When was the encomienda system made

And these revolts very quickly turned into large rebellions. And these large rebellions quickly became noticed in Europe, so that before long, the King of Spain enacted the New Laws These New Laws were designed to reform the encomienda system and curb or eliminate the abuses and neglect that were so widespread.

In addition to the revolts, you have advocates for the Native Americans arguing that they are equal free men who deserve the same rights as the Spaniards. And in fact, this debate became so prevalent that, in , the King issued the Valladolid debate about the morality of European colonization.

What are your thoughts on the encomienda system? You must be logged in to post a comment. Encomienda Begins How can Spain do that? New Laws and Reformation So the Spaniards developed the opinion that the indigenous populations were savage, and barbaric, and inferior, and they needed to be governed by a more enlightened culture. Click on a tab to select how you'd like to leave your comment. Facebook Google Login. Resource Life in Encomienda.

Content Warning: This resource addresses sexual assault and physical violence. Resource Teaching Materials Suggested Activities. Brief relation of the destruction of the Indies. Print Image. About the Image. Discussion Questions. What does this image reveal about the lives of Native people under the encomienda system?

In what ways were women uniquely vulnerable to the abuses of the encomienda system? Why were images like this circulated in Spain? What was the outcome of the campaign to end the encomienda system?

Print Section. Suggested Activities. This image was created as part of a campaign to end the encomienda system. Ask students to write a letter to King Charles V of Spain, describing their reaction to the image and why the encomienda system should be ended. Combine this image with the document about the Middle Passage for a lesson on suffering people of color endured for the profit of the Spanish colonies. The encomienda system was just one form of labor exploitation practiced in the colonial Americas.

Combine this image with any of the following resources to consider differing labor exploitation practices, the lives of those exploited, and why labor exploitation was critical to the development of the New World: Life Story: Dennis and Hannah Holland , Mortar and Pestle for Pounding Rice , and Fighting for Freedom in New Amsterdam. Moreover, its authors make no attempt to go deep into family histories and interrelationships.

Such research will demand a concentrated, special effort to master an enormous amount of detail. Aside from this, relevant information must be sought mainly in works basically concerned with other themes. He gives some examples of encomendero families who came to own great properties near their encomiendas in central Mexico, but retreats from any pronouncement on trends, since there were many other haciendas not traceable to that origin.

But he also believes that there were many other modes of land acquisition. Elsewhere the findings are also suggestive but fragmentary. From these examples a pattern seems to emerge. In most regions there came to be considerably more haciendas than there had been encomiendas. But in a typical case, if there be such a thing, the oldest, stablest, most prestigious, and best-located hacienda would have stemmed from the landholdings of the original encomendero and his family.

Research that could establish the general validity of such a pattern, however, would require years and the effort of many men. And even when accomplished it would probably not reveal the heart of the matter. Unless it went far beyond land titles, it could only demonstrate a certain genealogical relationship, and we can be almost certain that even this relationship did not exist in many regions, especially in the thinly-settled cattle areas where the encomienda was weak or absent.

Legal history yields few links between these two institutions, which dominated the Spanish American countryside, while any actual line of descent cannot yet be traced in detail.

Accordingly, the only means available to establish the connection is a phenomenological comparison of the two. This in itself could never prove—nor is it meant to prove—that the hacienda arose out of the encomienda, but it can show that the change was far less than a transformation. The comparison, to be just and fruitful, must range broadly over associated practices and structures which, one could maintain, were not a part of the institutions proper.

This procedure is necessary because the true comparability exists at the level of de facto practice, social organization, and broader functions. Neither encomienda nor hacienda ever found adequate legal expression of its full impact on society. First of all, we may compare the two institutions as to proprietorship. Following both custom and law, the encomendero lived and maintained a house in the city to whose jurisdiction his encomienda belonged.

Similarly the hacendado, while not a full-time urban resident in most cases, kept a large town house and held citizenship in the nearest city. The urban role played by both types expressed itself in the domination of the municipal council. In the Conquest period, the councils of most cities consisted exclusively of encomenderos. The later hacendados never achieved such a complete monopoly of urban office, since miners in some places and merchants in others were also council members, but nevertheless the dominance of the hacendado over municipal councils was the norm.

Each institution in its time was a family possession, the main resource of a numerous clan. Each gave rise to many entails; but, with or without legal devices of perpetuation, each had a strong tendency to remain in the family.

The balance between country and city shifted considerably from encomendero to hacendado. The encomendero stayed ordinarily in his city residence, as luxurious as he could afford to make it, and went to his encomienda as rarely as once a year on a trip which combined a pleasant country excursion and a tour of inspection at tribute-collecting time.

He did not have a house for himself on the encomienda, though he would often build or preempt structures there to house his subordinates and to store products. In contrast, the typical hacienda had an impressive country house as one of its outstanding features. The hacendado and his family could be counted on to live in town as much as possible. On occasion, for example in the depressed seventeenth century, an hacendado might not be able to afford the heavy expenses of ostentatious town living, and would sit out many months of involuntary exile in the country.

But when times were good, he would live mainly in the city and travel out to the hacienda for one good long vacation and inspection tour, much like the encomendero. Both types were rural-urban, with their economic base in the country and their social ties in the city. Only the balance between the two poles changed, corresponding to the slow and uneven movement of Spaniards and Spanish life out into the countryside through the course of the colonial period.

What one might call the staff of the two institutions was nearly identical. Both encomendero and hacendado had large collections of relatives, friends, and guests who partly lived on the bounty of the patron, partly worked for him. More specifically, both encomendero and hacendado had in their hire a steward called a majordomo, who took over nearly all the practical management of the estate. The man in this post would be well educated and would enjoy reasonably high standing in the Spanish world; yet he remained socially subordinate to the employer.

On the encomienda, or at least on large encomiendas, there were beneath the majordomo a number of combined tribute-collectors, labor foremen, and stock-watchers, often called estancieros. Typically they originated in the humblest strata of Spanish peninsular society or came out of marginal groups such as sailors, foreigners, or Negroes. The later hacienda had exactly the same kind of low-level supervisory personnel, sometimes still called estancieros—which significantly was the first word for cowboys on cattle haciendas.

They still came from the same social strata, belonging to the Spanish world, but at the very fringes of it. By this time, mestizos were commonly found in such work, along with Negroes, mulattoes, and poor Spaniards, but their relationship to Spanish society as a whole was precisely that of the earlier estancieros. These people lived more in the country than in the city, though often against their preference.

In any case, they spoke Spanish, rode horses, used Spanish weapons, implements, and techniques, and thus constituted a Spanish-urban extension into the countryside, taking their norms from the cities. At the lowest level, raw labor in both eases was done by Indians or near-Indians, divided into two distinct worker types, as will be seen shortly.

We must also take into account the ecclesiastical personnel of the great estate. The priest present on the larger haciendas duplicated these functions. In one aspect it would be natural to expect a thorough transformation—in the evolution from public to private, from a semi-governmental office to an agricultural enterprise.

Here too, however, a great deal of continuity can be observed. On the governmental side, encomenderos had the nominal paternalistic duties of protecting and instructing their Indians.

Hacendados, as mere property owners, lacked any legal justification whatever for such a role; yet they too achieved it in practice. As recognition of their power, the authorities would often give them positions such as captain of the militia or alcalde mayor, and they would exercise formal jurisdiction as well.

Both encomenderos and hacendados envisioned themselves as lords with retainers and vassals. Even on the economic side, in the evolution toward a private agricultural enterprise, there was no lack of common elements in encomienda and hacienda practice.

On the encomienda traditional, unsupervised Indian production ordinarily had primacy, but the encomendero would regularly go on to take possession of land, often on or near his encomienda. Usually, but by no means always, he received a formal land grant from the town council or the governor.

On these holdings, most commonly called estancias, 25 he would raise crops and livestock for his own establishment and for sale in town markets or mining camps. Of great importance in the agricultural labor force of the estancias were Indians falling outside the legal framework of the encomienda. Indians of this type, plus some Negro and Indian slaves, formed a permanent skeleton crew for the estancias, under the supervision of the estancieros.

All of the above characteristics persisted into the hacienda period. Even more important, the hacienda did not exploit all its vast holdings intensively; instead, certain restricted areas were cultivated under the direction of majordomos.

To do this work the hacienda possessed a more substantial crew of permanent workers than the estancias of the Conquest period. But they were still aided by a large seasonal influx of laborers from the independent Indian villages, impelled now by direct economic considerations rather than by encomienda obligation.

Both resident labor and nonresident labor, under both encomienda and hacienda, were still very close to pre-Columbian systems of periodic obligatory work. All types of workers performed something less than full-time duties, and obligations were usually reckoned by the household rather than by the individual. Also rooted in the pre-Columbian period were the so-called personal services which were so prominent a feature of the early encomienda.

Most of these were inherited by the hacienda. This is especially clear for Peru, where in the twentieth century hacienda workers still delivered produce to town and provided rotating servants in the town house of the hacendado, as they once did for the encomendero. The renowned self-sufficiency of the hacienda was also anticipated in the Conquest period.

Using their rights to Indian labor and produce as a base, encomenderos created networks of enterprises in almost all branches of economic activity that were locally profitable, though livestock and agriculture always occupied a prominent place.

They did their best to make coherent economic units of these varied holdings, each part supplementing and balancing the others. The whole estate was under unified management, since the majordomos were responsible both for official encomienda activities and for enterprises of a more private nature, as were the estancieros at a lower level.

The tendency to build complete, diversified estates, then, was already observable at a time when the Spanish sector of the economy was generally booming under the influence of newly opened mines and the demand of the nascent Spanish towns for all kinds of supplies.

This fact throws a new light on the self-sufficiency so characteristic of the later hacienda, which has often been explained very largely as a response to depressed conditions. Much the same type of structure appeared earlier in response to social and economic forces of quite a different kind. The vision of society which the Spaniards brought with them to America included a clear picture of the attributes of a great estate and its lord.

Aside from his mansion and numerous servants, guests, and vassals, he must have land, cattle, and horses, and various agricultural enterprises from wheat farms to vegetable gardens. From the early Conquest period, this ideal constituted a fixed pattern of ambitions for successful Spaniards. First the encomenderos and then the hacendados exerted themselves to carry it out to the last detail, even where local conditions rendered it economically irrational.

But by and large the great estate scheme was economically rational as well as socially desirable. Everything the estates produced was wanted in the cities; taken together these products helped create a Spanish as opposed to an Indian economy. The desire to assemble a complete set of varied holdings was not inconsistent with a thoroughly commercial orientation. Self-sufficiency is very hard to distinguish from the diversification or integration of a commercial enterprise, and the complete refusal to specialize, which may strike us today as amateurish, characterized not only the lords of estates, but colonial merchants as well.