Spanish vs. English Colonization in the Americas: A Comparison
Spanish vs. English Colonization in the Americas
Key Differences in Colonial Approaches
One of the main differences between the two settlements stems from the fact that Spanish America already had politically developed agricultural civilizations, empires, and states, in contrast to the hunting bands of Anglo-America. The former were already civilized (anthropologically speaking, civilization comes with intensive cereal farming), so the Spanish only had to change the political superstructure after military defeat. The latter were hunters, nomadic or semi-nomadic, impossible to hold, to become subjects.
Differing Indigenous Populations
*The people who found, in both cases were also different.*
* The Spanish encountered very different civilizations than those that existed in the peninsula. First, the indigenous of the Caribbean islands, and then the Aztecs, who already possessed a high degree of political organization. * Hernán Cortés appreciated these people and wanted to integrate them into Spanish society. He was optimistic and brought the first friars to convert the indigenous people to the Christian faith and teach them Spanish and European customs. There was a vision to assimilate.
The English Experience
* The English case is different. They came, as we said, with experience with the Irish. For them, the Irish were barbarians, and from the fourteenth century, there were laws to prevent marriages with them. That population was soon marginalized by the British. * It’s something different from what happened in Spain during the *Reconquista*, where unions between Moors and Christians occurred. In contrast, in America, there were differences between the higher social strata, with a growing population of *mestizos*. * The British, meanwhile, did not want to cohabit with the Indians. All British colonial history is based on the segregation of Indians and their removal to the margins.
Impact of Existing Empires
*Did the presence of empires like the Inca or Aztec affect the American conquest, or did it hurt the Spanish?*
It helped found two organized Spanish societies. Cortés, after defeating and kidnapping Moctezuma, kept the empire in his hands and used this machinery to settle imperial colonization while collecting taxes and obtaining labor in Mexico. The same happened in Peru with Francisco Pizarro, but here there was more resistance. However, he did the same, using the same resources as the nobility already settled there. So it was easier for Spanish colonization, and they were able to develop an organization and a bureaucracy.
North American Differences
In North America, it was not the same. The first English settlers were disappointed because what they found was very low compared to the South and was unusable as labor. The British, therefore, sought other resources.
* Initially, they hired servants who came from England and those who came to pay for the transatlantic voyage. It was the first migration. * But soon after, the Spanish began to buy enslaved Africans who traded with the Portuguese in the sixteenth century. * In the second half of the seventeenth century, the British did too. That reinforced the plantation system. The search for labor was fundamental.