The Columbian discovery of America is one of the greatest events in the history. Columbus set the stage for the era of explorations in the Americas. From the fifteenth century to the end of the Second World War, colonial imperialism of the Europeans was a process that explored lands beyond the shores of continental Europe. It led to the exploitation of the local resources and established settlements to manage and handle the resources. The arrival of Columbus in the lands of America was an invasion rather discovery. The Columbian exchange is the exchange of crops, diseases, ideas and people post Columbus’ voyage in the year 1492. Gibson states that as soon as Columbus stepped in the Americas, he decided to take the indigenous peoples back to Spain and sell them in the slave markets. The paper argues about the voyage of Columbus to the Americas and the major changes that took place in the Americas, such as slavery, disease, plantations and many others. The Spaniards were extremely brutal against the indigenous peoples and forced them to work in the gold mines. Though initially the trade was only for gold, gradually it turned out to be a trade of slaves.
The primary slave buyers were the Islamic states of the Middle East and the primary slave markets were in Spain. Unlike the Africans, the inhabitants of the Americas had no immunity to the diseases brought by the Europeans. The death toll began to increase on the islands due to epidemics, such as chicken pox, small pox, measles and many others. The epidemics not only killed the people, but also shattered political cohesion in the Americas. Without the natives to do the work, the Spaniards could not support themselves or realize the profit they expected from the new colonies of the Americas. Increased suppression of the survivors led to the declining indigenous peoples of Americas. The Spanish violence and cruelty was incomprehensible. They hanged the natives and smashed their heads against rocks. Those who resisted had their ears and nose cut off. Unable to withstand the Spanish cruelty, the natives started killing the Spaniards and destroying the forts set up by Columbus.
The Spanish soldiers invaded the villages and rounded up the populations. They either killed the remaining natives or shipped them back to Spain. On the islands, the natives had to work to supply the colonists and the soldiers with food. Several natives killed themselves and their children instead of submitting to the Spanish. In less than five decades, the Spanish made the native population virtually extinct and replaced them with black slaves from Africa. The declining numbers of the natives led to the focus of the Europeans on the islands of the Caribbean. The views of European Christianity could not convince the Europeans to treat the natives as fail and equal. In the eyes of the Europeans, the natives were savages and uncultured people as valuable as a resource of slave. The European invasion resulted in a new mercantile class, capital formation and emergence of modern banking to create a new sense of nationalism.
The change of control between the European powers led to several temporary settlements, which turned out to become permanent settlements. For the natives, the change in the status of the former homeland from colony to a nation made very little difference to their situation. The former colonies of the Americas developed imperialistic aspirations of their own. The languages of the natives differ from those spoken by the mainstream populations. Also, the culture of the indigenous peoples of the Americas invariably differs from that of the rest of the world. They are conscious of their separate identities and struggle to retain them. They are marginal to the states that claim domination over them. The theory of social evolution placed the natives at the bottom of the ladder of development. By the beginning of the sixteenth century, the entire population of the Caribbean exterminated in the Lesser Antilles due to disease, warfare and slave labor.
The native Americas experienced the system of encomienda. Encomienda was the delegation of the royal power to collect tribute from, and to use the services of the Indians. In the initial years, the beneficiaries looked upon encomienda as a subterfuge for slavery. It was a tax imposed on the indigenous peoples as subjects of the Spanish kings. Most of the people received encomienda as heir of their husband and possessed the right to transfer them to their children irrespective of their gender. The Spanish crown remained ambiguous about the policy of encomienda and required a royal approval of the intended husband. Though encomienda held significant power for short periods of time, in the long run, it eroded the privileges. The members of the church opposed encomiendas as they led to the exploitation of the Native American labor in the Caribbean islands. Several arguments over the rights of the indigenous peoples, and those of the conquistadores and settlers continued until 1542, when the Crown issued new laws abolishing enslavement of the Indians.
In the Caribbean, three major theories proved influential, which were the plantation model, the creole-society model and the plural-society model. The plantation model was dependant on the idea that the institution of plantation and the experience of slavery are central to the life of the Caribbean. The plantation system of the Caribbean was a rigid system of social stratification between racial and class hierarchies. Sugar cultivation demanded large and cheap labor force to work in the hot tropical climate. The central theme of the creole society is that the Europeans and the Africans that settled in the Caribbean built a new society that was neither African nor European. The color-class hierarchy of the Caribbean was a correlation between the skin color and social status, and a direct legacy of slavery. It was more visible in the territories where the majority of the people were Africans.
In the 1520s, the economies of the settled Caribbean colonies, such as Hispaniola, Puerto Rico, Cuba and Jamaica started shifting from the occupation of mining to tobacco cultivation, ranching and market gardening. The imported African slaves predominantly replaced the natives, and concentrated on the plantation economies, such as coffee, cotton and sugar. The constant supply of imported slaves resulted in increasing marronage and proliferation of maroon societies. Marronage represented forms of resistance to slavery, in the form of permanent responses, such as suicide, self-mutilation, conspiracy and rebellion. Maroon settlements called palenques were establishments by the Indians to escape from forced labor. Mountains that lie in the interior of the Caribbean islands were the best places for the Indians to establish palenques. The emancipation of slavery decided to end the domination-subordination relationship that developed between the North Atlantic tier and circum-Caribbean countries.
The Caribbean was an important region for the Atlantic slave trade. In the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, millions of slaves reached the staple-producing colonies of the Caribbean. The major focus of the slave trade was on the British, French and Dutch colonies of the Caribbean. St. Domingue was the greatest consumer of slaves followed by Jamaica. There was a decline in the import of slaves by mid-eighteenth century due to the saturation of the island. Gradually, the import of slaves inclined to Barbados and Suriname. By the end of the nineteenth century, slave trade was illegal for a major part of the Caribbean. However, the illicit trade of the nineteenth century supplied substantial number of slaves to the French West Indies. Free migration into the Caribbean was as important as the slave trade. By the end of the nineteenth century, the slaves outnumbered free migrants in the Americas. Free migrants decided to move to the Caribbean to work as entrepreneurs or laborers to work without the constraints of a binding contract.
While the colonial governments of the Caribbean promoted the free migration, some whites, lured by the grants of lands and other benefits voluntarily migrated to the Caribbean. Indentured migration into the Caribbean varied in a complicated manner in response to the fortunes of the plantation economy. The occasional changes in the legal possession of the colonies had a great political shift due to the Haitian revolution. The trade in the Caribbean accelerated due to the production of export crops and led to the establishment of the Caribbean islands giving rise to tourism. In the twentieth and the twenty-first century, Caribbean witnessed millions of tourists entering the countries, which in turn increased the scope for illegal drugs. At the present time, the Caribbean is no longer a slave region; instead, it is one of the most prosperous tourist regions of the world attracting millions of tourists worldwide.
References
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Buckman, Robert T. Latin America 2014. Rowman & Littlefield, 2014.
Erskine, Noel Leo. Plantation Church: How African American Religion Was Born in Caribbean Slavery. Oxford University Press, 2014.
Gibson, Carrie. Empire's Crossroads: The Caribbean From Columbus to the Present Day. Pan Macmillan, 2014.
Ramharacksingh, Ronald. Caribbean Primary Agriculture. Nelson Thornes Limited, 2014.
Teelucksingh, Jerome. Caribbean Empire: The Impact of Culture, Literature and History. Academica PressLlc, 2014.
