US history. What is the history of the settlement of South America? American colonization period

As a result of Columbus's voyage, they found much more, a whole “New World” inhabited by numerous peoples. Having conquered these peoples with lightning speed, the Europeans began the merciless exploitation of the natural and human resources of the continent they had captured. It was from this moment that the breakthrough began, which by the end of the 19th century made Euro-American civilization dominant over the rest of the peoples of the planet.

The remarkable Marxist geographer James Blaut, in his pioneering study The Colonial Model of the World, paints a broad picture of early capitalist production in colonial South America and shows its key importance for the emergence of European capitalism. It is necessary to briefly summarize his conclusions.

Precious metals

Thanks to the conquest of America, by 1640 Europeans received from there at least 180 tons of gold and 17 thousand tons of silver. This is official data. In fact, these figures can easily be multiplied by two, taking into account poor customs records and widespread smuggling. The huge influx of precious metals led to a sharp expansion of the sphere of monetary circulation necessary for the development of capitalism. But, more importantly, the fall of gold and silver allowed European entrepreneurs to pay higher prices for goods and labor and thereby seize the dominant heights in international trade and production, pushing aside their competitors - groups of non-European proto-bourgeoisie, especially in the Mediterranean region. Leaving aside for now the role of genocide in the extraction of precious metals, as well as other forms of capitalist economies in Colombian America, it is necessary to note Blaut's important argument that the very process of extracting these metals and the economic activity necessary to support it was profit-generating.

Plantations

In the 15-16th centuries. Commercial and feudal sugar production developed throughout the Mediterranean and in West and East Africa, although honey was still preferred in Northern Europe due to its lower cost. Even then, the sugar industry was an important part of the proto-capitalist sector of the Mediterranean economy. Then, throughout the 16th century, there is a process of rapid development of sugar plantations in America, which replaces and displaces sugar production in the Mediterranean. Thus, taking advantage of the two traditional benefits of colonialism - “free” land and cheap labor - European proto-capitalists eliminate their competitors with their feudal and semi-feudal production. No other type of industry, Blaut concludes, was as important to the development of capitalism before the 19th century as the sugar plantations in Colombian America. And the data he provides is truly amazing.

So in 1600, 30,000 tons of sugar were exported from Brazil with a selling price of 2 million pounds sterling. This is about twice the value of all British exports that year. Let us recall that it is Britain and its commercial wool production that Eurocentric historians (i.e., 99% of all historians) consider the main engine of capitalist development in the 17th century. That same year, per capita income in Brazil (excluding the Indians, of course) was higher than in Britain, which only later caught up with Brazil. By the end of the 16th century, the rate of capitalist accumulation on Brazilian plantations was so high that it allowed production to double every 2 years. At the beginning of the 17th century, Dutch capitalists, who controlled a significant part of the sugar business in Brazil, carried out calculations that showed that the annual rate of profit in this industry was 56%, and in monetary terms, almost 1 million pounds sterling (a fantastic amount for that time). Moreover, these profits were even higher at the end of the 16th century, when the cost of production, including the purchase of slaves, was only one-fifth of the income from the sale of sugar.

Sugar plantations in America occupied a central place in the development of the early capitalist economy in Europe. But besides sugar, there was also tobacco, there were spices, dyes, and there was a huge fishing industry in Newfoundland and other places on the East Coast of North America. All this was also part of the capitalist development of Europe. The slave trade was also extremely profitable. Blaut estimates that by the end of the 16th century, the colonial economy of the Western Hemisphere employed up to 1 million people, about half of whom were employed in capitalist production. In the 1570s, the huge mining town of Potosi in the Andes had a population of 120,000, more than the population of European cities such as Paris, Rome or Madrid at the time.

Finally, about fifty new species of agricultural plants, cultivated by the agricultural genius of the peoples of the “New World”, fell into the hands of Europeans, such as potatoes, corn, tomatoes, a number of varieties of pepper, cocoa for chocolate production, a number of legumes, peanuts, sunflowers, etc. -potatoes and corn became cheap substitutes for bread for the European masses, saving millions from devastating crop shortages, allowing Europe to double food production in the fifty years from 1492 and thus providing one of the fundamental conditions for creating a market for wage labor for capitalist production.

So, thanks to the works of Blaut and a number of other radical historians, the key role of early European colonialism in the development of capitalism and its “centering” (centratedness is a neologism of J. Blaut - A.B.) begins to emerge precisely in Europe, and not in other areas of the world proto-capitalist development . Vast territories, cheap slave labor of enslaved peoples, robbery of the natural resources of the Americas gave the European proto-bourgeoisie a decisive superiority over its competitors in the international economic system of the 16th and 17th centuries, allowed it to rapidly accelerate the already existing trends of capitalist production and accumulation and, thus, initiate the process of social -political transformation of feudal Europe into a bourgeois society. As the famous Caribbean Marxist historian S.R.L. wrote. James, “the slave trade and slavery became the economic basis of the French Revolution... Almost all the industries that developed in France in the 18th century were based on the production of goods for the Guinean coast or for America.” (James, 47-48).

At the heart of this fateful turn in world history was the genocide of the peoples of the Western Hemisphere. This genocide was not only the first in the history of capitalism, not only stands at its origins, it is both the largest in terms of the number of victims and the longest extermination of peoples and ethnic groups, which continues to this day.

"I have become death, the Destroyer of Worlds."
(Bhagavad Gita)

Robert Oppenheimer remembered these lines when he saw the first atomic explosion. With much greater right, the ominous words of the ancient Sanskrit poem could be recalled by the people who were on the ships Niña, Pinta and Santa Maria, when 450 years before the Explosion, on the same dark early morning they noticed a fire on the leeward side of the island, which they later named in honor of the Saint Savior - San Salvador.

Twenty-six days after testing a nuclear device in the New Mexico desert, the bomb dropped on Hiroshima killed at least 130,000 people, almost all of them civilians. In just 21 years after Columbus landed on the islands of the Caribbean, the largest of them, renamed Hispaniola by the Admiral (present-day Haiti and the Dominican Republic), lost almost all of its indigenous population - about 8 million people, killed, died from disease, hunger, slavery labor and despair. The devastating power of this Spanish "nuclear bomb" on Hispaniola was equivalent to more than 50 Hiroshima-type atomic bombs. And that was just the beginning.

Thus, a historian from the University of Hawaii, David Stanard, begins his book “The American Holocaust” (1992) by comparing the first and “most monstrous in terms of size and consequences of genocide in world history” with the practice of genocides in the 20th century, and in this historical perspective lies, in my opinion view, the special significance of his work, as well as the significance of Ward Churchill's subsequent book, A Minor Question of Genocide (1997), and a number of other studies in recent years. In these works, the destruction of the indigenous population of the Americas by Europeans and Latinos appears not only as the most massive and prolonged (up to this day) genocide in world history, but also as an organic part of Euro-American civilization from the late Middle Ages to Western imperialism of our days.

Stanard begins his book by describing the amazing richness and variety of human life in the Americas before Columbus's fateful voyage. He then takes the reader along the historical and geographical route of genocide: from the extermination of the indigenous inhabitants of the Caribbean, Mexico, Central and South America, to the turn north and the destruction of Indians in Florida, Virginia and New England, and finally through the Great Prairies and the Southwest to California and the Pacific Coast of the Northwest. The following part of my article is based primarily on Stanard's book, while the second part, genocide in North America, uses Churchill's work.

Who was the victim of the most massive genocide in world history?

The human society destroyed by the Europeans in the Caribbean was in every respect superior to their own, if closeness to the ideal of a communist society is taken as a measure of development. It would be more accurate to say that, thanks to a rare combination of natural conditions, the Tainos (or Arawaks) lived in a communist society. Not the way the European Marx imagined it, but communist nonetheless. Residents of the Greater Antilles have achieved a high level of regulation of their relationships with the natural world. They learned to get from nature everything they needed, not by depleting it, but by cultivating and transforming it. They had huge aqua farms, in each of which they raised up to a thousand large sea turtles (the equivalent of 100 head of cattle). They literally “collected” small fish from the sea, using plant substances that paralyzed them. Their agriculture was superior to that of Europe and was based on a three-tier planting system that uses combinations of different plant types to create a favorable soil and climate regime. Their homes, spacious, clean and bright, would be the envy of the European masses.

American geographer Karl Sauer comes to the following conclusion:

“The tropical idyll that we find in the descriptions of Columbus and Peter Martyr was largely true.” About Tainos (Arawak): “These people did not need anything. They took care of their plants and were skilled fishermen, canoeists and swimmers. They built attractive homes and kept them clean. Aesthetically, they expressed themselves in wood. They had free time to play ball, dance and play music. They lived in peace and friendship." (Standard, 51).

But Columbus, that typical European of the 15th and 16th centuries, had a different idea of ​​the “good society.” On October 12, 1492, the day of "Contact", he wrote in his diary:
“These people walk around in what their mother gave birth to, but they are good-natured... they can be made free and converted to our Holy Faith. They will make good and skillful servants.”

That day, representatives of the two continents met for the first time on an island that the locals called Guanahani. Early in the morning, a crowd of curious Tainos gathered under the tall pines on the sandy shore. They watched as a strange boat with a hull like a fish skeleton and bearded strangers in it swam to the shore and buried itself in the sand. Bearded men came out and pulled her higher, away from the foam of the surf. Now they stood opposite each other. The newcomers were dark-skinned and black-haired, with shaggy heads and overgrown beards, and many of their faces were riddled with smallpox, one of the 60 to 70 deadly diseases they would bring to the Western Hemisphere. There was a heavy smell coming from them. In Europe in the 15th century, people did not wash. At a temperature of 30-35 degrees Celsius, the aliens were dressed from head to toe, with metal armor hanging over their clothes. In their hands they held long thin knives, daggers and sticks sparkling in the sun.

In his logbook, Columbus often noted the amazing beauty of the islands and their inhabitants - friendly, happy, peaceful. And just two days after the first contact, an ominous entry appears in the journal: “50 soldiers are enough to conquer them all and force them to do whatever we want.” “The locals allow us to go wherever we want and give us everything we ask from them.” What surprised the Europeans most was the incomprehensible generosity of this people. And this is not surprising. Columbus and his comrades sailed to these islands from the real hell that was Europe at that time. They were the real fiends (and in many ways the scum) of the European hell, over which the bloody dawn of primitive capitalist accumulation rose. We need to tell you briefly about this place.

Hell called Europe

In hell, Europe was waging a fierce class war, frequent epidemics of smallpox, cholera and plague devastated cities, and even more often death from hunger decimated the population. But even in prosperous years, according to a 16th-century historian of Spain, “the rich ate and ate to their heart’s content, while thousands of hungry eyes looked greedily at their gargantuan dinners.” So precarious was the existence of the masses that even in the 17th century, every "average" increase in the price of wheat or millet in France killed an equal or twice as large percentage of the population as US casualties in the Civil War. Centuries after Columbus's voyage, the city ditches of Europe still served as public toilets, with the entrails of killed animals and the remains of carcasses left to rot in the streets. A particular problem in London were the so-called. “Poor holes” are “large, deep, open pits where the corpses of the dead poor were piled, in a row, layer upon layer. Only when the hole was filled to the brim was it covered with earth.” One contemporary wrote: “How disgusting is the stench that comes from these pits filled with corpses, especially in the heat and after the rain.” Little better was the smell emanating from living Europeans, most of whom were born and died without ever washing themselves. Almost every one of them bore traces of smallpox and other deforming diseases that left their victims half-blind, pockmarked, scabbed, rotting chronic sores, lame, etc. The average life expectancy did not reach 30 years. Half of the children died before they turned 10.

A criminal could be waiting for you around every corner. One of the most popular methods of robbery was to throw a stone from a window onto the head of the victim and then search him, and one of the holiday entertainments was to burn a dozen or two cats alive. During the famine years, the cities of Europe were rocked by riots. And the largest class war of that era, or rather a series of wars collectively called Peasant Wars, claimed more than 100,000 lives. The fate of the rural population was not the best. The classic description of the French peasants of the 17th century, left by La Bruere and confirmed by modern historians, sums up the existence of this largest class of feudal Europe:

“Sullen animals, males and females, scattered across the countryside, dirty and deathly pale, scorched by the sun, chained to the earth, which they dig and shovel with invincible tenacity; they have a kind of gift of speech, and when they straighten up, you can see human faces on them, and they really are people. At night they return to their lairs, where they live on black bread, water and roots."

And what Lawrence Stone wrote about a typical English village can be applied to the rest of Europe at that time:

“It was a place full of hatred and malice, the only thing that bound its inhabitants were episodes of mass hysteria, which for a time united the majority to torture and burn the local witch.” There were towns in England and on the Continent in which up to a third of the population were accused of witchcraft, and where 10 out of every hundred townspeople were executed on this charge in one year alone. At the end of the 16th and 17th centuries, more than 3,300 people were executed for “Satanism” in one of the regions of peaceful Switzerland. In the tiny village of Wiesensteig, 63 “witches” were burned in one year. In Obermarchtal, with a population of 700, 54 people died at the stake in three years.

Poverty was such a central phenomenon of European society that in the 17th century the French language had a whole palette of words (about 20) to denote all its gradations and shades. The Academy's Dictionary explained the meaning of the term dans un etat d'indigence absolue as follows: “one who previously had no food or the necessary clothing or a roof over his head, but who has now said goodbye to the few battered cooking bowls and blankets that constituted his main property working families."

Slavery flourished in Christian Europe. The Church welcomed and encouraged him; it was itself a major slave trader; I will discuss the significance of her policies in this area for understanding genocide in America at the end of the essay. In the 14th and 15th centuries, most slaves came from Eastern Europe, especially Romania (history repeats itself in modern times). Little girls were especially valued. From a letter from one slave trader to a client interested in this product: “When the ships arrive from Romania, there should be girls there, but keep in mind that small slaves are as expensive as adult ones; Of those that are of any value, not one costs less than 50-60 florins.” Historian John Boswell notes that "10 to 20 percent of women sold in Seville in the 15th century were pregnant or had babies, and these unborn children and infants usually went to the buyer with the woman at no additional cost."

The rich had their own problems. They craved gold and silver to satisfy their habits for exotic goods, habits acquired since the time of the first crusades, i.e. the first colonial expeditions of Europeans. Silks, spices, fine cotton, drugs and medicines, perfumes and jewelry required a lot of money. So gold became for Europeans, in the words of one Venetian, “the veins of the entire state life... its mind and soul. . .its essence and its very life.” But the supply of precious metals from Africa and the Middle East was unreliable. In addition, the wars in Eastern Europe drained European coffers. It was necessary to find a new, reliable and preferably cheaper source of gold.

What can we add to this? As can be seen from the above, brutal violence was the norm of European life. But at times it took on a particularly pathological character and seemed to foreshadow what awaited the unsuspecting inhabitants of the Western Hemisphere. In addition to the everyday scenes of witch hunts and bonfires, in 1476 a man in Milan was torn to pieces by a mob and then eaten by his tormentors. In Paris and Lyon, Huguenots were killed and cut into pieces, which were then openly sold on the streets. Other outbreaks of sophisticated torture, murder and ritual cannibalism were not unusual.

Finally, while Columbus was searching Europe for money for his sea adventures, the Inquisition was raging in Spain. There and throughout Europe, those suspected of apostasy from Christianity were subjected to torture and execution in every form of which the inventive imagination of the Europeans was capable. Some were hanged, burned at the stake, boiled in a cauldron, or hung on the rack. Others were crushed, their heads were cut off, they were skinned alive, they were drowned and quartered.

This was the world that the former slave trader Christopher Columbus and his sailors left behind in August 1492. They were typical inhabitants of this world, its deadly bacilli, the killing power of which was soon to be experienced by millions of human beings living on the other side of the Atlantic.

Numbers

“When the white masters came to our land, they brought fear and withered flowers. They disfigured and destroyed the color of other nations. . . Marauders by day, criminals by night, murderers of the world." Mayan book Chilam Balam.

Stanard and Churchill spend many pages describing the conspiracy of the Euro-American scientific establishment to conceal the true population of the American continent in the pre-Columbian era. The Smithsonian Institution in Washington was and continues to be at the head of this conspiracy. And Ward Churchill also talks in detail about the resistance that American Zionist scientists, specializing in the so-called strategic area for the ideology of modern imperialism. "Holocaust", i.e. of the Nazi genocide against European Jews, have contributed to the attempts of progressive historians to establish the actual scale and world-historical significance of the genocide of Native Americans at the hands of “Western civilization.” We will address this last question in the second part of this article, which focuses on genocide in North America. As for the flagship of official American science, the Smithsonian Institution, until very recently, promoted as “scientific” estimates of the pre-Columbian population made in the 19th and early 20th centuries by racist anthropologists like James Mooney, according to which no more than 1 100,000 people. Only in the post-war period, the use of agricultural analysis methods made it possible to establish that the population density there was an order of magnitude higher, and that back in the 17th century, for example, on the island of Martha’s Vineyard, now a resort site for the richest and most influential Euro-Americans, 3 thousand Indians lived. By the mid-60s. estimates of the indigenous population north of the Rio Grande had risen to at least 12.5 million by the time of the European invasion. In the Great Lakes region alone, by 1492, up to 3.8 million lived, and in the basin of the Mississippi and its main tributaries - up to 5.25. In the 80s new research has shown that the population of pre-Columbian North America may have been as high as 18.5, and the entire hemisphere as high as 112 million (Dobyns). Based on these studies, Cherokee demographer Russell Thornton made calculations to determine how many people did and did not live in North America. His conclusion: at least 9-12.5 million. Recently, many historians have taken the average between the calculations of Dobyns and Thornton as the norm, i.e. 15 million as the most likely approximate number of indigenous people in North America. In other words, the population of this continent was about fifteen times higher than what the Smithsonian Institution claimed back in the 1980s, and seven and a half times higher than what it is willing to admit today. Moreover, calculations close to those carried out by Dobyns and Thornton were known already in the mid-19th century, but they were ignored as ideologically unacceptable, contradicting the central myth of the conquerors about the supposedly “primordial”, “desert” continent, which was just waiting for them to populate it .

Based on modern data, it can be said that when Christopher Columbus landed on one of the islands of the continent soon called the “New World,” on October 12, 1492, its population was between 100 and 145 million people (Standard). Two centuries later it had declined by 90%. To this day, the most “lucky” of the once existing peoples of both Americas have retained no more than 5% of their former numbers. In terms of its size and duration (to this day), the genocide of the indigenous population of the Western Hemisphere has no parallel in world history.

So on Hispaniola, where about 8 million Tainos flourished until 1492, by 1570 there were only two miserable villages of the island’s indigenous inhabitants, about which 80 years ago Columbus wrote that “there are no better and more kind people in the world.”

Some statistics by region.

In the 75 years from the arrival of the first Europeans in 1519 to 1594, the population of Central Mexico, the most densely populated region of the American continent, fell by 95%, from 25 million to barely 1 million 300 thousand people.

In the 60 years since the Spanish arrived, the population of Western Nicaragua has dropped by 99%, from more than 1 million to less than 10 thousand people.

In Western and Central Honduras, 95% of the indigenous people were exterminated over half a century. In Cordoba, near the Gulf of Mexico, 97% in just over a century. In the neighboring province of Jalapa, 97% of the population was also destroyed: from 180 thousand in 1520 to 5 thousand in 1626. And so on throughout Mexico and Central America. The arrival of Europeans meant the immediate and almost complete disappearance of the indigenous population, who had lived and flourished there for many millennia.

On the eve of the European invasion of Peru and Chile, from 9 to 14 million people lived in the homeland of the Incas... Long before the end of the century, no more than 1 million inhabitants remained in Peru. And in a few more years - only half of this. 94% of the Andean population, between 8.5 and 13.5 million people, was destroyed.

Brazil was perhaps the most populated region of the Americas. According to the first Portuguese governor, Tome de Souza, the reserves of the indigenous population here were inexhaustible “even if we butchered them in a slaughterhouse.” He was wrong. Just 20 years after the founding of the colony in 1549, epidemics and slave labor on plantations brought the peoples of Brazil to the brink of extinction.

By the end of the 16th century, about 200 thousand Spaniards moved to both “Indies”. To Mexico, Central America and further south. By this time, from 60 to 80 million indigenous inhabitants of these areas were destroyed.

Columbus era genocidal methods

Here we see striking parallels with the methods of the Nazis. Already in the second expedition of Columbus (1493), the Spaniards used an analogue of Hitler's Sonderkommandos to enslave and exterminate the local population. Parties of Spanish thugs with dogs trained to kill people, instruments of torture, gallows and shackles organized regular punitive expeditions with inevitable mass executions. But it is important to emphasize the following. The connection between this early capitalist genocide and the Nazi one lay deeper. The Taino people, who inhabited the Greater Antilles and were completely exterminated within several decades, did not fall victim to “medieval” atrocities, not Christian fanaticism, or even the pathological greed of European invaders. Both of them, and the other, and the third led to genocide only when organized by a new economic rationality. The entire population of Hispaniola, Cuba, Jamaica and other islands was registered as private property, which was supposed to bring profit. This methodical accounting of a huge population scattered across the world's largest islands by a bunch of Europeans fresh out of the Middle Ages is most striking.

Columbus was the first to use mass hangings

From the Spanish accountants in armor and with a cross there is a direct thread to the “rubber” genocide in the “Belgian” Congo, which killed 10 million Africans, and to the Nazi system of slave labor for destruction.

Columbus obliged all residents over 14 years of age to hand over to the Spaniards a thimble of gold dust or 25 pounds of cotton every three months (in areas where there was no gold). Those who fulfilled this quota were hung on their necks with a copper token indicating the date of receipt of the last tribute. The token gave its owner the right to three months of life. Those caught without this token or with an expired one had the hands of both hands cut off, hung them around the victim’s neck and sent him to die in his village. Columbus, who had previously been involved in the slave trade along the western coast of Africa, apparently adopted this type of execution from Arab slave traders. During Columbus's governorship, up to 10 thousand Indians were killed in this way on Hispaniola alone. It was almost impossible to fulfill the established quota. The locals had to give up growing food and all other activities in order to dig for gold. Hunger began. Weakened and demoralized, they became easy prey for diseases brought by the Spaniards. Such as the flu brought by pigs from the Canary Islands, which were brought to Hispaniola by Columbus's second expedition. Tens, perhaps hundreds of thousands of Tainos died in this first pandemic of American genocide. An eyewitness describes huge piles of Hispaniola residents who died from the flu, with no one to bury them. The Indians tried to run wherever they could: across the entire island, into the mountains, even to other islands. But there was no salvation anywhere. Mothers killed their children before killing themselves. Entire villages resorted to mass suicide by throwing themselves off cliffs or taking poison. But even more found death at the hands of the Spaniards.

In addition to atrocities that could at least be explained by the cannibalistic rationality of systematic profiteering, the genocide on Atilla and later on the continent included seemingly irrational, unjustifiable forms of violence on a massive scale and in pathological, sadistic forms. Sources contemporary to Columbus describe how Spanish colonists hanged, roasted on spits, and burned Indians at the stake. Children were cut into pieces to feed the dogs. And this despite the fact that the Tainos initially offered virtually no resistance to the Spaniards. “The Spaniards bet on who could cut a person in half with one blow or cut off his head, or they ripped open their bellies. They tore babies from their mother's breasts by the legs and smashed their heads on stones... They impaled other children on their long swords, along with their mothers and everyone who stood in front of them.” More zeal could not have been demanded from any SS man on the Eastern Front, Ward Churchill rightly notes. Let us add that the Spaniards established a rule that for one killed Christian, they would kill a hundred Indians. The Nazis didn't have to invent anything. All they had to do was copy.

Cuban Lidice 16th century

The testimonies of the Spaniards of that era about their sadism are truly innumerable. In one often cited episode in Cuba, a Spanish unit of about 100 soldiers camped on the bank of a river and, finding sharpening stones in it, sharpened their swords on them. Wanting to test their sharpness, an eyewitness of this event reports, they pounced on a group of men, women, children and old people sitting on the shore (apparently specially rounded up for this), who looked in fear at the Spaniards and their horses, and began to rip open their bellies, chop and cut until you kill them all. Then they entered a large house nearby and did the same there, killing everyone they found there. Streams of blood flowed from the house, as if a herd of cows had been slaughtered there. Seeing the terrible wounds of the dead and dying was a terrible sight.

This massacre began in the village of Zukayo, whose residents had recently prepared a lunch of cassava, fruit and fish for the conquistadors. From there it spread throughout the area. No one knows how many Indians the Spaniards killed in this outburst of sadism before their bloodlust was dulled, but Las Casas estimates it to be well over 20,000.

The Spaniards took pleasure in inventing sophisticated cruelties and tortures. They built a gallows high enough so that the hanged man could touch the ground with his toes to avoid strangulation, and thus hanged thirteen Indians, one after another, in honor of Christ the Savior and his apostles. While the Indians were still alive, the Spaniards tested the sharpness and strength of their swords on them, opening their chests with one blow so that their insides were visible, and there were those who did worse things. Then, straw was wrapped around their dismembered bodies and burned alive. One soldier caught two children about two years old, pierced their throats with a dagger and threw them into the abyss.

If these descriptions sound familiar to those who have heard of the massacres in My Lai, Song Mai and other Vietnamese villages, the similarity is made even stronger by the term "pacification" that the Spaniards used to describe their reign of terror. But no matter how horrifying the massacres in Vietnam were, their scale cannot be compared with what happened five hundred years ago on the island of Hispaniola alone. By the time Columbus arrived in 1492, the population of this island was 8 million. Four years later, between a third and half of that number had died and been destroyed. And after 1496 the rate of destruction increased even more.

Slave work

Unlike British America, where the immediate goal of genocide was the physical destruction of the indigenous population to conquer “living space,” genocide in Central and South America was a by-product of the brutal exploitation of Indians for economic purposes. Massacres and torture were not uncommon, but they served as weapons of terror to subdue and “pacify” the indigenous population. The inhabitants of America were considered as tens of millions of free labor of natural slaves for the extraction of gold and silver. There were so many of them that the rational economic method for the Spaniards seemed not to reproduce the labor force of their slaves, but to replace them. The Indians were killed by backbreaking work, and then replaced with a fresh batch of slaves.

From the highlands of the Andes they were driven to coca plantations in the lowlands of the tropical forest, where their organisms, unaccustomed to such a climate, became easy prey to fatal diseases. Such as "uta", which rotted the nose, mouth and throat and led to a painful death. So high was the mortality rate on these plantations (up to 50% in five months) that even the Crown became concerned and issued a decree limiting coca production. Like all decrees of this kind, it remained on paper, because, as a contemporary wrote, “on coca plantations there is one disease that is more terrible than all others. This is the unlimited greed of the Spaniards."

But it was even worse to end up in the silver mines. Workers were lowered to a depth of 250 meters with a bag of roasted maize for a week-long shift. In addition to backbreaking work, collapses, poor ventilation and violence by supervisors, Indian miners breathed toxic fumes of arsenic, mercury, etc. “If 20 healthy Indians go down a mine on Monday, only half can come out of it crippled on Sunday,” wrote one contemporary. Stanard estimates that the average life expectancy of coca harvesters and Indian miners in the early period of the genocide was no more than three or four months, i.e. approximately the same as in the synthetic rubber factory in Auschwitz in 1943.

Hernán Cortés tortures Cuauhtemoc to find out where the Aztecs hid the gold.

After the massacre in the Aztec capital Tenochtetlan, Cortés declared Central Mexico "New Spain" and established a colonial regime based on slave labor. This is how a contemporary describes the methods of “pacification” (hence “pacification” as the official policy of Washington during the Vietnam War) and enslavement of Indians to work in the mines.

“Numerous testimonies from numerous witnesses tell of Indians being marched in columns to the mines. They are chained to each other with neck shackles.

Pits with stakes on which Indians were impaled

Those who fall down have their heads cut off. There are stories of children being locked in houses and burned, and stabbed to death if they walk too slowly. It is common practice to cut off women's breasts and tie weights to their legs before throwing them into a lake or lagoon. There are stories of babies torn from their mothers, killed and used as road signs. Fugitive or “wandering” Indians have their limbs cut off and sent back to their villages with their severed hands and noses hung around their necks. They talk about “pregnant women, children and old people, who are caught as many as possible” and thrown into special pits, at the bottom of which sharp stakes are dug and “they are left there until the pit is full.” And much, much more." (Standard, 82-83)

Indians are burned in their houses

As a result, of the approximately 25 million inhabitants who inhabited the Mexican kingdom when the conquistadors arrived, by 1595 only 1.3 million remained alive. The rest were mostly martyred in the mines and plantations of New Spain.

In the Andes, where Pizarro's gangs wielded swords and whips, the population fell from 14 million to less than 1 million by the end of the 16th century. The reasons were the same as in Mexico and Central America. As one Spaniard in Peru wrote in 1539, “The Indians here are completely destroyed and are dying... They pray with a cross that they be given food for God’s sake. But [the soldiers] kill all the llamas for the sake of nothing more than making candles... The Indians are not left anything for sowing, and since they have no livestock and have nowhere to get it from, they can only die of hunger.” (Churchill, 103)

Psychological aspect of genocide

Recent historians of the American genocide are beginning to pay more and more attention to its psychological aspect, the role of depression and stress in the complete destruction of tens and hundreds of peoples and ethnic groups. And here I see a number of parallels with the current situation of the peoples of the former Soviet Union.

The chronicles of the genocide have preserved numerous evidence of the mental “dislocation” of the indigenous population of America. The cultural war that European conquerors waged for centuries against the cultures of the peoples they enslaved with the open intention of their destruction had terrible consequences on the psyche of the indigenous population of the New World. Reactions to this “psychic attack” ranged from alcoholism to chronic depression, mass infanticide and suicide, and even more often, people simply lay down and die. Side effects of mental damage were a sharp drop in the birth rate and a rise in infant mortality. Even if disease, hunger, hard labor and murder did not lead to the complete destruction of the indigenous collective, low birth rates and infant mortality led to this sooner and later. The Spanish noticed a sharp drop in the number of children and at times tried to force the Indians to have children.

Kirkpatrick Sale summed up the Taino reaction to their genocide:

“Las Casas, like others, expresses the opinion that what struck the Tainos most about the strange white people from the big ships was not their violence, not even their greed and strange attitude towards property, but rather their coldness, their spiritual callousness, their lack of love " (Kirkpatrick Sale. The Conquest of Paradise. p. 151.)

In general, reading the history of imperialist genocide on all continents - from Hispaniola, the Andes and California to Equatorial Africa, the Indian subcontinent, China and Tasmania - you begin to understand literature like Wells’s “War of the Worlds” or Bradbury’s “The Martian Chronicles” differently, not to mention Hollywood alien invasions. Do these nightmares of Euro-American fiction originate from the horrors of the past suppressed in the “collective unconscious”, are they not called upon to suppress feelings of guilt (or, conversely, to prepare for new genocides) by portraying themselves as victims of “aliens” who were exterminated by your ancestors from Columbus to Churchill, Hitler and the Bushes?

Demonization of the victim

The genocide in America also had its own propaganda support, its own “black PR”, strikingly similar to that used by Euro-American imperialists to “demonize” their future enemy in the eyes of their population, to give war and robbery an aura of justice.

On January 16, 1493, three days after killing two Tainos while trading, Columbus turned his ships back to Europe. In his journal, he described the natives and their people killed by the Spaniards as "the evil inhabitants of the island of Cariba who eat people." As proven by modern anthropologists, this was pure fiction, but it formed the basis of a kind of classification of the population of Antilles, and then the entire New World, which became a guide to genocide. Those who welcomed and submitted to the colonizers were considered “affectionate Tainos.” Those natives who resisted or were simply killed by the Spaniards fell under the rubric of cannibal savages, deserving everything that the colonizers were able to inflict on them. (In particular, in the lair of November 4 and 23, 1492, we find the following creations of Columbus’s dark medieval imagination: these “fierce savages” “have an eye in the middle of their foreheads,” they have “dog noses, with which they drink the blood of their victims, with which they cut the throat and castrate.")

“These islands are inhabited by Cannibals, a wild, unruly race who feed on human flesh. It is correct to call them anthropophages. They wage constant wars against the gentle and timid Indians for the sake of their bodies; these are their trophies, what they hunt for. They mercilessly destroy and terrorize the Indians."

This description of Coma, one of the participants in Columbus's second expedition, says much more about the Europeans than about the inhabitants of the Caribbean. The Spaniards preemptively dehumanized people they had never met, but who would become their victims. And this is not distant history; it reads like today's newspaper.

“A wild and unruly race” are the keywords of Western imperialism, from Columbus to Bush. “Wild” - because she does not want to be the slave of a “civilized” invader. Soviet communists were also listed among the “wild” “enemies of civilization.” From Columbus, who in 1493 invented Caribbean cannibals with an eye on their forehead and dog noses, there is a direct thread to Reichsführer Himmler, who at a meeting of SS leaders in mid-1942 explained the specifics of the war on the Eastern Front:

"In all previous campaigns, Germany's enemies had enough common sense and decency to succumb to superior force, thanks to their "old and civilized... Western European sophistication." In the Battle of France, enemy units surrendered as soon as they received warnings that “further resistance was pointless.” Of course, “we SS men” came to Russia without illusions, but until the last winter too many Germans did not realize that “Russian commissars and die-hard Bolsheviks are filled with a cruel will to power and an animal stubbornness that makes them fight to the end and has nothing in common with human logic or duty... but is an instinct common to all animals." The Bolsheviks were “animals,” so “devoid of all humanity” that “surrounded and without food, they resorted to killing their comrades in order to last longer,” behavior bordering on “cannibalism.” This is a “war of annihilation” between “brute matter, the primitive mass, better to say, the sub-human Untermensch, led by the commissars” and the “Germans...” (Arno J. Mayer. Why Did the Heavens Not Darken? The “Final Solution” in History (New York: Pantheon Books, 1988, p. 281.)

In fact, and in strict accordance with the principle of ideological inversion, it was not the indigenous inhabitants of the New World who engaged in cannibalism, but their conquerors. Columbus's second expedition brought to the Caribbean a large shipment of mastiffs and greyhounds trained to kill people and eat their entrails. Very soon the Spaniards began to feed their dogs human meat. Living children were considered a special delicacy. Colonizers allowed dogs to chew them alive, often in the presence of their parents.

Dogs eat Indians

Spaniard feeding hounds with Indian children

Modern historians come to the conclusion that in the Caribbean there was a whole network of “butcher shops” where the bodies of Indians were sold as dog food. Like everything else in Columbus's legacy, cannibalism also developed on the mainland. A letter from one of the conquerors of the Inca Empire has been preserved, in which he writes: “... when I returned from Cartagena, I met a Portuguese named Roge Martin. On the porch of his house hung parts of cut-up Indians to feed his dogs, as if they were wild animals...” (Standard, 88)

In turn, the Spaniards often had to eat their dogs, fed on human flesh, when in search of gold and slaves they found themselves in a difficult situation and suffered from hunger. This is one of the dark ironies of this genocide.

Why?

Churchill asks how to explain the fact that a group of human beings, even such as the Spaniards of the Columbus era, collectively obsessed with the desire for wealth and prestige, could, over a long period of time, display such boundless ferocity, such extreme inhumanity towards other people ? The same question was posed earlier by Stanard, who traced in detail the ideological roots of genocide in America from the early Middle Ages to the Renaissance. “Who are these people whose minds and souls were behind the genocides of Muslims, Africans, Indians, Jews, Gypsies and other religious, racial and ethnic groups? Who are they who continue to commit mass murder today?” What kind of people could commit these heinous crimes? Christians, Stanard answers and invites the reader to become acquainted with the ancient views of European Christians on gender, race and war. He discovers that by the end of the Middle Ages, European culture had prepared all the necessary preconditions for a four-hundred-year genocide against the indigenous inhabitants of the New World.

Stanard pays special attention to the Christian imperative of suppressing “carnal desires,” i.e. the repressive attitude towards sexuality in European culture instilled by the Church. In particular, he establishes a genetic connection between genocide in the New World and the pan-European waves of terror against “witches”, in whom some modern researchers see the bearers of matriarchal pagan ideology, popular among the masses and threatening the power of the Church and the feudal elite.

Stanard also emphasizes the European origins of the concept of race and skin color.

The Church has always supported the slave trade, although in the early Middle Ages it in principle forbade keeping Christians in slavery. After all, for the Church, only a Christian was a person in the full sense of the word. The “infidels” could become human only by accepting Christianity, and this gave them the right to freedom. But in the 14th century, an ominous change occurred in the policy of the Church. As the volume of the slave trade in the Mediterranean increased, so did the profits from it. But these incomes were threatened by a loophole left by the clergy to strengthen the ideology of Christian exclusivity. Earlier ideological motives came into conflict with the material interests of the Christian ruling classes. And so in 1366, the prelates of Florence sanctioned the import and sale of “infidel” slaves, explaining that by “infidel” they meant “all slaves of unfaithful origin, even if by the time of their importation they had become Catholics,” and that “infidels by birth ” simply means “from the land and race of the infidels.” Thus, the Church changed the principle justifying slavery from religious to ethnic, which was an important step towards modern genocides based on unchanging racial and ethnic characteristics (Armenian, Jewish, Gypsy, Slavic and others).

European racial “science” did not lag behind religion. The specificity of European feudalism was the requirement for the genetic exclusivity of the noble class. In Spain, the concept of "purity of blood", limpieza de sangra, became central towards the end of the 15th century and throughout the 16th century. Nobility could not be achieved either by wealth or merit. The origins of “racial science” lie in the genealogical research of the time, which was carried out by a whole army of specialists checking pedigree lines.

The theory of “separate and unequal origins,” put forward by the famous Swiss physician and philosopher Paracelsus in 1520, was especially important. According to this theory, Africans, Indians and other non-Christian “colored” peoples descended not from Adam and Eve, but from other and lower ancestors. The ideas of Paracelsus became widespread in Europe on the eve of the European invasion of Mexico and South America. These ideas were an early expression of the so-called. the theory of “polygenesis”, which became an indispensable part of the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century. But even before the publication of Paracelsus's writings, similar ideological justifications for genocide appeared in Spain (1512) and Scotland (1519). The Spaniard Bernardo de Mesa (later Bishop of Cuba) and the Scotsman Johann Major came to the same conclusion that the indigenous inhabitants of the New World were a special race, destined by God to be slaves of European Christians. The height of theological debates among Spanish intellectuals on the subject of whether the Indians were people or monkeys occurred in the mid-16th century, when millions of people in Central and South America died from terrible epidemics, brutal massacres and hard labor.

The official historian of the Indies, Fernandez de Ovieda, did not deny atrocities against the Indians and described “countless cruel deaths, innumerable as the stars.” But he considered this acceptable, for “to use gunpowder against the pagans is to burn incense for the Lord.” And in response to Las Casas' pleas to spare the inhabitants of America, theologian Juan de Sepulveda said: “How can one doubt that peoples so uncivilized, so barbaric and corrupted by so many sins and perversions were justly conquered.” He quoted Aristotle, who wrote in his Politics that some people are "slaves by nature" and "must be driven like wild beasts to force them to live rightly." To which Las Casas replied: “Let us forget about Aristotle, because, fortunately, we have the commandment of Christ: Love your neighbor as yourself.” (But even Las Casas, the most passionate and humane European defender of the Indians, felt forced to admit, that they are “possibly complete barbarians”).

But if among the church intelligentsia opinions about the nature of the native inhabitants of America could differ, among the European masses there was complete unanimity on this matter. Even 15 years before the great debate between Las Casas and Sepulveda, a Spanish observer wrote that “ordinary people “universally consider as sages those who are convinced that the American Indians are not people, but “a special, third species of animals between man and ape and were created God, in order to better serve man.” (Standard, 211).

Thus, in the early 16th century, a racist apology for colonialism and suprematism was formed, which in the hands of the Euro-American ruling classes would serve as a justification (“defense of civilization”) for subsequent genocides (and those yet to come?). It is not surprising, therefore, that on the basis of his research, Stanard puts forward the thesis of a deep ideological connection between the Spanish and Anglo-Saxon genocide of the peoples of the Americas and the Nazi genocide of Jews, Gypsies and Slavs. European colonialists, white settlers, and Nazis all had the same ideological roots. And that ideology, Stanard adds, remains alive today. It was on this basis that US interventions in Southeast Asia and the Middle East were based.

List of used literature

J. M. Blaut. The Colonizer's Model of the World. Geographical Diffusionism and Eurocentric History. New Yourk: The Giulford Press, 1993.

Ward Churchill. A Little Matter of Genocide. Holocaust and the Denial in the Americas 1492 to the Present. San Francisco: City Lights, 1997.

C. L. R. James. The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L'Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution. New York: Vintage, 1989.

Arno J. Mayer. Why Did the Heavens Not Darken?The “Final Solution” in History. New York: Pantheon Books, 1988.

David Stannard. American Holocaust: The Conquest of the New World. Oxford University Press, 1993.

Beginning of European colonization of North America

Note 1

At the end of the 15th century, Europeans discovered North America. The Spaniards were the first to reach the shores of America.

For half a century they dominated the Pacific coast of the continent. They were able to explore the California Peninsula and numerous areas of the coastline. The Atlantic coast of North America was explored by the British, French and Portuguese.

In 1497-1498, an Italian from England, Giovanni Caboto, led two expeditions. He discovered the island of Newfoundland and explored areas along the northern coast. By the beginning of the 16th century, the Portuguese discovered Labrador, the Spaniards developed the coast of Florida. The French moved inland, reaching the Gulf and the St. Lawrence River.

At this time, England was a leader in economic development and maritime exploration. She was the first to not only export the natural resources of open lands to the metropolis. She chose to colonize coastal areas.

England's main rival in the colonization of new lands was Spain. The Spaniards gained a foothold in Florida, mastering the shores of two oceans, and moved from western Mexico to the Appalachians and the Grand Canyon. By the end of the 16th century, Spain founded New Spain and captured Texas and California. These territories turned out to be not as profitable as the lands in Central and South America, so Spain soon turned its attention to the latter.

France remained a dangerous competitor to Great Britain in North America. The French founded a settlement in Quebec in 1608 and began to explore Canada (New France). In 1682, they founded colonies in Louisiana, exploring the Mississippi River basin.

The Dutch did not seek to gain a foothold on the American continent. Having gained access to the vast wealth of India, they created the East India Company in 1602. Following the trends of the times, the Dutch founded the West India Company. This company founded New Amsterdam, settlements in Brazil and captured part of the islands. These territories served as the basis for the development of new lands.

British colonization of North America

In the 17th century, the process of colonization by Great Britain of North America accelerated:

• in 1620 the English Puritans laid out New Plymouth;
• New Hampshire was founded in 1622;
• Massachusetts built in 1628;
• in 1634 Maryland and Connecticut were laid out;
• in 1634 the settlement of Rhode Island appeared;
• North and South Carolina and New Jersey were founded in 1664.

In the same 1664, the British ousted the Dutch from the Hudson River basin. The city of New Amsterdam and the Portuguese colony of New Holland received a new name - New York. Attempts by Holland in 1673-1674 to recapture territories captured by the British were unsuccessful.

Note 2

Almost 170 years from the founding of the first English settlements to the achievement of independence began to be called the colonial period of the United States.

The British, having reached the North American coast, met only hunting tribes here. Their level of development did not match the level and wealth of the Incas and Aztecs whom the Spaniards encountered in America. The British did not discover gold and silver here, but they realized that the main value of the new lands was their land resources. Queen Elizabeth I of England approved the colonization of American territories in 1583. All newly discovered lands were declared by the British to be the property of the English crown.

The British used another method of gaining a foothold in new lands. They used the first settlements of sailors and pirates as transit bases or temporary shelters. In 1584, by order of the queen, Walter Raleigh led a caravan of ships with settlers. Quite quickly, the eastern coast of northern Florida became British property. The new lands were named Virginia. From Virginia, the British moved to the foothills of the Appalachian Mountains. English colonists settled in the New World independently of each other, trying to have their own access to the sea.

In the 18th century, European powers weakened their influence in North America. The Spaniards lost Florida, the French lost Canada and Quebec to England.

Alperovich Moisey Samuilovich, Slezkin Lev Yuryevich::: Formation of independent states in Latin America (1804-1903)

By the time of the discovery and conquest of America by European colonialists, it was inhabited by numerous Indian tribes and peoples who were at various stages of social and cultural development. Some of them managed to reach a high level of civilization, others led a very primitive lifestyle.

The oldest known culture on the American continent, the Maya, the center of which was the Yucatan Peninsula, was characterized by the significant development of agriculture, crafts, trade, art, science, and the presence of hieroglyphic writing. While maintaining a number of institutions of the tribal system, the Mayans also developed elements of a slave society. Their culture had a strong influence on neighboring peoples - Zapotecs, Olmecs, Totonacs, etc.

Central Mexico in the 15th century. found itself under the rule of the Aztecs, who were the successors and heirs of more ancient Indian civilizations. They had developed agriculture, construction equipment reached a high level, and a variety of trade was conducted. The Aztecs created many outstanding monuments of architecture and sculpture, a solar calendar, and had the rudiments of writing. The emergence of property inequality, the emergence of slavery and a number of other signs indicated their gradual transition to a class society.

In the region of the Andean highlands lived the Quechua, Aymara and other peoples, distinguished by their high material and spiritual culture. In the XV - early XVI centuries. a number of tribes in this area subjugated the Incas, who formed a vast state (with its capital in Cusco), where the official language was Quechua.

The Pueblo Indian tribes (Hosti, Zuni, Tanyo, Keres, etc.) who lived in the basin of the Rio Grande del Norte and Colorado rivers, inhabited the basins of the Orinoco and Amazon rivers, the Tupi, Guarani, Caribs, Arawaks, Brazilian Kayapo, inhabitants of the Pampas and the Pacific coast warlike Mapuches (whom the European conquerors began to call Araucanians), inhabitants of various regions of modern Peru and Ecuador, Colorado Indians, Jivaro, Saparo, tribes of La Plata (Diaguita, Charrua, Querandi, etc.) "Patagonian Tehuelchi, Indians of Tierra del Fuego - she, Yagan, Chono - were at different stages of the primitive communal system.

At the turn of the XV-XVI centuries. The original process of development of the peoples of America was forcibly interrupted by European conquerors - the conquistadors. Speaking about the historical destinies of the indigenous population of the American continent, F. Engels pointed out that “the Spanish conquest interrupted any further independent development of them.”

The conquest and colonization of America, which had such fatal consequences for its peoples, were determined by the complex socio-economic processes that were then taking place in European society.

The development of industry and trade, the emergence of the bourgeois class, the formation of capitalist relations in the depths of the feudal system caused at the end of the 15th - beginning of the 16th centuries. .in the countries of Western Europe, the desire to open new trade routes and seize the untold riches of East and South Asia. For this purpose, a number of expeditions were undertaken, in the organization of which Spain took a major part. The main role of Spain in the great discoveries of the 15th-16th centuries. was determined not only by its geographical location, but also by the presence of a large bankrupt nobility, which, after the completion of the reconquista (1492), could not find employment for itself and feverishly looked for sources of enrichment, dreaming of discovering a fabulous “golden country” overseas - Eldorado. “...Gold was the magic word that drove the Spaniards across the Atlantic Ocean to America,” wrote F. Engels, “gold is what the white man first demanded as soon as he set foot on the newly discovered shore.”

At the beginning of August 1492, a flotilla under the command of Christopher Columbus, equipped with funds from the Spanish government, left the port of Palos (in southwestern Spain) in a westerly direction and, after a long voyage in the Atlantic Ocean, on October 12 reached a small island, which the Spaniards gave the name San -Salvador” i.e. “Holy Savior” (the locals called him Guanahani). As a result of the voyages of Columbus and other navigators (the Spaniards Alonso de Ojeda, Vicente Pinzon, Rodrigo de Bastidas, the Portuguese Pedro Alvarez Cabral, etc.) by the beginning of the 16th century. the central part of the Bahamas archipelago, the Greater Antilles (Cuba, Haiti, Puerto Rico, Jamaica), most of the Lesser Antilles (from the Virgin Islands to Dominica), Trinidad and a number of small islands in the Caribbean Sea were discovered; The northern and significant parts of the eastern coast of South America and most of the Atlantic coast of Central America were surveyed. Back in 1494, the Treaty of Tordesillas was concluded between Spain and Portugal, delimiting the spheres of their colonial expansion.

Numerous adventurers, bankrupt nobles, hired soldiers, criminals, etc., rushed to the newly discovered territories in pursuit of easy money from the Iberian Peninsula. Through deception and violence, they seized the lands of the local population and declared them the possessions of Spain and Portugal. In 1492, Columbus founded on the island of Haiti, which he called Hispaniola (i.e., “little Spain”), the first colony “Navidad” (“Russianism”), and in 1496 he founded the city of Santo Domingo here, which became a springboard for the subsequent conquest of the entire island and the subjugation of its indigenous inhabitants. In 1508-1509 Spanish conquistadors began to capture and colonize Puerto Rico, Jamaica and the Isthmus of Panama, the territory of which they called Golden Castile. In 1511, Diego de Velazquez's detachment landed in Cuba and began its conquest.

Robbering, enslaving and exploiting the Indians, the invaders brutally suppressed any attempt at resistance. They barbarously destroyed and destroyed entire cities and villages, and brutally dealt with their population. An eyewitness to the events, the Dominican monk Bartolome de Las Casas, who personally observed the bloody “wild wars” of the conquistadors, said that they hanged and drowned the Indians, cut them into pieces with swords, burned them alive, roasted them over low heat, poisoned them with dogs, not even sparing the elderly and women and children. “Robbery and robbery are the only goal of Spanish adventurers in America,” K. Marx pointed out.

In search of treasures, the conquerors sought to discover and capture more and more new lands. “Gold,” Columbus wrote to the Spanish royal couple from Jamaica in 1503, “is perfection. Gold creates treasures, and the one who owns it can do whatever he wants, and is even able to bring human souls into heaven."

In 1513, Vasco Nunez de Balboa crossed the Isthmus of Panama from north to south and reached the Pacific coast, and Juan Ponce de Leon discovered the Florida Peninsula - the first Spanish possession in North America. In 1516, the expedition of Juan Diaz de Solis explored the basin of the Rio de la Plata (“Silver River”). A year later, the Yucatan Peninsula was discovered, and soon the Gulf Coast was explored.

In 1519-1521 Spanish conquistadors led by Hernan Cortes conquered Central Mexico, destroying the ancient Indian culture of the Aztecs here and setting their capital Tenochtitlan to fire. By the end of the 20s of the 16th century. they captured a vast area from the Gulf of Mexico to the Pacific Ocean, as well as most of Central America. Subsequently, the Spanish colonialists continued their advance to the south (Yucatan) and north (up to the Colorado and Rio Grande del Norte river basins, California and Texas).

After the invasion of Mexico and Central America, troops of conquistadors poured into the South American continent. Since 1530, the Portuguese began a more or less systematic colonization of Brazil, from where they began to export the valuable species of wood “pau brazil” (from which the name of the country came). In the first half of the 30s of the 16th century. The Spaniards, led by Francisco Pizarro and Diego de Almagro, captured Peru, destroying the Inca civilization that had developed here. They began the conquest of this country with a massacre of unarmed Indians in the city of Cajamarca, the signal for which was given by the priest Valverde. The Inca ruler Atahualpa was treacherously captured and executed. Moving south, Spanish conquerors led by Almagro invaded the country they called Chile in 1535-1537. However, the conquistadors encountered stubborn resistance from the warlike Araucanians and failed. At the same time, Pedro de Mendoza began the colonization of La Plata.

Numerous detachments of European conquerors also rushed to the northern part of South America, where, according to their ideas, the mythical country of Eldorado, rich in gold and other treasures, was located. The German bankers Welser and Echinger also participated in the financing of these expeditions, who received from their debtor, Emperor (and King of Spain) Charles V, the right to colonize the southern coast of the Caribbean, which at that time was called “Tierra Firme”. In search of El Dorado, the Spanish expeditions of Ordaz, Jimenez de Quesada, Benalcazar and detachments of German mercenaries under the command of Ehinger, Speyer, Federman penetrated in the 30s of the 16th century. in the Orinoco and Magdalena river basins. In 1538, Jimenez de Quesada, Federman and Benalcazar, moving respectively from the north, east and south, met on the Cundinamarca plateau, near the city of Bogota.

In the early 40s, Francisco de Orella did not reach the Amazon River and descended along its course to the Atlantic Ocean.

At the same time, the Spaniards, led by Pedro de Valdivia, undertook a new campaign in Chile, but by the beginning of the 50s they were able to capture only the northern and central part of the country. The penetration of Spanish and Portuguese conquerors into the interior of America continued in the second half of the 16th century, and the conquest and colonization of many areas (for example, southern Chile and northern Mexico) dragged on for a much longer period.

However, the vast and rich lands of the New World were also claimed by other European powers - England, France and Holland, who unsuccessfully tried to seize various territories in South and Central America, as well as a number of islands in the West Indies. For this purpose, they used pirates - filibusters and buccaneers, who robbed mainly Spanish ships and the American colonies of Spain. In 1578, the English pirate Francis Drake reached the coast of South America in the La Plata area and passed through the Strait of Magellan into the Pacific Ocean. Seeing a threat to its colonial possessions, the Spanish government equipped and sent a huge squadron to the shores of England. However, this “Invincible Armada” was defeated in 1588, and Spain lost its naval power. Soon another English pirate, Walter Raleigh, landed on the northern coast of South America, trying to discover the fabulous El Dorado in the Orinoco Basin. Raids on Spanish possessions in America were carried out in the 16th-17th centuries. the English Hawkins, Cavendish, Henry Morgan (the latter completely plundered Panama in 1671), the Dutch Joris Spielbergen, Schouten and other pirates.

The Portuguese colony of Brazil was also subjected to in the 16th-17th centuries. attacks by French and English pirates, especially after its inclusion in the Spanish colonial empire in connection with the transfer of the Portuguese crown to the King of Spain (1581 -1640). Holland, which during this period was at war with Spain, managed to capture part of Brazil (Pernambuco), and hold it for a quarter of a century (1630-1654).

However, the fierce struggle of the two largest powers - England and France - for world primacy, their mutual rivalry, caused, in particular, by the desire to seize the Spanish and Portuguese colonies in America, objectively contributed to the preservation of most of them in the hands of weaker Spain and Portugal. Despite all attempts by rivals to deprive the Spaniards and Portuguese of their colonial monopoly, South and Central America, with the exception of the small territory of Guiana, divided between England, France and Holland, as well as the Mosquito Coast (on the east coast of Nicaragua) and Belize (southeast Yucatan) , which were the object of English colonization until the beginning of the 19th century. .continued to remain in the possession of Spain and Portugal.

Only in the West Indies, during which during the 16th - 18th centuries. England, France, Holland and Spain fought fiercely (with many islands repeatedly passing from one power to another), the positions of the Spanish colonialists were significantly weakened. By the end of the 18th - beginning of the 19th century. they only managed to retain Cuba, Puerto Rico and the eastern half of Haiti (Santo Domingo). According to the Treaty of Ryswick of 1697, Spain had to cede the western half of this island to France, which founded a colony here, which in French began to be called Saint-Domingue (in traditional Russian transcription - San Domingo). The French also captured (back in 1635) Guadeloupe and Martinique.

Jamaica, most of the Lesser Antilles (St. Kitts, Nevis, Antigua, Montserrat, St. Vincent, Barbados, Grenada, etc.), the Bahamas and Bermuda archipelagos were in the 17th century. captured by England. Its rights to many islands belonging to the Lesser Antilles group (St. Kitts, Nevis, Montserrat, Dominica, St. Vincent, Grenada) were finally secured by the Treaty of Versailles in 1783. In 1797, the British captured the Spanish island of Trinidad, located near northeastern coast of Venezuela, and at the beginning of the 19th century. (1814) achieved official recognition of their claims to the small island of Tobago, which had actually been in their hands since 1580 (with some interruptions).

The islands of Curacao, Aruba, Bonaire and others came under Dutch rule, and the largest of the Virgin Islands (Saint Croix, St. Thomas and St. John), initially captured by Spain, and then the object of a fierce struggle between England, France and the Netherlands, 30-50s of the 18th century. were bought by Denmark.

The discovery and colonization of the American continent by Europeans, where pre-feudal relations previously reigned supreme, objectively contributed to the development of the feudal system there. At the same time, these events had enormous world-historical significance for accelerating the process of development of capitalism in Europe and drawing the vast territories of America into its orbit. “The discovery of America and the sea route around Africa,” K. Marx and F. Engels pointed out, “created a new field of activity for the rising bourgeoisie. The East Indian and Chinese markets, the colonization of America, exchange with the colonies, the increase in the number of means of exchange and goods in general gave a hitherto unheard of impetus to trade, navigation, industry and thereby caused the rapid development of the revolutionary element in the disintegrating feudal society.” The discovery of America, according to Marx and Engels, prepared the way for the creation of a world market, which “caused a colossal development of trade, navigation and means of land communication.”

However, the conquistadors were inspired, as W. Z. Foster noted, “by no means the ideas of social progress; their only goal was to capture everything they could for themselves and for their class.” At the same time, during the conquest, they mercilessly destroyed the ancient civilizations created by the indigenous population of America, and the Indians themselves were enslaved or exterminated. Thus, having captured vast spaces of the New World, the conquerors barbarously destroyed the forms of economic life, social structure, and original culture that had reached a high level of development among some peoples.

In an effort to consolidate their dominance over the captured territories of America, European colonialists created appropriate administrative and socio-economic systems here.

From the Spanish possessions in North and Central America, the Viceroyalty of New Spain was created in 1535 with its capital in Mexico City. Its composition by the end of the 18th - beginning of the 19th century. included the entire modern territory of Mexico (with the exception of Chiapas) and the southern part of the current United States (the states of Texas, California, New Mexico, Arizona, Nevada, Utah, part of Colorado and Wyoming). The northern boundary of the viceroyalty was not precisely established until 1819 due to territorial disputes between Spain, England, the United States and Russia. Spain's colonies in South America, with the exception of its Caribbean coast (Venezuela), and the southeastern part of Central America (Panama) formed the Viceroyalty of Peru in 1542, whose capital was Lima.

Some areas, nominally under the authority of the viceroy, were actually independent political-administrative units governed by captains general, who were directly subordinate to the Madrid government. Thus, most of Central America (with the exception of Yucatan, Tabasco, Panama) was occupied by the Captaincy General of Guatemala. Spanish possessions in the West Indies and on the Caribbean coast “until the second half of the 18th century. constituted the captaincy general of Santo Domingo. Part of the Viceroyalty of Peru until the 30s of the 18th century. included the captaincy general of New Granada (with its capital in Bogota).

Along with the formation of viceroyalties and captaincy generals, during the Spanish conquest, special administrative and judicial boards, the so-called audiences, were established in the largest colonial centers, with advisory functions. The territory under the jurisdiction of each audience constituted a specific administrative unit, and its boundaries in some cases coincided with the boundaries of the corresponding captaincy general. The first audience - Santo Domingo - was created in 1511. Subsequently, by the beginning of the 17th century, audiences of Mexico City and Guadalajara were established in New Spain, in Central America - Guatemala, in Peru - Lima, Quito, Charcas (covering the La -Plata and Upper Peru), Panama, Bogota, Santiago (Chile).

It should be noted that although the governor of Chile (who was also the head of the audience) was subordinate and accountable to the Peruvian viceroy, due to the remoteness and military importance of this colony, its administration enjoyed much greater political independence than, for example, the authorities of the audiences of Charcas or Quito. In fact, she dealt directly with the royal government in Madrid, although in certain economic and some other matters she depended on Peru.

In the 18th century The administrative and political structure of Spain's American colonies (mainly its possessions in South America and the West Indies) underwent significant changes.

New Granada was transformed into a viceroyalty in 1739. It included territories that were under the jurisdiction of the audiences of Panama and Quito. After the Seven Years' War of 1756-1763, during which the Cuban capital Havana was occupied by the British, Spain had to cede Florida to England in exchange for Havana. But the Spaniards then received the French colony of Western Louisiana with New Orleans. Following this, in 1764, Cuba was transformed into a captaincy general, which also included Louisiana. In 1776, another new viceroyalty was created - Rio de la Plata, which included the former territory of the audience of Charcas: Buenos Aires and other provinces of modern Argentina, Paraguay, Upper Peru (present-day Bolivia), "Eastern Coast" ( "Banda Oriental"), as the territory of Uruguay, located on the eastern bank of the Uruguay River, was called at that time. Venezuela (with its capital in Caracas) was transformed into an independent captaincy general in 1777. The following year, the status of captaincy general was granted to Chile, whose dependence on Peru now assumed an even more fictitious character than before.

By the end of the 18th century. There was a significant weakening of Spain's position in the Caribbean. True, Florida was returned to her under the Treaty of Versailles, but in 1795 (according to the Treaty of Basel), the Madrid government was forced to cede Santo Domingo to France (i.e., the eastern half of Haiti), and in 1801 return it to France. Louisiana. In this regard, the center of Spanish rule in the West Indies moved to Cuba, where the audience from Santo Domingo was transferred. The governors of Florida and Puerto Rico were subordinate to the captain general and the audience of Cuba, although legally these colonies were considered to be directly dependent on the mother country.

The system of governance of Spain's American colonies was modeled after the Spanish feudal monarchy. The highest authority in each colony was exercised by the viceroy or captain general. The governors of individual provinces were subordinate to him. The cities and rural districts into which the provinces were divided were governed by corregidores and senior alcaldes, subordinate to the governors. They, in turn, were subordinate to hereditary elders (caciques), and later elected elders of Indian villages. In the 80s of the XVIII century. In Spanish America, an administrative division into commissaries was introduced. In New Spain, 12 commissaries were created, in Peru and La Plata - 8 each, in Chile - 2, etc.

Viceroys and captains-general enjoyed broad rights. They appointed provincial governors, corregidors and senior alcaldes, issued orders concerning various aspects of colonial life, and were in charge of the treasury and all armed forces. The viceroys were also royal viceroys in church affairs: since the Spanish monarch had the right of patronage in relation to the church in the American colonies, the viceroy on his behalf appointed priests from among the candidates submitted by the bishops.

The audiences that existed in a number of colonial centers performed mainly judicial functions. But they were also entrusted with monitoring the activities of the administrative apparatus. However, the audiences were only advisory bodies, the decisions of which were not binding on the viceroys and captains general.

Cruel colonial oppression led to a further decrease in the Indian population of Latin America, which was greatly facilitated by frequent epidemics of smallpox, typhus and other diseases brought by the conquerors. The catastrophic labor situation thus created and the sharp reduction in the number of taxpayers very seriously affected the interests of the colonialists. In this regard, at the beginning of the 18th century. The question arose of eliminating the institution of encomienda, which by this time, as a result of the spread of peonage, had largely lost its former significance. The royal government hoped to get new workers and taxpayers at its disposal in this way. As for the Spanish American landowners, most of them, due to the dispossession of the peasantry and the development of the peonage system, were no longer interested in preserving the encomiendas. The liquidation of the latter was also due to the growing resistance of the Indians, which led in the second half of the 17th century. to numerous uprisings.

Decrees of 1718-1720 The institution of encomienda in the American colonies of Spain was formally abolished. However, in fact, it was preserved in some places in a hidden form or even legally for many years. In some provinces of New Spain (Yucatan, Tabasco), encomiendas were officially abolished only in 1785, and in Chile - only in 1791. There is evidence of the existence of encomiendas in the second half of the 18th century. and in other areas, particularly La Plata and New Granada.

With the abolition of encomiendas, large landowners retained not only their estates - “haciendas” and “estancias”, but in fact also power over the Indians. In most cases, they seized all or part of the lands of Indian communities, as a result of which landless and land-poor peasants, deprived of freedom of movement, were forced to continue working on the estates as peons. The Indians who somehow escaped this fate fell under the authority of the corregidores and other officials. They had to pay a capitation tax and serve labor service.

Along with the landowners and the royal government, the oppressor of the Indians was the Catholic Church, in whose hands were vast territories. Enslaved Indians were attached to the vast possessions of the Jesuit and other spiritual missions (of which there were especially many in Paraguay) and were subjected to severe oppression. The church also received huge income from the collection of tithes, payments for services, all kinds of usurious transactions, “voluntary” donations from the population, etc.

Thus, by the end of the 18th and beginning of the 19th centuries. the majority of the Indian population of Latin America, deprived of personal freedom and often land, found themselves in virtual feudal dependence on their exploiters. However, in some inaccessible areas, remote from the main centers of colonization, independent tribes remained who did not recognize the power of the invaders and showed stubborn resistance to them. These free Indians, who stubbornly avoided contact with the colonialists, mostly retained the former primitive communal system, traditional way of life, their own language and culture. Only in the XIX-XX centuries. most of them were conquered, and their lands were expropriated.

In certain areas of America there also existed a free peasantry: “llaneros” - on the plains (llanos) of Venezuela and New Granada, “gauchos” - in southern Brazil and La Plata. In Mexico there were small farm-type land holdings - “ranches”.

Despite the extermination of most of the Indians, a number of indigenous people survived in many countries of the American continent. The bulk of the Indian population were exploited, enslaved peasants who suffered under the yoke of landowners, royal officials and the Catholic Church, as well as workers in mines, manufactories and craft workshops, loaders, domestic servants, etc.

Negroes imported from Africa worked primarily on plantations of sugar cane, coffee, tobacco and other tropical crops, as well as in the mining industry, in factories, etc. Most of them were slaves, but those few who were nominally considered free, in their own way in fact, they were almost no different from slaves. Although during the XVI-XVIII centuries. Many millions of African slaves were imported into Latin America due to high mortality caused by overwork, unusual climate and disease; their numbers in most colonies by the end of the 18th - beginning of the 19th centuries. was small. However, in Brazil it exceeded at the end of the 18th century. 1.3 million people with a total population of 2 to 3 million. The population of African origin also predominated on the islands of the West Indies and was quite numerous in New Granada, Venezuela and some other areas.

Along with Indians and blacks in Latin America, from the very beginning of its colonization, a group of people of European origin appeared and began to grow. The privileged elite of colonial society were natives of the metropolis - the Spaniards (who in America were contemptuously called “gachupins” or “chapetons”) and the Portuguese. These were predominantly representatives of the noble nobility, as well as wealthy merchants in whose hands colonial trade was in control. They occupied almost all the highest administrative, military and church positions. Among them were large landowners and mine owners. The natives of the metropolis were proud of their origins and considered themselves a superior race in comparison not only with Indians and blacks, but even with the descendants of their compatriots - the Creoles - who were born in America.

The term “Creole” is very arbitrary and imprecise. Creoles in America were the “purebred” descendants of Europeans born here. However, in fact, most of them had, to one degree or another, an admixture of Indian or Negro blood. Most of the landowners came from among the Creoles. They also joined the ranks of the colonial intelligentsia and the lower clergy, and occupied minor positions in the administrative apparatus and the army. Relatively few of them were engaged in commercial and industrial activities, but they owned most of the mines and manufactories. Among the Creole population there were also small landowners, artisans, owners of small businesses, etc.

Possessing nominally equal rights with natives of the metropolis, Creoles were in fact discriminated against and were appointed to senior positions only as an exception. In turn, they treated the Indians and “coloreds” in general with contempt, treating them as representatives of an inferior race. They were proud of the supposed purity of their blood, although many of them had absolutely no reason for this.

During colonization, a process of mixing of Europeans, Indians, and blacks took place. Therefore, the population of Latin America at the end of the 18th - beginning of the 19th centuries. its ethnic composition was extremely heterogeneous. In addition to Indians, blacks and colonists of European origin, there was a very large group that arose from a mixture of various ethnic elements: whites and Indians (Indo-European mestizos), whites and blacks (mulattoes), Indians and blacks (sambo).

The mestizo population was deprived of civil rights: mestizos and mulattoes could not hold official and officer positions, participate in municipal elections, etc. Representatives of this large group of the population were engaged in crafts, retail trade, liberal professions, served as managers, clerks, and supervisors rich landowners. They constituted the majority among small landowners. Some of them, by the end of the colonial period, began to penetrate the ranks of the lower clergy. Some of the mestizos turned into peons, workers in factories and mines, soldiers, and constituted a declassed element of the cities.

In contrast to the mixture of various ethnic elements that was taking place, the colonialists sought to isolate and contrast with each other the natives of the metropolis, Creoles, Indians, blacks and mestizos. They divided the entire population of the colonies into groups based on race. However, in fact, belonging to one or another category was often determined not so much by ethnic characteristics as by social factors. Thus, many wealthy people who were mestizos in the anthropological sense were officially considered Creoles, and the children of Indian and white women who lived in Indian villages were often considered by the authorities as Indians.

Tribes belonging to the linguistic groups of the Caribs and Arawaks also made up the population of the islands of the West Indies.

The estuary (widened mouth) formed by the Parana and Uruguay rivers is a bay of the Atlantic Ocean.

K. Marxi F. Engels, Works, vol. 21, p. 31.

Ibid., p. 408.

This was one of the Bahamas islands, according to most historians and geographers, the one that was later called Fr. Watling, and recently renamed again to San Salvador.

Later, the entire Spanish colony in Haiti and even the island itself began to be called this.

Archives of Marx and Engels, vol. VII, p. 100.

Travels of Christopher Columbus. Diaries, letters, documents, M.,. 1961, p. 461.

From the Spanish "el dorado" - "gilded". The idea of ​​Eldorado arose among European conquerors, apparently on the basis of greatly exaggerated information about some rituals common among the Chibcha Indian tribes inhabiting the north-west of South America, who, when electing a supreme leader, covered his body with gold and brought gold and emeralds as gifts to their deities .

That is, “solid land”, in contrast to the islands of the West Indies. In a more limited sense, this term was later used to designate the part of the Isthmus of Panama adjacent to the South American mainland, which made up the territories of the provinces of Daria, Panama and Veraguas.

The last attempt of this kind was made in the 70s of the 18th century. Spaniard Rodriguez.

About the fate of Santo Domingo at the turn of the 18th-19th centuries. see page 16 and chap. 3.

K. Marxi F. Engels, Works, vol. 4, p. 425.

W. Z. Foster, Essay on the Political History of America, Ed. foreign lit., 1953, p. 46.

This city was built on the site of the Aztec capital Tenochtitlan, destroyed and burned by the Spaniards.

K. Marx and F. Engels, Works, vol. 23, p. 179.

Gachupins (Spanish) - “people with spurs”, Chapetones (Spanish) - literally “newcomers”, “newcomers”.

In the first years of the 17th century. The great migration of Europeans to North America began. A weak trickle of several hundred English colonists over the course of just over three centuries turned into a full-flowing stream of millions of immigrants. Due to various circumstances, they left to create a new civilization on a sparsely populated continent.

The first immigrants from England to settle in what is now the United States crossed the Atlantic Ocean long after the prosperous Spanish colonies were established in Mexico, the West Indies, and South America. Like everyone else moving to the New World at that time, they arrived on small, overcrowded ships. The journey took from 6 to 12 weeks, food was scarce, and many settlers died from disease. The ships were often hit by storms and storms, and people died at sea.

Most European immigrants left their homeland for greater economic opportunity, often coupled with a desire for religious freedom or a determination to escape political oppression. In 1620-1635 economic turmoil swept across England. Many people lost their jobs, even skilled artisans struggled to make ends meet. These troubles were aggravated by crop failures. In addition, the clothmaking industry that was developing in England required an increase in the supply of wool, and in order for the weaving looms not to stop, sheep began to be grazed on communal lands taken from the peasants. Dispossessed peasants were forced to seek their fortune overseas.

On the new land, the colonists encountered, first of all, dense forests. Indian tribes lived there, many of which were at enmity with the white newcomers. However, the latter would hardly have been able to survive without the friendly Indians, from whom they learned to grow local varieties of vegetables - pumpkin, zucchini, beans and corn. Virgin forests, stretching for almost 2 thousand km along the eastern coast of the North American continent, provided them with an abundance of game and fuel. They also provided material for building houses, ships, making household utensils, as well as valuable raw materials for export.

The first permanent English settlement in America was the fort and settlement of Jamestown in Virginia, founded in 1607. The area soon became prosperous due to the cultivation of tobacco, which the colonists sold in London. Although the new continent had enormous natural resources, trade with Europe was vital, since the colonists could not yet produce many goods themselves.

Gradually, the colonies became self-sufficient societies with their own access to the sea. Each of them became a separate, independent organism. But, despite this, the problems of trade, navigation, industrial production and finance went beyond the individual colonies and required a joint settlement, which subsequently led to the federal structure of the American state.

Settlement of the colonies in the 17th century. required careful planning and management, and was also very expensive and risky. The settlers had to be transported by sea over a distance of almost 5 thousand km, provided with household items, clothing, seeds, tools, building materials, livestock, weapons and ammunition. Unlike the colonization policies pursued by other states, emigration from England was not carried out by the government, but by private individuals whose main motive was to make a profit.

Two colonies - Virginia and Massachusetts - founded privileged companies: the Massachusetts Bay Company and the London Virginia Company. Their funds, created by investors, were used to supply and transport the colonists. Wealthy immigrants arriving in the New Haven colony (later part of Connecticut) paid their own fare and supported their families and servants. New Hampshire, Maine, Maryland, North and South Carolina, New Jersey and Pennsylvania originally belonged to the owners of the English nobility (gentry), who settled the lands granted to them by the king with tenants and servants.

The first 13 colonies that later became the United States were (from north to south): New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Connecticut, New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Delaware, Maryland, Virginia, North and South Carolina, Georgia .

Georgia was founded by a group of individuals led by James Edward Oglethorpe. They planned to send debtors from English prisons to America to create a border colony that would block the path of the Spaniards in the south of the continent. Meanwhile, the colony of New Netherland, founded in 1621 by the Dutch, was transferred to England in 1664 and was renamed New York.

Many moved to America for political reasons. In the 1630s. The despotic rule of Charles I gave impetus to migration to the New World. Then the revolution in England and the victory of the opponents of Charles I, led by Oliver Cromwell, in the 1640s. forced many cavaliers - “the king’s men” - to try their luck in Virginia. The despotism of the petty German princes, especially in matters of faith, and the numerous wars that took place in their possessions contributed to the strengthening of German immigration to America at the end of the 17th and 18th centuries.

Men and women, even those who were not particularly interested in a new life on American soil, often succumbed to the persuasion of recruiters. William Penn disseminated information in the press about the opportunities and benefits awaiting those wishing to move to Pennsylvania. Judges and jailers were persuaded to give prisoners a chance to move to America instead of carrying out their sentences.

Only a few colonists could go overseas with their families at their own expense to start a new life there. Ship captains received large rewards for selling contracts and hiring poor people to work in America. In order to take more passengers on board, they did not disdain anything - from the most extraordinary promises and promises to kidnapping. In other cases, the costs of transporting and maintaining settlers were borne by colonization agencies such as the Virginia Company of London and the Massachusetts Bay Company. Migrants who signed a contract with the company were obliged to work for it as a laborer or contracted servant (servant) for a certain period of time - usually from four to seven years. Upon expiration of the term, the servants could receive a small plot of land. Many of those who arrived in the New World under these conditions soon discovered that remaining servants or tenants did not lead to a better life than in their homeland.

Historians estimate that approximately half of the colonists living south of New England came to America by indenture. Although the majority honestly fulfilled their obligations, some fled from their owners. Many fugitive servants, however, managed to obtain land and acquire a farm - in the colony where they settled or in neighboring ones. Indentured servitude was not considered disgraceful, and the families that began their lives in America from this semi-slave position did not at all tarnish their reputation thereby. Even among the leaders of the colonies there were people who had been servants in the past.

There was, however, a very important exception to this rule - the African slave trade. The first blacks were brought to Virginia in 1619, seven years after the founding of Jamestown. In the beginning, many "black" settlers were considered indentured servants who could "earn" their freedom. However, by the 60s. In the 17th century, when the need for workers on plantations increased, slavery began to strengthen. Blacks began to be brought from Africa in shackles - already as lifelong slaves.

Most of the colonists in the 17th century. were English, but small numbers of Dutch, Swedes and Germans lived in the mid-Atlantic colonies. In South Carolina and other colonies there were French Huguenots, as well as Spaniards, Italians and Portuguese. After 1680 England ceased to be the main source of immigration. Thousands of people fled from war-torn Europe. Many left their homeland to escape poverty caused by pressure from the authorities and large landlords who owned estates. By 1690, the American population reached 1/4 million. Since then it has doubled every 25 years until it exceeded 2.5 million people in 1775.

American settlements were grouped into geographic "sections", depending on natural conditions.

New England on northeast(Connecticut, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Maine) was a secondary area in agricultural terms: thin soil, poor vegetation, mountainous, uneven terrain, short summers and long winters. Therefore, its inhabitants solved other problems - they used the power of water and built mills and sawmills. The presence of timber contributed to the development of shipbuilding, convenient bays favored trade, and the sea served as a source of enrichment. In Massachusetts, cod fishing alone immediately began to bring high profits. The settlement near Massachusetts Bay played an important role in the religious development of all of New England. The 25 colonists who founded it had a royal charter and were determined to prosper. During the first 10 years of the colony's existence, 65 Puritan priests arrived there, and as a result of the religious beliefs of the colonists' leaders and with their support, the power of the church strengthened there. Formally, the clergy did not have secular power, but in fact they led the colony.

In the south, with its warm climate and fertile soil, a largely agrarian society developed. IN mid-Atlantic colonies - Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Delaware and New York - the nature was more diverse: forests, valleys suitable for agriculture, bays where such large port cities as Philadelphia and New York grew.

In the mid-Atlantic colonies, society was much more diverse and tolerant than in New England. Pennsylvania and Delaware owe their success to the Quakers, who set out to attract settlers of many faiths and nationalities. Quakers predominated in Philadelphia, and there were other sects in other parts of the colony. Immigrants from Germany showed themselves to be the most skilled farmers; they also knew weaving, shoemaking, carpentry and other crafts. The bulk of Scottish and Irish immigrants arrived in the New World through Pennsylvania. The population of the New York colonies was just as mixed, which perfectly demonstrates the multilingualism of America. By 1646 along the river. The Hudson was settled by the Dutch, French, Danes, Norwegians, Swedes, English, Scots, Irish, Germans, Poles, people from Bohemia, Portugal, and Italy. But these are only the forerunners of millions of future immigrants.

Eastern states- Virginia, Maryland, North and South Carolina, Georgia - were very different from New England and the Mid-Atlantic colonies in their predominantly rural character. The first surviving English settlement in the New World was Jamestown, Virginia.

A distinctive feature of the early stages of colonial history was the lack of strict control by the British authorities. While the colonies were being formed, they were essentially left to their own devices. The British government was not directly involved in their founding (with the exception of Georgia), and it began to take political leadership of the colonies gradually and not immediately.

Since 1651, the British government from time to time passed regulations regulating certain aspects of the economic life of the colonies, which in most cases benefited only England, but the colonists simply ignored the laws that harmed them. Sometimes the British administration tried to force their implementation, but these attempts quickly failed.

The relative political independence of the colonies was largely due to their distance from England. They became increasingly “American” rather than “English”. This trend was intensified by the mixing of different national groups and cultures - a process that was going on all the time in America.

The history of the country is inextricably linked with its literature. And thus, while studying, one cannot help but touch on American history. Each work belongs to a particular historical period. Thus, in his Washington, Irving talks about the Dutch pioneers who settled along the Hudson River, mentions the seven-year war for independence, the English king George III and the country's first president, George Washington. Setting as my goal to draw parallel connections between literature and history, in this introductory article I want to say a few words about how it all began, because the historical moments that will be discussed are not reflected in any works.

Colonization of America 15th – 18th centuries (brief summary)

“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”
An American philosopher, George Santayana

If you are asking yourself why you need to know history, then know that those who do not remember their history are doomed to repeat its mistakes.

So, the history of America began relatively recently, when in the 16th century people arrived on the new continent discovered by Columbus. These people were of different skin colors and different incomes, and the reasons that prompted them to come to the New World were also different. Some were attracted by the desire to start a new life, others sought to get rich, and others were fleeing persecution from the authorities or religious persecution. However, all these people, representing different cultures and nationalities, were united by the desire to change something in their lives and, most importantly, they were ready to take risks.
Inspired by the idea of ​​creating a new world almost from scratch, the pioneers succeeded. Fantasy and dream became reality; they, like Julius Caesar, they came, they saw and they conquered.

I came, I saw, I conquered.
Julius Caesar

In those early days, America was an abundance of natural resources and a vast expanse of uncultivated land inhabited by friendly local people.
If we look a little further back into the past, then, presumably, the first people who appeared on the American continent came from Asia. According to Steve Wingand, this happened about 14 thousand years ago.

The first Americans probably wandered over from Asia about 14,000 years ago.
Steve Wiengand

Over the next 5 centuries, these tribes settled across two continents and, depending on the natural landscape and climate, began to engage in hunting, cattle breeding or agriculture.
In 985 AD, warlike Vikings arrived on the continent. For about 40 years they tried to gain a foothold in this country, but being outnumbered by the indigenous people, they eventually abandoned their attempts.
Then Columbus appeared in 1492, followed by other Europeans who were drawn to the continent by the thirst for profit and simple adventurism.

On October 12, 34 states celebrate Columbus Day in America. Christopher Columbus discovered America in 1492.

The Spanish were the first Europeans to arrive on the continent. Christopher Columbus, being an Italian by birth, having received a refusal from his king, turned to the Spanish king Ferdinand with a request to finance his expedition to Asia. It is not surprising that when Columbus discovered America instead of Asia, all of Spain rushed to this strange country. France and England rushed after the Spaniards. Thus began the colonization of America.

Spain got a head start in the Americas, mainly because the aforementioned Italian named Columbus was working for the Spanish and got them enthusiastic about it early on. But while the Spanish had a head start, other European countries eagerly sought to catch up.
(Source: U.S. history for dummies by S. Wiegand)

Having initially encountered no resistance from the local population, the Europeans behaved like aggressors, killing and enslaving the Indians. The Spanish conquerors were particularly cruel, plundering and burning Indian villages and killing their inhabitants. Following the Europeans, diseases also came to the continent. Thus, epidemics of measles and smallpox gave the process of extermination of the local population stunning speed.
But from the end of the 16th century, powerful Spain began to lose its influence on the continent, which was greatly facilitated by the weakening of its power, both on land and at sea. And the dominant position in the American colonies passed to England, Holland and France.

Henry Hudson founded the first Dutch settlement in 1613 on the island of Manhattan. This colony, located along the Hudson River, was called New Netherland, and its center was the city of New Amsterdam. However, this colony was later captured by the British and transferred to the Duke of York. Accordingly, the city was renamed New York. The population of this colony was mixed, but although the British predominated, the influence of the Dutch remained quite strong. Dutch words have entered the American language, and the appearance of some places reflects the “Dutch architectural style” - tall houses with sloping roofs.

The colonialist managed to gain a foothold on the continent, for which they thank God every fourth Thursday of the month of November. Thanksgiving is a holiday to celebrate their first year in their new place.

If the first settlers chose the north of the country mainly for religious reasons, then the south for economic reasons. Without standing on ceremony with the local population, the Europeans quickly pushed them back to lands unsuitable for life or simply killed them.
The practical English were especially firmly established. Quickly realizing what rich resources this continent contained, they began to grow tobacco and then cotton in the southern part of the country. And to get even more profit, the British brought slaves from Africa to cultivate plantations.
To summarize, I will say that in the 15th century, Spanish, English, French and other settlements appeared on the American continent, which began to be called colonies, and their inhabitants - colonists. At the same time, a struggle for territory began between the invaders, with particularly strong military actions taking place between the French and English colonists.