Colonies and resistance in the Americas

On 1 January 1804 Haiti declared independence, the first country founded by people who had freed themselves from slavery.

Conquest with many allies

Spain’s American empire was built in a few decades. Hernán Cortés landed on the coast of Mexico in 1519 with a few hundred soldiers. He could not have defeated the Aztec empire with them alone. Indigenous opponents of the Aztecs joined him by the thousands, including tributary peoples and the independent Tlaxcalans. Smallpox struck Tenochtitlan in 1520 (unit 4), and after a siege of about three months the city surrendered on 13 August 1521. Its last ruler, Cuauhtémoc, was captured and later executed. In 1532 Francisco Pizarro captured the Inca ruler Atahualpa at Cajamarca in the Andes, at a moment when the Inca empire had just come out of a civil war between Atahualpa and his brother. Atahualpa paid a huge ransom in gold and silver and was executed anyway in 1533.

Silver, sugar and forced labour

Colonies existed to send wealth to Europe, and the wealth was produced by forced labour. Under the encomienda, the Spanish crown granted a colonist the right to the labour and tribute of a group of Indigenous people. In 1545 a mountain of silver ore was found at Potosí, in today’s Bolivia, and for generations it was the richest silver mine in the world. To work it, Spanish officials took over an old Andean labour draft, the mita, and forced Indigenous villages across a huge region to send men to the mines, where many died. Spanish silver paid for wars in Europe and flowed across the Pacific to China. The friar Bartolomé de las Casas spent decades denouncing the treatment of Indigenous people, and in 1542 the crown issued the New Laws to limit the encomienda, though colonists resisted them. In Brazil, the Caribbean and later the southern British colonies, sugar, tobacco and rice plantations relied on enslaved Africans. England founded Jamestown in Virginia in 1607, and France founded Quebec in 1608.

Rebellion in the Andes

Indigenous and African people resisted colonial rule from the start, by flight, by armed revolt and by keeping their languages and beliefs alive. Enslaved people who escaped formed free communities, called quilombos in Brazil and maroon communities in the Caribbean. One of the largest rebellions began in Peru in November 1780. José Gabriel Condorcanqui, a descendant of the Inca rulers who took the name Túpac Amaru II, arrested and executed a hated provincial official, Antonio de Arriaga. His movement attacked the abuses of colonial officials and the Potosí mita, and on 16 November 1780 he decreed an end to the slavery of Black people, the first such decree in Spanish America. He was captured and executed in Cuzco in 1781, but the rebellion went on: the Aymara leader Túpac Katari and his wife Bartolina Sisa besieged La Paz for months in 1781.

Haiti

In the 18th century the French colony of Saint-Domingue, the western part of the island of Hispaniola, produced more sugar and coffee than any other colony in the Caribbean, worked by hundreds of thousands of enslaved Africans. In August 1791 the enslaved people of the northern plain rose in revolt. Over the next twelve years they fought French, Spanish and British armies. Toussaint Louverture, who had been born enslaved, became the revolution’s most famous leader; France ended slavery in the colony in 1793 and in all its colonies in 1794. When Napoleon sent an army to restore French control, Toussaint was seized and taken to France, where he died in prison in 1803. His general Jean-Jacques Dessalines defeated the French army, and on 1 January 1804 he declared the independence of Haiti. Within the next two decades most of mainland Spanish America also won its independence.