68 pages • 2 hours read
Alan TaylorAmerican Colonies: The Settling of North America
Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 2001A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Summary
Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Key Figures
Themes
Index of Terms
Important Quotes
Essay Topics
Tools
BetaPart 1, Chapters 2-4Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Part 1
Chapter 2 Summary: “Colonizers: 1400-1800”
When the European colonizers arrived, they brought together the ecological systems of the Old and New Worlds and “wrought an environmental revolution” (25). This union disproportionately favored the Europeans, as it provided valuable new imports for Europe while also introducing weeds, pests, and deadly microbes to the Americas.
Before their expeditions to the New World, 15th-century Christians felt increasingly restricted by the wealth, power, and technology of their rivals, the Muslims. They attributed their inferiority to Muslim control of trade routes to the East. There was thus a drive to discover new trade routes, particularly by Spain and Portugal, who had recently retaken the Iberian Peninsula from the Muslims in the reconquista (26).
At the end of the 15th century, new ship technologies were developed (like the caravel) that enabled 14th-century trade to shift into the Atlantic (28). Iberian success on the northwest coast of Africa and the Atlantic islands encouraged “a more intensive mode of colonization: settlement” (29). The local people of the Canary Islands, the Guanche, were essentially eradicated by a combination of disease (brought unwittingly by the Europeans) and enslavement (30). The subjugation of the Canary Islands provide a colonial model for “the discovery, invasion, and remaking of the Americas” (31).
Christopher Columbus, a militant Catholic, obtained royal patronage from Spain to cross the Atlantic and find East Asia (33). While European intellectuals of the time understood that the earth was round and that such a discovery was feasibly possible, ironically, it was Columbus’s botched calculations that lead him to believe he could sail westward to Asia (33-34).
Columbus followed the model of the Canary Islands in “settling” Hispaniola, creating commercial plantations worked by forced labor of the local Taino people. Word of his discoveries and success spread rapidly in Europe due to the newly invented printing press (35). While Columbus initially intended to sell the Taino as slaves, they were so decimated by disease that he began importing slaves from West Africa to work the land (44).
While transatlantic colonization was difficult for the invaders, it was deadly for the local populations. Indians suffered from both microparasitism (Old World diseases like smallpox and bubonic plague) and macroparasitism (the Spanish colonizers) (38-39). Meanwhile, an influx of new crops cultivated in the Americas (potatoes, maize, etc.) lead to a more varied diet for Europeans, enabling population growth (45). Many advantages for the Europeans were proportionately disadvantageous for native peoples.
Chapter 3 Summary: “New Spain: 1500-1600”
While legend of Spain’s exceptional cruelty to the Indians during the colonization process (“the Black Legend”) was enhanced by rival Europeans to justify their own imperialism, Spanish colonization of Mexico was brutal (51). Possessing superior military technology (steel weapons, war dogs, and horses), Hernán Cortés and his men easily conquered the great Aztec city of Tenochtitlán in 1519. Rampant disease among the Indians bolstered the Spaniards’ sense of divine justification—and terrified many Aztecs into converting to Catholicism. As in the Caribbean, “the Spaniards’ single greatest single advantage came from their unintentional and microscopic allies: the pathogens of diseases new to the Indians” (56).
Conquistador expeditions were high-risk, high-reward ventures for the conquerors. After obtaining a license from the Crown (adelantado), expeditions were self-funded. At stake was social mobility: many conquistadors were middle-class, rank-and-file soldiers, and in Mexico there was ample opportunity to make a fortune. Grants called encomiendas allowed their holder, the encomendero, to collect tribute from conquered Indians. The conquistadors were largely motivated by greed but believed that greed served nobler purposes: “to extend the realm of their monarch and to expand the church of their God” (58).
The conquistadors’ excessive violence and greed created friction with the Crown, which wanted to stabilize and tax the region. Efforts to rein the conquistadors in were not properly enforced (59). Frustrated too were the missionaries, who sought to convert Indians to Catholicism by forcing them to abandon their native beliefs. These attempts were not entirely successful: Indians continued to practice their own religion in secret or absorbed native cults into their Catholic practice, a process called syncretism (60).
As Spanish women rarely undertook the dangers of transatlantic travel, Spanish men took wives and concubines among the Indians. The population’s increasing racial and cultural complexity led to the development of a new racial hierarchy known as the castas, with pure-born Spaniards at the top and Indians and Africans at the bottom (61).
Chapter 4 Summary: “The Spanish Frontier: 1530-1700”
The Spanish, longing for the sort of success enjoyed by Cortés at Tenochtitlán, were convinced that gold-rich cities must exist to the north of Mexico as well. This belief was reinforced in 1536 by the return of the long-lost Cabeza de Vaca, a conquistador turned slave turned sacred healer (68-70). Vaca, now naturalized as an Indian, referred to richer peoples to the north, inciting a new wave of conquests, the largest being those of Hernando de Soto and Francisco Vásquez de Coronado.
De Soto went to Florida and what is now the American southeast. He and his men lived on food stolen from the Mississippian Indians, inflicting sadistic punishments on resisters (72). Taylor describes this practice of all conquistadors with charged language: “conquistadores lived as parasites off the native produce of the invaded regions” (68). While they found cultural markers suggesting Aztec-like wealth—crops, temple mounds, and powerful chiefs—there was no gold or silver of substantial quantity. Eventually de Soto died of sickness in 1542, and the conquistadors abandoned the project. Decimated by disease, the Mississippians were forced to leave their cities and disperse into the hills (73). By 1700 the area seemed scarcely populated where there once had been a thriving civilization. Their cultures profoundly disrupted by population collapse, new ethnic Indian groups emerged from the survivors, a process called ethnogenesis (74).
Meanwhile, Coronado was drawn to western New Mexico by Vaca’s stories and especially by tall tales of “temples sheathed in precious metals” told by a Franciscan friar, Fray Marcos de Niza. In July 1540 they discovered this wasn’t the case; Cibola, called Hawikuh by the local Zuni, had no such riches. Tricked by the local peoples he called the Pueblo into making a pointless excursion further north into the Great Plains, Coronado eventually gave up and returned to northern Mexico in 1542, where he was officially prosecuted for his abuse of the Pueblo. His “greater crimes,” Taylor writes, were “obscured by his great conquest” (76).
As a result of these failed missions the Spanish lost interest in the northern lands and sought to fortify their holdings in Florida, which were relentlessly pillaged by rogue natives and the pirates of other imperial powers (198). Spanish imperial power would remain largely confined to the south.
Part 1, Chapters 2-4 Analysis
Chapters 2 through 4 cover Spain’s first transatlantic voyages and the initial results of contact between the American natives and Europeans. These meetings were unilaterally devastating to Indians and usually rewarding for the colonizers. Chapter 2 describes Christopher Columbus’s first encounters with the Taino on Hispaniola. Chapter 3 delves into the bloody conquering of the Aztecs by Cortés. Finally, Chapter 4 details de Soto and Coronado’s Spanish expeditions into the north, which failed on multiple fronts. Materially, they did not find anything resembling the golden cities of central Mexico, and culturally, the Spanish inability to treat native peoples fairly resulted in misdirects, complicating their missions.
Chapter 3 establishes an important reference point for the rest of the work: the origins of the Black Legend. Propaganda developed by Spain’s imperial rivals, the Black Legend claimed that Spanish treatment of native peoples was uniquely monstrous. While it was certainly brutal, this treatment was not unique; many Europeans had already committed similar atrocities closer to home. As the Canary Islands and Hispaniola served as colonization training grounds for the Spanish, the English had used similar tactics in subduing Ireland. Spain, in fact, stood alone among the imperial powers in enacting laws for the protection of indigenous peoples. Thus the Black Legend functioned, essentially, as a distancing device for other Europeans. They could think of themselves as benevolent masters compared to the brutish Spaniards, when in fact Europeans were almost universally cruel in their treatment of native peoples.
Taylor is generally interested in colonizer motivations and justifications. In the case of the Spanish, he suggests the true motive of most to be profit. He uses vivid primary source quotations to support this, including Cortés’s description of his “disease” (“I and my companions suffer from a disease of the heart which can be cured only with gold”) and one Aztec’s comment that the Spanish “picked up the gold and fingered it like monkeys […] They hungered like pigs for that gold” (57). Observations in Taylor’s own words can range from subtle (“But the conquistadors held that their greed served other, nobler purposes” [58], the implication being that this claim was disingenuous), to contemptuous (“Because conquistadors lived as parasites off the native produce of the invaded regions” [67]).
But as Taylor rightly concentrates on Spanish greed, we should be sure to loop it back to the real treasure of the Americas for all Europeans: social mobility. While conquistador officers were gentry (hidalgos), the regular soldiers were middle class and self-funded. The Americas offered them something unheard of in Europe at the time: a chance at autonomy and self-sufficiency. The irony, as Taylor will underline more clearly in subsequent chapters, is that the cost of liberty for them was the brutal subjugation of others. Taylor is generally comfortable with accommodating complex motivations in all of his players, recognizing that human beings themselves are complex. Some Spaniards, like de Soto, were driven by “a streak of sadism” (72). Others, like the Franciscans, genuinely believed that they were saving souls even as they violently forced Indians to convert to Christianity. Finally some, like Cabeza de Vaca, were eloquent enough in their defense of native peoples to shift official Spanish policy from conquest to pacification.
