Search Results: Encomienda

The encomienda was a system where Spanish adventurers and settlers were granted the legal right to extract forced labour from indigenous tribal chiefs in the Americas colonies of the Spanish Empire. In return, the Europeans were expected...

The repartimiento system was a distribution of rights to Spanish colonialists and municipalities, which allowed them to extract forced but low-paid labour from local communities in conquered territories. Designed to replace the inefficient...

Bartolomé de Las Casas (1484-1566) was a Spanish Dominican friar and former conquistador who revealed the atrocities of the conquests of New Spain and Peru and who strove to protect the basic rights of indigenous peoples in the Spanish Empire...

European explorers began to probe the Western Hemisphere in the early 1500s, and they found to their utter amazement not only a huge landmass but also a world filled with several diverse and populous indigenous cultures. Among their most...

Slavery in Colonial America, defined as white English settlers enslaving Africans, began in 1640 in the Jamestown Colony of Virginia but had already been embraced as policy prior to that date with the enslavement and deportation of Native...

The Conquest of New Spain by Bernal Díaz del Castillo (1492 to c. 1580) is an account written in 1568 of the early Spanish colonization of Mesoamerica, specifically the conquest of the Aztec civilization in Mexico from 1519 to 1521 when Díaz...

The European colonization of the Americas was the process by which European settlers populated the regions of North, Central, South America, and the islands of the Caribbean. It is also recognized as the direct cause for the cultures of the...

An illustration from the 16th century Codex Kingsborough showing the abuses of the encomienda forced labour system in the Viceroyalty of New Spain. (British Museum, London)

The staggering quantity of gold the conquistadors extracted from the Americas allowed Spain to become the richest country in the world. The thirst for gold to pay for armies and gain personal enrichment resulted in waves of expeditions of...

The Spanish conquistadors might have gained a lasting reputation as the great gold-seekers of history, but they were actually far more successful in acquiring silver. Over 100 tons of gold were extracted from the Americas from 1492 to 1560...