The Spanish Conquest and settlement of America

Abstract

Fifteenth-century Europe was a society suffering from the economic and social dislocations caused by the ravages of the Black Death. The problem that faced the crown and its agents in Hispaniola prefigured in miniature the problem that underlay the whole Spanish enterprise in America. The continuing decline of Hispaniola's indigenous and imported non-white population elicited two distinctive responses, each with major consequences for the future of Spanish America. It provoked, in the first place, a powerful movement of moral indignation, both in the island itself and in metropolitan Spain. The movement was led by Dominicans horrified by the conditions they found on the island on their arrival in 1510. By the middle of the sixteenth century there were probably around 100,000 whites in Spanish America. By the middle of the sixteenth century Spanish America was a very different world from the one that had been envisaged in the immediate aftermath of conquest.

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