Category Archives: Chile

by | 2 February 2025 · 6:36 am

Rescinding Emancipation in Manila

From The Other Slavery: The Uncovered Story of Indian Enslavement in America, by Andrés Reséndez (HarperCollins, 2016), Kindle pp. 144-146:

The backlash against the campaign to free the Indians was strongest in the Philippines. The royal order of June 12, 1679, specifying that “no native could be held as a slave under any circumstance” and that “all Indians enslaved up to now are hereby set free as well as their children and descendants” caused a great deal of turmoil in Manila. As in Chile, the first recourse in the Philippines was to stall using the traditional formula: “This cédula [royal order] is of the kind that must be obeyed but not complied with,” observed the members of the Audiencia of Manila, “and we must write back to the Prince so that better informed he could send us his orders.” Their displeasure was patent. “When royal orders are so far apart from the natural law, they cannot be executed,” wrote an irate audiencia member to Charles II, “and with all due respect, even less so when that natural law is for the benefit of those who have been vanquished in war, for the victors would have a right to take their lives but only choose to take away their liberty.”

Yet even in the distant Philippines, there were some courageous crusaders. While waiting for the king’s reply, the audiencia’s attorney prodded his reluctant colleagues to make public the emancipation decree. The immediate result was a flood of requests: “So many were the slaves who crowded around this Royal Audiencia to claim their liberty that we could not process the multitude of their papers, even when being extracted in brief and summarily.” Many slaves around the capital abandoned their masters, who were left “without service,” as the archbishop of Manila, Felipe Pardo, observed.

It was in the provinces that the situation became truly critical. Native Filipinos faced total ruin, as they had most of their wealth invested in their slaves. Moreover, the slaves supplied much of the rice and other basic foodstuffs of the islands, and now “agitated and encouraged by the recent laws setting them free [they] went to the extremity of refusing to plant the fields.” The greatest threat of all was that “by setting these slaves free, the provinces remote from Manila may be stirred up and revolt, such as those in the Visayas and Nueva Segovia; and in the island of Mindanao, the malcontent Caragas and Subanos might well join forces with the Muslim insurgents there.”

In Chile the governor had taken the lead in opposing the Spanish campaign, but in the Philippines all branches of the imperial administration, including the governor, the members of the audiencia, the city council of Manila, members of the military, and the ecclesiastical establishment beginning with the archbishop, sent letters to Charles II requesting the suspension of the emancipation decree. Among the petitioners were Native Filipinos, for whom slavery had been a way of life since time immemorial. “When a principal native walks around town or visits a temple,” observed a Spanish chronicler, “it is with great pomp and accompanied by male and female slaves carrying silk parasols to protect their masters from the sun or rain, and the señoras go first followed by their servants and slaves, and then come their husbands or father or brothers with their own servants and slaves.” The emancipation decree came as a great annoyance to these Native slave owners. Those of Pampanga, a province on the northern shore of Manila Bay, in central Luzon, resolutely opposed the liberation of their slaves, whom they regarded as “the principal nerve and backbone of our strength.” They wrote a long letter to the king of Spain explaining how the Spanish galleons were built in the nearby shipyards of Cavite with teak and mahogany supplied in part by slaves: “And while our women together with our slaves plant the seeds, we men are up in the hills cutting wood for the royal yards.” By emancipating the slaves of Pampanga, the empire stood to lose its ships.

In the end, the Audiencia of Manila rescinded the king’s emancipation decree on September 7, 1682, and replaced it with a new decree: all previously liberated slaves had to return to their duties within fifteen days upon penalty of one hundred lashes and one year in the galleys (forced service as a rower aboard a galley, or ship). Charles II continued to press his case for liberation, but ending formal slavery in the Philippines proved very difficult.

In 1674, the Governor of Chile similarly resisted emancipation (p. 143):

The tenor of the governor’s letter was defiant, but it was consistent with a medieval legal tradition that can be summed up in the curious dictum “Obedezco pero no cumplo” (I obey but do not comply). In a vast empire such as Spain’s, royal officials used this response to show both their respect for royal authority and the inapplicability of a decree or order to a particular kingdom.

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Filed under Chile, labor, migration, Philippines, slavery, Spain

by | 10 March 2022 · 7:16 am

Similarities of Native American and Iberian Empires

From The Penguin History Of Latin America, by Edwin Williamson (Penguin, 2003), Kindle pp. 75-76:

What occurred in the sixteenth century was not so much the discovery of a New World as the meeting of two branches of humanity which had previously been unknown to each other. For the Indians of America, who had lived a completely isolated existence, the encounter with aliens was inherently traumatic. The European invasions brought much that was radically new in the realm of ideas and values, in agricultural methods, including new crops and animals, in technology, with the introduction of the wheel, iron, guns, ships, tools, and in the economy, where the use of money, profit-making and trade were far more developed than in Indian societies. All these innovations would change and also disrupt the Indian world.

Even so, in the imperial areas of Middle America and the Andes the break with tradition was not total. In the first place, Indians and Iberians had comparable ideas of political sovereignty: the Catholic monarchs of the Iberian kingdoms derived their legitimacy and absolute authority from a divine source, as did the rulers of the Aztecs and the Incas. In both the European and the Amerindian imperial states the religious establishment was closely involved in the business of government; a priestly caste or a Church hierarchy buttressed the state and received numerous privileges, land and tribute from the people. Both kinds of society were seigneurial: Indian nobles, like their Iberian counterparts, owned large estates worked by tribute-paying peasants; they also headed large households composed of extended families or kinship groups, as well as numerous dependants and servants. Relations within these households and between noble clans replicated the reciprocal relationship between the monarch and his people, based as it was on patriarchy and patronage – a man of power would bestow favours in return for the loyalty of his clients and subordinates. Aristocrats valued honour and glory derived from military exploits, for in America as in Iberia there was long experience of conquering and subjugating alien kingdoms. Indeed, James Lockhart and Stuart Schwartz have remarked on the extent to which the expectations of indigenous Americans ‘matched those of the Iberians, whose conquest lore also included notions of tribute imposition, change of religion and allegiance, and manipulation of local rulers, together with at least provisional local autonomy.’

These two worlds – Renaissance Europe and Indian America – met and clashed in the sixteenth century. The consequences of that encounter were manifold and extremely diverse, and, for reasons not wholly attributable to the Iberians, they were destructive for large numbers of Indians. Nevertheless, it has become clear that there existed sufficient political and social similarities between the two worlds, at least in Middle America and in the central Andes, for there to have occurred a fairly rapid process of restructuring and hybridization after the conquest had been completed.

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Filed under Bolivia, Chile, democracy, Ecuador, Mexico, migration, nationalism, Peru, Portugal, religion, Spain

by | 9 March 2022 · 6:32 am

The Inca Vertical Archipelago

From The Penguin History Of Latin America, by Edwin Williamson (Penguin, 2003), Kindle pp. 48-49, 50-51:

In less than a hundred years the Incas had built the most formidable empire in the Western Hemisphere. Like that of the Aztecs, their dominion was characterized essentially by the levying of tribute from scores of subject kingdoms and tribes. But the Incas went much further than the Aztecs in developing a centralized bureaucratic state at the service of a supreme ruling class. In this the physical peculiarities of the Andean region were directly influential.

The geography of the area covered by the Inca empire is marked by great contrasts of climate and terrain. Ascending from the rainless deserts of the coast to the snow-capped peaks of the Andes, one passes through sharply varying ecological environments. On the coast, agriculture is possible only in the vicinity of rivers or on land under irrigation; fishing has therefore always been important. In the highlands, altitude determines the kind of crops that can be produced; for instance, maize will grow well up to 11,000 feet, while at higher levels tubers and grains can be cultivated. In the cold, windswept puna – steppe-like grasslands just below the snow-line – no agriculture is possible, though pasture is available for the llamas, vicuñas and other ruminants that provide meat and wool. Each level forms an ‘ecological tier’ yielding a particular range of produce, and yet there is not enough fertile land on any one tier to sustain a large population. Over the centuries Andean societies developed a way of overcoming this problem by sending out settlers to cultivate crops at different altitudes in order to complement the produce of their native territories. Andean societies were not therefore territorially integrated units, but took rather the form of ‘vertical archipelagos’ comprising the ancestral homeland – which provided the core of tribal identity – and outlying agrarian settlements on a number of ecological tiers specializing in various types of produce for distribution and exchange among the dispersed branches of the tribe. Geography thus produced a unique economic structure, which, in turn, determined social values and practices. Where fertile land, being scarce, needed to be so carefully husbanded, it is little wonder that its distribution had to be closely regulated by the community and that a spirit of co-operation should be so highly prized among members of the tribe. As a result, the two ruling principles of Andean tribal society were redistribution and reciprocity.

…

As a direct descendant of the Sun God, the supreme Inca was an absolute ruler possessed of an awesome majesty. Just as the sun sustained all living things in the natural world, so the Inca was responsible for the well-being of the social order. In return for his dispensation of justice, his subjects would offer up to him their tribute and labour services. The Inca state, in effect, drew upon elementary tribal relations of reciprocity and mutual aid, and converted them into a sophisticated system of ideological control based upon a relationship between the royal patron and his clients which was not essentially different from that which existed between a contemporary European monarch and his subjects. What many modern writers have seen as unique ‘socialist’ or ‘welfare state’ features of the Inca empire were in reality manifestations of royal patronage. Thus, for instance, the Inca would allow his peasants to graze their animals on common lands as a reward for their labour services on his personal estates. The bulk of the tribute-goods collected from the peasants would go towards provisioning the army, the bureaucracy and other branches of the imperial state, but a portion was kept back in storehouses and released in times of famine by the generosity of the Inca in order to relieve the hunger of the masses. Similarly, the Inca would redistribute some of the tribute to provide for the old and the sick. In the view of Nathan Wachtel, ‘the peasants felt therefore that they shared in the consumption of the produce they delivered as tribute’, though it may be as well to recall that this form of reciprocity rested on the ideological exploitation of peasant labour. Certainly, there was a sharp divide between the hard grind of a peasant’s life in the villages and the leisured circumstances of the Inca nobility and of the curacas (tribal lords) who had been co-opted into the imperial ruling class. These aristocrats – called orejones or ‘big ears’ by the Spaniards because of their custom of distending their ear-lobes with gold discs – possessed private estates and material wealth which they would display as a sign of their power. In addition to the finery of their costume and the delicacy of their diet, they were allowed to practise polygamy and concubinage, and to chew the narcotic coca leaf. These special liberties were strictly forbidden to commoners, for, like all aristocratic societies, the Incas were obsessed with status, and perhaps more than most, the Incas succeeded in using religion to justify social privilege.

Inca religion was very much a family affair, since the supreme Inca and his kin possessed the sacred aura of divine descent. This was another example of the Incas’ conversion of tribal customs into the tools of imperialism.

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Filed under Bolivia, Chile, democracy, economics, Ecuador, labor, migration, military, nationalism, Peru, religion

by | 2 August 2020 · 6:01 am

Doubling Cape Horn, 1839

From Twenty Years Before the Mast, by Charles Erskine (Fossil, 2016), Kindle pp. 33-34:

On the 30th of January a strong land-breeze began to blow, which obliged us to get under way and beat out to sea. The weather now began to grow cold, the thermometer ranging from 50° to 45°. Our ship glided through the water like a thing of life. For several days many whales, seals, and porpoises showed themselves on the surface of the water. The porpoises differed from any I had ever seen before, in having a stripe around their necks. We captured several of them, and this made a fresh mess for all hands round. The next night at midnight we had a view of the rugged peaks of Terra del Fuego, and at twelve o’clock we entered the Straits of La Maire. The land here presents rather a dreary appearance. The high peaks on either hand are covered with snow, even in midsummer.

At sunset we passed the straits and again entered the open sea. We doubled Cape Horn in our shirt-sleeves, with studding sails set on both sides, below and aloft, and left it under close-reefed top-sails, with our pea-jackets on. We had but just rounded the cape and arrived in the South Pacific, or summer seas, when the wind suddenly shifted to the south, blowing a perfect gale from the regions of perpetual ice and snow. The change of temperature was sudden and keenly felt, and made us hug our pea-jackets closely about us. Such is the life of a sailor — from one extreme to another. Cape Horn is in latitude 55°48′ south, and sometimes vessels are driven as far as 60°, in order to get round into the Pacific. Cape Horn is called the “stormy cape.” It takes its name from the peculiar hornlike shape of its rocky mountain heights, which terminate the land. Be it fair or foul, rain or shine, in all weather and at all seasons, Cape Horn is a terror to the sailor, and many a long yarn is spun in the forecastle by poor Jack as this much-dreaded point is approached.

On the 18th of February we came to anchor in Orange Harbor, Terra del Fuego, or, as the name implies, the “land of fire.” This is the first harbor on the western side of Cape Horn. The cape was discovered by Magellan in the year 1519. It was at this spot that the celebrated circumnavigators, Captains Cook, King, Fitzroy, Laplace, d’Urville, and others used to make their rendezvous and lay in a supply of wood and water. The harbor is land-locked, and is the safest on the coast. It has many small bays, the best of which is Dingy Cove. Here boats may enter to obtain wood, and from its banks game and fish may be taken in great abundance. Everything about has a bleak and wintry appearance and is in keeping with the climate, yet the scenery is pleasing to the eye.

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Filed under Argentina, Chile, Pacific, science, travel, U.S.