European colonization of the Americas

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The first known Europeans to reach the Americas are believed to have been the Vikings ("Norse"), who established several colonies in the Americas from the 11th century. One Viking from Norway, Leif Erikson established a short-lived settlement in Vinland, present day Newfoundland. Settlements in Greenland survived for several centuries, during which time the Greenland Norse and the Inuit people experienced mostly hostile contact. By the 15th century the Norse Greenland settlements had collapsed.

Several medieval Arabic sources also suggest that Muslim explorers from Al-Andalus (Islamic Iberia, comprising modern Spain and Portugal) may have travelled in expeditions across the Atlantic to the Americas between the 9th and 14th centuries.^[1][2]

In 1492, Christopher Columbus reached the Americas, after which European exploration and colonization rapidly expanding through Hispaniola, Puerto Rico (Borinquen) and Cuba. The post-1492 era is known as the Columbian Exchange period.

The European and Asian lifestyle included a long history of sharing close quarters with domesticated animals such as cows, pigs, sheep, goats, horses, and various domesticated fowl, which had resulted in epidemic diseases unknown in the Americas. Thus the large-scale contact with Europeans after 1492 introduced novel germs to the indigenous people of the Americas. Smallpox (1525, 1558, 1589), typhus (1546), influenza (1558), diphtheria (1614) and measles (1618) epidemics swept ahead of initial European contact, killing between 10 million and 112 million people, about 95% to 98% of the indigenous population.^{[citation needed]} This population loss and the cultural chaos and political collapses it caused greatly facilitated both colonization of the land and the conquest of the native civilizations.^[3]

Estimates of the population of the Americas at the time Columbus arrived have varied tremendously. This population debate has often had ideological underpinnings. Some have argued that contemporary estimates of a high pre-Columbian indigenous population are rooted in a bias against aspects of Western civilization and/or Christianity. Robert Royal writes that "estimates of pre-Columbian population figures have become heavily politicized with scholars who are particularly critical of Europe often favoring wildly higher figures."^[4] Since civilizations rose and fell in the Americas before Columbus arrived, the indigenous population in 1492 was not necessarily at a high point, and may have already been in decline. Indigenous populations in most areas of the Americas reached a low point by the early twentieth century, and in a number of cases started to climb again.^[5]

Determining how many people died in these massacres overall is difficult. In the book The Wild Frontier: Atrocities during the American-Indian War from Jamestown Colony to Wounded Knee, amateur historian William M. Osborn sought to tally every recorded atrocity in the area that would eventually become the continental United States, from first contact (1511) to the closing of the frontier (1890), and determined that 9,156 people died from atrocities perpetrated by Native Americans, and 7,193 people died from atrocities perpetrated by Europeans. Osborn defines an atrocity as the murder, torture, or mutilation of civilians, the wounded, and prisoners.^[6]

The first conquests were made by the Spanish, who quickly conquered most of South and Central America and large parts of North America. The Portuguese took Brazil. The British, French and Dutch conquered islands in the Caribbean Sea, many of which had already been conquered by the Spanish or depopulated by disease. Early European colonies in North America included Spanish Florida, the British settlements in Virginia and New England, French settlements in Quebec and Louisiana, and Dutch settlements in New Netherlands.

Denmark-Norway revived its former colonies in Greenland from the 18th until the 20th century, and also colonised a few of the Virgin Islands.

[edit] Early state-sponsored colonists

Further information: Spanish colonization of the Americas , Portugal in the Age of Discovery , and The First European colonization wave (15th century-19th century)

The first phase of European activity in the Americas began with the Atlantic Ocean crossings of Christopher Columbus (1492-1500), sponsored by Spain, whose original attempt was to find a new route to India and China, known as "the Indies." He was followed by other explorers such as John Cabot, who discovered Newfoundland and was sponsored by England. Pedro Alvares Cabral discovered Brazil for Portugal. Amerigo Vespucci, who in voyages from 1497 to 1513 sailing for Spain and Portugal, established that Columbus had discovered a new set of continents. Map makers still use his name, America, for two continents. Other explorers included Giovanni da Verrazzano, sponsored by France, the Portuguese João Vaz Corte-Real in Newfoundland and Samuel de Champlain (1567-1635) who explored Canada. In 1513, Vasco Núñez de Balboa crossed the Isthmus of Panama, and led the first European expedition to see the Pacific Ocean from the west coast of the New World. In an action with enduring historical import, Balboa claimed the Pacific Ocean and all the lands adjoining it for the Spanish Crown. It was 1517 before another expedition from Cuba visited Central America, landing on the coast of the Yucatán in search of slaves.

These explorations were followed, notably in the case of Spain, by a phase of conquest: The Spaniards, having just finished the Reconquista during which they expelled the Muslims and Jews out of the Iberian peninsula, were the first to colonize the Americas, applying the same model of governing to former Al-Andalus than to the newly discovered territories of the Americas. Ten years after Columbus' discovery, the administration of Hispaniola (today Haiti and the Dominican Republic) was handed over to Nicolas de Ovando of the Order of Alcántara, founded during the Reconquista. As in the Iberian Peninsula, the inhabitants of Hispaniola were not expelled, but were given new landmasters, while religious orders took care of the local administration. Progressively the encomienda system granting land to the settlers was set in place.

The handful of conquistadores managed to conquer most of the territory, by dividing the natives among themselves. Mexico was conquered by Hernán Cortés in 1519-1521, and the Inca Empire was conquered by Francisco Pizarro from 1532 to 1535.

From the discovery of the Americas by Columbus (1492) to the end of the 16th century, approximatively 80% of the native population was annihilated (around 50 million in 1492 to 8 million in 1650 ^[7]), mostly by outbreaks of Old World diseases but also by several massacres and forced labour (the mita was re-established in the old Inca Empire, and the tequitl — equivalent of the mita — in the Aztec Empire). The conquistadores progressively replaced the native American oligarchies, in part through miscegenation with the local elites. In 1532, Charles V, Holy Roman Emperor imposed a vice-king to Mexico, Antonio de Mendoza, in order to prevent Cortes' independantist drives, who definitively returned to Spain in 1540. Two years later, Charles V signed the New Laws (which replaced the Laws of Burgos of 1512) prohibiting slavery and the repartimientos, but also claiming as his own all the American lands and all of the autochtonous people as his own subjects.

When in May 1493, the Pope Alexander VI enacted the Inter caetera bull granting the new lands to the Kingdom of Spain, he requested in exchange the evangelization of the people. Thus, during Columbus' second travel, the Benedictine friar Boyl accompanied him, along with twelve other priests. Since slavery was prohibited between Christians, and could only be imposed in non-Christian prisoners of war or on men already sold as slaves, the debate on Christianization was particularly acute through-out the 16th century. In 1537, the papal bull Sublimis Deus granted Native Americans a soul, thus prohibiting their enslavement, without putting an end to the debate. Some claimed that the native who had rebelled and been captured could be enslaved nonetheless. Later, the Valladolid controversy opposed the Dominican priest Bartolomé de Las Casas to the Jesuit Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda, the first one arguing that Native Americans were beings doted with souls, as all other human beings, while the latter argued they had no soul and could thus be enslaved. The Christianization was at first violent: when the first Franciscans arrived in Mexico in 1524, they burnt the places dedicated to pagan cult, alienating themselves the local population ^[8]. In the 1530s, they began to adopt Christianism to local customs, by building the new churches on the sites of ancient pyramids, etc., leading to a mix of Old World Christianism with local religions ^[8]. The Spanish Roman Catholic Church, needing the natives' labor and cooperation, evangelized in Quechua, Nahuatl, Guarani and others American languages, contributing to the expansion of these indigenous languages and equipping some of them with writing systems. One of the first primitive schools for Americans was founded by Fray Pedro de Gante in 1523.

To reward their troops the Conquistadores often allotted Indian towns to their troops and officers. Black African slaves were introduced to substitute for native American labor in some locations.

The Portuguese switched from an initial plan of establishing trading posts to extensive colonization of what is now Brazil. They imported millions of slaves to run their plantations.

The French, Spanish and Portuguese royal governments all expected to rule these settlements and to collect at least 20% of all treasure found (the Quinto Real collected by the Casa de Contratación) plus collect all the taxes they could.

[edit] Economic immigrants

Many immigrants to the American colonies came for economic reasons. Inspired by the Spanish riches from colonies founded upon the conquest of the Aztecs, Incas, and other large Native American populations in the sixteenth century, the first Englishmen to settle in America hoped for some of the same rich discoveries when they first established a settlement in Jamestown, Virginia. They were sponsored by common stock companies such as the Virginia Charter Company financed by wealthy Englishmen who understood the economic potential of this new land. The main purpose of this colony was the hope of finding gold or the possibility (or impossibility) of finding a passage through the Americas to the Indies. It took strong leaders, like John Smith, to convince the colonists of Jamestown that searching for gold was not taking care of their immediate needs for food and shelter and that "he who shall not work shall not eat." (A direction based on text from the King James Version of the New Testament.) The extremely high mortality rate was quite distressing and cause for despair among the colonists. Tobacco quickly became a cash crop for export and the sustaining economic driver of Virginia and nearby colonies like Maryland.

From the beginning of Virginia's settlements in 1587 until the 1680s, the main source of labour and a large portion of the immigrants were indentured servants looking for new life in the overseas colonies. During the 17th century, indentured servants constituted three-quarters of all European immigrants to the Chesapeake region. Most of the indentured servants were English farmers who had been pushed off their lands due to the expansion of livestock raising, the enclosure of land, and overcrowding in the countryside. This unfortunate turn of events served as a push for thousands of people (mostly single men) away from their situation in England. There was hope, however, as American landowners were in need of labourers and were willing to pay for a labourer’s passage to America if they served them for several years. By selling passage for five to seven years worth of work they could hope to start out on their own in America.

In the French colonial regions, the focus of economy was the fur trade with the natives. Farming was set up primarily to provide subsistence only, although cod and other fish of the Grand Banks were a major export and source of income for the French and many other European nations. The fur trade was also practiced by the Russians on the northwest coast of North America. After the French and Indian War, the English captured virtually all French possessions in North America, leaving only the islands of Saint-Pierre and Miquelon to France.

[edit] Religious immigration

Other groups of colonists came to America searching for the right to practice their religion without persecution. After the Protestant Reformation of the sixteenth century, King Henry VIII's renunciation of the Catholic Church, and the publication of the Bible in English, many began to question the organization of the existing Church of England. One of the primary manifestations of this was the "Puritan" movement, which wanted to "purify" the existing Church of England of its many residual Catholic rites that they believed had no mention in the Bible.

As the English monarch, Charles I tried to impose his belief in the right of "Divine Right of Kings" to do as he pleased. Ministers and many people in England had a strong feeling of persecution. Crackdowns by the English Church led to the migration of about 20,000 Puritans to New England from about 1629 to 1642. One other manifestation was the English Civil War (1642-1650) that led to Charles I's capture and beheading under Puritan Oliver Cromwell. Pennsylvania was given to William Penn in settlement of a debt the king owed his father. Its government was set up by William Penn in about 1682 to become primarily a refuge for persecuted English Quakers; but others were welcomed. Baptists, Quakers and German and Swiss Protestants flocked to Pennsylvania.

The lure of cheap land, religious freedom and the right to improve themselves with their own hand was very attractive to those who wished to escape from persecution and poverty. In America, all these groups gradually worked out a way to live together peacefully and cooperatively in the roughly 150 years preceding the American Revolution.

Roman Catholics were the first major religious group to immigrate to the New World, as settlers in the colonies of Spain and Portugal (and later, France) were required to belong to that faith. English and Dutch colonies, on the other hand, tended to be more religiously diverse. Settlers to these colonies included Anglicans, Dutch Calvinists, English Puritans, English Catholics, Scottish Presbyterians, French Huguenots, German and Swedish Lutherans, Quakers, Mennonites, Amish, Moravians, and Jews.

[edit] Forced immigration

Main article: Atlantic slave trade

Slavery existed in America, prior to the presence of Europeans, as the Natives often captured and held other tribe's members as captives. Some of these captives were even forced to undergo human sacrifice under some tribes, such as the Aztecs. The Spanish followed with the enslavement of local aborigines in the Caribbean. As the native populations declined from mostly disease, and significantly from forced exploitation and careless murder, they were often replaced by Africans imported through a large commercial slave trade. By the 18th century, the overwhelming number of black slaves was such that Native American slavery was less common. Africans, who were taken aboard slave ships to the Americas, were primarily obtained from their African homelands by coastal tribes who captured and sold them. The high incidence of nearly always fatal disease, to Europeans, kept nearly all slave capture activities confined to native African tribes. Rum, guns and gun powder were some of the major trade items traded for slaves. Approximately three to four hundred thousand in all, black slaves kept streaming into the ports of Charleston, South Carolina and Newport, Rhode Island until about 1810. The total slave trade to islands in the Caribbean, Brazil, Mexico and to the United States is estimated to have been between 10 and 28 million slaves.^[9] In addition to African slaves, poor Europeans were brought over in substantial numbers as indentured servants, particularly in the British Thirteen colonies.^[10]