domingo’s slave-based economy would also, though, be the first to collapse, at the end of the 16th century, partly because of sustained resistance by the enslaved—their continual escape and rebellion—that was costly for planters. The enslaved had composed most of society in the prior century. Now the majority were escaped and, to a lesser extent, freed slaves, living with substantial autonomy as independent peasants dispersed across the countryside. These themes are illuminated through an exploration of one of the earliest freedom suits in the Americas. This suit was won on appeal in Santo Domingo in 1531 through remarkable transatlantic collaboration by family members and sailors as well as through the evident power of notarized documents in the Spanish Empire.

U.S. foreign policy toward Latin America in the 19th century initially focused on excluding or limiting the military and economic influence of European powers, territorial expansion, and encouraging American commerce. These objectives were expressed in the No Transfer Principle (1811) and the Monroe Doctrine (1823). American policy was unilateralist (not isolationist); it gradually became more aggressive and interventionist as the idea of Manifest Destiny contributed to wars and military conflicts against indigenous peoples, France, Britain, Spain, and Mexico in the Western Hemisphere. Expansionist sentiments and U.S. domestic politics inspired annexationist impulses and filibuster expeditions to Mexico, Cuba, and parts of Central America. Civil war in the United States put a temporary halt to interventionism and imperial dreams in Latin America. From the 1870s until the end of the century, U.S. policy intensified efforts to establish political and military hegemony in the Western Hemisphere, including periodic naval interventions in the Caribbean and Central America, reaching even to Brazil in the 1890s. By the end of the century Secretary of State Richard Olney added the Olney Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine (“Today the United States is practically sovereign on this continent and its fiat is law upon the subjects to which it confines its interposition . . .”), and President Theodore Roosevelt contributed his own corollary in 1904 (“in the Western Hemisphere the adherence of the United States to the Monroe Doctrine may force the United States, however reluctantly, in flagrant cases of wrongdoing or impotence, to exercise an international police power”). American policy toward Latin America, at the turn of the century, explicitly justified unilateral intervention, military occupation, and transformation of sovereign states into political and economic protectorates in order to defend U.S. economic interests and an expanding concept of national security.

From the first half of the 18th century to 1850, whaling ships, coming from different New England ports, hunted whales in the South Atlantic, focusing their attentions on certain areas along the Brazilian coast, the loci of constant seasonal migration by these mammals for procreation. According to data about whaling voyages obtained from the Mystic Sea Port Museum, between 1700 and 1920, 16,379 expeditions left the Northeast of New England. At the heart of this temporal demarcation, between 1761 and 1844, around 650 whaling expeditions were carried out along the Brazilian coast, representing approximately 3.97% of the total excursions of the period. In other words, in 83 years an average of 7.83 expeditions were made each year to various regions of the Brazilian coast, specifically Bahia, Pernambuco, Rio de Janeiro, São Paulo, and Santa Catarina. From these areas, a huge amount of two whale species were caught: humpback whales and the southern right whale. In this period, the most desired prey was the sperm whale. However, these did not come close to the coast, so they were rarely killed in Brazilian waters. Whalers thus balanced hunting sperm whales in deep waters with the catching of the other types in Brazilian coastal waters. The results of these incursions were measured by the quantity of oil, extracted from animal fat, bones deposited on the decks of boats, and spermaceti, taken from the cranium of the sperm whale, brought to New England ports. The aim of this article is to trace the trajectory of the North American whaling incursions, from their port of origin to the places of whale hunting on the Brazilian coast. In addition, the text focuses on the typology of vessels, the duration of expeditions, experiences of crews, and the results of voyages, materialized in the production unloaded in U.S. ports.

What effect did European horses have on the Americas?

What impact did the horse have on the Americas quizlet?

Which of the following were New World foods that revolutionized Old World agriculture?

What Incan system did the Spanish adopt in an effort to fuel their mercantilist economic system?