Gus Ch. 4-5 Review

Columbian Exchange: was a dramatically widespread exchange of animals, foods, human populations (including slaves), communicable diseases, and ideas between the Eastern and Western hemispheres that occurred after Christopher Columbus landed in the Americas. New diseases introduced by Europeans (many of which diseases had originated in Asia) to which indigenous people had no immunity, depopulated many cultures. By some estimates, nearly 80 percent of the native population of the Americas was wiped out from the introduction of Eurasian diseases.[citation needed] On the other hand, the contact between the two areas circulated a wide variety of new crops and livestock which supported increases in population. Explorers returned to Europe with maize, potatoes, and tomatoes, which became very important crops in Eurasia by the 18th century. Similarly, Europeans introduced manioc and the peanut to tropical Southeast Asia and West Africa, where they flourished and supported growth in populations on soils that otherwise would not produce large yields. Encomienda: The encomienda is a trusteeship labor system that was employed by the Spanish crown during the Spanish colonization of the Americas and the Philippines. In the encomienda, the crown granted a person a specified number of natives for whom they were to take responsibility. The receiver of the grant was to instruct the natives in the Spanish language and in the Catholic faith. In return, they could exact tribute from the natives in the form of labour, gold or other products, such as in corn, wheat or chickens. In the former Inca empire, for example, the system continued the Incaic (and even pre-Incaic) traditions of exacting tribute under the form of labor. In 1503 the crown began to legally grant encomiendas to soldiers, conquistadors and officials. The system of encomiendas was aided by the Crown's organizing Natives into small communities known as reducciones, in response to the declining populations. Each reducción had a Native chief responsible for keeping track of the laborers in his community. The encomienda system did not grant people land, but it indirectly aided in the settlers' acquisition of land. Encomenderos became familiar with Native lands; they were positioned to take control of land belonging to the Natives under their trusteeship through legal or extralegal means, when the opportunity arose. As initially defined, the encomendero and his heir were only supposed to benefit from the grant for two generations; however, this was often not the case, especially if the heir rendered some service to the crown. Repartimiento: The Repartimiento de Labor was a colonial forced labor system imposed upon the indigenous population of Spanish America and the Philippines. In concept it was similar to other tribute-labor systems, such as the mita of the Inca Empire or the corvée of Ancien Régime France: the natives were forced to do low-paid or unpaid labor for a certain number of weeks or months each year on Spanish-owned farms, mines, workshops (obrajes), and public projects. Like the encomienda system that preceded it, the repartimiento was not slavery, in that the worker is not owned outright—

being free in various respects other than in the dispensation of his or her labor—and the work was intermittent. It however, created slavery-like conditions in certain areas, most notoriously in silver mines of 16th century Peru. [1] In the first decades of the colonization of the Caribbean the word was used for the institution that became the encomienda, which can cause confusion. The repartimiento, for the most part, replaced the encomienda of throughout the Viceroyalty of New Spain by the beginning of the 17th century. [2] In Peru encomiendas lasted longer, and the Quechua word mita frequently was used for repartimiento. There were instances when both systems (repartimiento and encomienda) coexisted. In practice, a conquistador, or later a Spanish settler or offiical, would be given and supervised a number of indigenous workers, who would labor in farms or mines, or in the case of the Philippines might also be assigned to the ship yards constructing the Manila galleons. The one in charge of doing the reparto ("distribution") of workers was the Alcalde Mayor (local magistrate) of the city. Cabildo: autonomous municipal council, the lowest administrative unit in the Spanish government. The institution was especially influential in Spanish America, where it was set up in the early 16th cent. in imitation of the Castilian ayuntamiento, the name it was at first briefly called. Composed originally of elected administrative officials, usually local landowners, it was the only institution in which creoles could participate. It was presided over by the alcalde mayor, the administrator of a provincial division, who was assisted in judicial matters by alcaldes ordinarios (see alcalde). The cabildo exercised considerable executive, legislative, and judicial powers; it distributed lands, imposed taxes, provided for police service, and supervised trade and public facilities such as hospitals and jails. Bartolome de las Casas: a 16th-century Spanish Dominican priest, writer and the first resident Bishop of Chiapas. As a settler in the New World he witnessed, and was driven to oppose, the torture and genocide of the Native Americans by the Spanish colonists and pushed for rights of the natives appealing to the imperial court of Charles V. His stance for African slaves' rights was later than the one for native slavery. Viceroy Francisco Toledo: Spanish viceroy of Peru from November 26, 1569 to September 23, 1581. During his rule, Toledo took charge of the government and implemented many reforms. He centralized colonial governmental functions and laid the foundation for the future administration of the viceroyalty. He established royal authority and Spanish dominance in the colony. He broke the power of the encomenderos, reducing them to obedient servants of the crown. He worked hard to convert the Indigenous and provide them with religious training. Toledo added new laws and royal decrees regarding the Indians and their lands, and he gathered the natives into villages, or reducciones. He promulgated laws that applied to both Indians and Spanish alike. He tried to adapt the political and social structures of the Incas to life in the viceroyalty. He also reduced the old system of mita,

which had transformed from mandatory public service into a form of forced native labor. Under his reforms of the mita, no more than one seventh of the male population of a village could be conscripted, they could not be forced to work far from their native villages, and they were entitled to compensation for their labor. These reforms later were called the Toledo Reforms. Potosi: Founded in 1546 as a mining town, it soon produced fabulous wealth, becoming one of the largest cities in the Americas and the world with a population exceeding 200,000 people. It is from Potosí that most of the silver shipped through the Spanish Main came. Indian laborers, forced by Francisco de Toledo, Count of Oropesa through the traditional Incan mita institution of contributed labor, came to die by the thousands, not simply from exposure and brutal labor, but by mercury poisoning: in the patio process the silver-ore, having been crushed to powder by hydraulic machinery, was cold-mixed with mercury and trodden to an amalgam by the native workers with their bare feet.