32.8 America: a.d. 1701 to 1800  (Page 18/20)

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Mexico, central america, and the caribbean

In Mexico Spanish rule continued in a stagnant civilization. The object of Spanish colonization was to enrich the Spanish king, without thought to the effect on the population and progress of the colonized country. There were 5,000 to 6,000 priests, with 6,000 to 8,000 other members of the religious orders and they were owners of tremendous properties. By the end of the century there were perhaps a 1,000,000 creoles and the mestizos were becoming more numerous. In the army, the privates were mestizos and the officers, creoles. The 3,000,000 or 4,000,000 Indians lived very little differently from their ancestors. As the century progressed and after wide-spread administrative reforms by the new Bourbon monarch, Philipe, King of Spain and grandson of Louis XIV, - especially liberalization of trade regulation - there was a general economic upsurge and the growth of a large middle class population gave new intellectual and cultural life to the colony. A very rapid population increase was apparent by the close of the century, apparently as a result of the development of immunity to the various European diseases. Spanish America became much more Europeanized, although racial plurality, prevalence of large estates and the widespread compulsory labor (both debt peonage and outright slavery) and the extraordinary economic and cultural importance of the Church, distinguished it from the most of Europe. Mexico City had 112,926 people in 1793 and was larger than any city in France or England except Paris and London. There were more people in Mexico than in all of the thirteen colonies of North America. (Ref . 139). Silver mines in the northern part of the country allowed the Mexicans to purchase large quantities of European goods. When the maize supply, which originated in the south, was interrupted in 1785-86, however, famine developed in the northern mine area and there was an endless flight of workers to the south and Mexico City. (Ref. 292 )

Guatemala City was founded in 1776, after the old capital was destroyed by an earth- quake. (Ref. 213 ) After about 1720 Britain's largest supply of American Indian slaves for the West Indies came, not from the U.S.A. south, but from Central America, primarily the Gulf of Honduras, the Mosquito Coast and Panama. Mosquito Indians and some Darien warriors in Panama raided Spanish settlements and Catholic Indian villages in the interior, returning to the coast with slaves. Two thousand such individuals were sold by the Mosquitos in the decade following 1712. (Ref. 267 )

In the Caribbean, the first coffee plants were started on Martinique by a French naval officer in 1723 and the Caribbean would eventually supply 90% of the world's coffee. (Ref. 222 ) Jamaica continued its sugar production and Saint Domingue produced as much or more. Jamaica, as a very large island, had gigantic estates developed there, especially after 1740, when the island's sugar economy was expanded. A typical estate would have a master's house and 9 or 10 black slaves for every white man. The colonial pound had a lower value than the pound sterling (1 pound sterling = 1.4 Jamaican pounds). Piracy and pillage by French privateers was common. (Ref. 292 ) By 1763 the British had taken previously Spanish Havana and all the French islands except St. Dominque, but all was restored by the Treaty of Paris of that year. (Ref 8) Britain did gain permanent control of Belize and protectorates over Honduras and Nicaragua. (Ref. 119 )