A Concise History of the World

by Merry E. Wiesner-Hanks

  Families and race in the colonial world

  The process of mixture and creolization that marked the early modern world involved people themselves as well as their ideas and practices. Every trade venture, willing or coerced migration, conquest, or any other sort of travel brought individuals who thought of themselves as belonging to different groups together. Despite norms prescribing group endogamy, there were sexual relationships, many of which produced children. Like everything else, the scale of this mixture increased in the early modern period, when the movement of people across vast distances increased dramatically.

  As we have seen in earlier chapters, from a very early point in history people developed concepts about human groups—particularly their own—based on real or perceived kinship and shared culture. They used a variety of words to describe these groups; in English these include tribe, people, ethnicity, background, race, and nation. The group was created and maintained by intermarriage, and membership in it was understood to be contained in and passed down through the blood. Religion was also sometimes conceptualized as blood, with people regarded as having Jewish, Muslim, or Christian blood, and after the Reformation Protestant or Catholic blood. European fathers choosing a wetnurse for their children took care to make sure she was of the same denomination, lest, if he was a Catholic, her Protestant blood turn into Protestant milk (the two bodily fluids were seen as fungible) and thus infect the child with heretical ideas.

  Describing differences as blood naturalized them, making them appear as if they were created by God in nature, but people often held contradictory ideas about this. Thus the same religious reformers who warned against choosing the wrong wetnurse also worked for conversions, and did not think about whether adopting a new religion would also change a woman's milk. Catholic authorities in colonial areas limited entrance to certain convents to “pure-blooded” white or native women, thus excluding women of mixed background, but were more willing to allow a light-skinned mestizo than a “full-blooded” native marry a white person. Such contradictions did not generally lessen people's convictions about the reality of differences and hierarchies, however, and authorities had to decide how to deal with the situation.

  In China, the Manchu Qing rulers who assumed power in the seventeenth century initially encouraged Manchu/Han marriages as a way of blending the two cultures, but in 1655 reversed course and forbade them, enforcing this by requiring bannermen to live in separate walled quarters of Chinese cities. There were very few marriages, although Manchu bannermen did buy Han Chinese women as concubines and servants, so there were certainly children.

  In the Americas, the Spanish and Portuguese crown first hoped to avoid such relationships by keeping groups—Europeans, Africans, and indigenous peoples—apart. The gender balance among both European and African immigrants made this impossible, and authorities quickly gave up, but they still thought it necessary that people be divided into categories. With each generation, the varieties of possible mixture proliferated, and the response of colonial authorities was to create an even more complex system of categories for persons of mixed ancestry, which were called castas. The Catholic Church and Spanish and Portuguese officials defined as many as forty different categories and combinations that were in theory based on place of birth, assumed geographic origin, and the status of one's mother, with a specific name for each one. The various castas and the relationships among them were clearly delineated in treatises and by the eighteenth century in paintings that showed scenes of parents of different castas and the children such parents produced: India + Spaniard = Mestizo; India + Negro = Lobo; Chamiza + Cambuja = Chino, and so on. Some of these castas had fanciful names, or ones derived from animals, such as coyote or lobo (wolf). The casta system built on earlier Iberian notions of “purity of blood,” in which descendants of Muslim and Jewish converts to Christianity were viewed as tainted, because their religious allegiance was carried in their blood. In the Latin American colonies, people of indigenous and African ancestry both had lower rank than did those of European ancestry, with blood that was viewed as less pure. New laws passed after 1763 in the French Caribbean colonies set out a similar system, with various categories based on the supposed origin of one's ancestors.

  Determining the proper casta in which to place actual people was not as easy as setting these out in theory or in paintings, however. In practice, whether one was a “mestizo” or “mulatto” or “caboclo” or another category was to a large extent determined by how one looked, with lighter-skinned mixed-ancestry persons accorded a higher rank than darker ones, even if they were siblings. Many historians have thus termed the social structure that developed in colonial Spanish and Portuguese America, including the Caribbean (and later in the French Caribbean), a “pigmentocracy” based largely on skin color, but also on facial features and hair texture. Because what category one was in determined one's ability to marry or inherit, enter a convent or the priesthood, attend university, live in certain places, or have access to other advantages, individuals not only passed as members of a higher group, but bought licenses to be considered descendants of Europeans, regardless of their particular ethnic appearance and ancestry. In addition, individuals might define themselves, or be defined, as belonging to different categories at different points in their life, in what scholars have called a “racial drift” toward whiteness.

  The granting of honorary whiteness and the difficulty of assigning people to castas points out just how subjective this entire system was, but it was the essential determinant of family life and gender norms in Latin America. For members of the white European elite, the concern about bloodlines and skin color created a pattern of intermarriage within the extended family, with older women identifying the distant cousins that were favored as spouses. Following the southern European pattern, these marriages were often between an older man and a younger woman, which limited the number of potential spouses for women, and many never married. Most elite men married, and they often also had children by slaves or servants who were part of their household. Rural native people also married most often within their own group, with the extended family exerting control over choice of spouses just as it did for elite whites. For slaves, many persons of mixed ancestry, and poor people of all types, family and property considerations did not enter into marital considerations, and in most cases people simply did not get married at all, though in many cases they did establish long-term unions regarded by their neighbors and friends as stable.

  4.8 The Mexican artist Luis de Mena combines a still life, casta painting, and devotional image of the Virgin of Guadalupe on a single canvas, painted about 1750. The racial mixtures he portrays include ones that would have been rare or non-existent, such as that at the upper left showing a light-skinned woman in an elaborate European dress and an indigenous man in a loincloth.

  In the European colonies that were established in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, patterns were different from those of Latin America and from each other. French authorities, and those of the Dutch and English East India Companies, initially encouraged sexual relations and even marriage between European men and indigenous women as a means of making alliances, cementing their power, and spreading Christianity. In the Dutch East Indies soldiers, merchants, and minor officials married local women, and in French North America fur traders did as well. Attitudes toward this began to change as more European women moved to the colonies, and as it became clear that cultural transformation often went in the other direction, with European men “going native” instead of local women becoming French or Dutch. Hesitation about intermarriage also came from the other side: in much of West Africa, Portuguese men were not allowed to marry local women of free standing, as this would give them claims to land use, while in India, high-caste families were not interested in marrying their daughters to the type of European men usually found in the colonies. In any case, the number of European men in many colonies was small, so European rule did not disrupt existing family patterns
to a great extent, and they continued to be shaped by existing social and cultural traditions. In Southeast Asia, these included temporary marriages in which women married men from outside their group in order to create connections and networks of obligations. Merchants from far away had been linked to local families through such marriages for centuries; they ended if the man returned home, but they were marriage, not concubinage or something less formal.

  At the same time that the Dutch and English East India Companies tolerated or even encouraged intermarriage, Dutch and British colonies in North America forbade it, with laws that first regulated sexual relations between Europeans and Africans and were then extended to Native Americans. In 1638, the Dutch colony of New Amsterdam forbade fornication (sex outside of marriage) between “Christians” and “Negroes,” and in 1662 the Virginia Assembly set double the normal fine for fornication involving people from these two groups. In the very same sentence, the Virginia law declares that “children got by any Englishman upon a negro woman … shall be held bond or free only according to the condition of the mother.” The law makes no distinction for married couples, so reverses normal English practice, in which the legal status of children born in a marriage followed the father, and contrasts with Islamic law, in which the children of free fathers were free. Thus laws about mixing in North America were determined by slavery from the very beginning. A 1691 Virginia law closed any marriage loophole, flatly forbidding marriage between an “English or other white man or woman”, and a “negroe, mulatto, or Indian man or woman,” with a punishment of banishment. Though such laws were usually gender-neutral, what lawmakers were most worried about was, as the preamble to the Virginia law states: “negroes, mulattoes, and Indians intermarrying with English, or other white women” and the resultant “abominable mixture and spurious issue.” Such laws were passed in all the southern colonies in North America and also in Pennsylvania and Massachusetts between 1700 and 1750. (They were struck down by the US Supreme Court in 1967, but remained on the books in some states for decades after that; the last of such “miscegenation” laws was rescinded by Alabama voters in a statewide referendum in 2000.)

  The relatively large number of women among European settlers and the declining number of indigenous women in coastal areas where settlements were located meant that marriages or even long-term sexual relationships between white men and indigenous women were rare in the British North American colonies. Government policy toward Native Americans, which increasingly removed them from their original homelands and by the nineteenth century ordered them to live on reservations, disrupted family life along with every other aspect of indigenous society, though extended kin groups retained some voice wherever they could. White families, especially in the north, tended to follow the northwestern European model, with late marriage and a high proportion of people who never married.

  Most people of African descent in North America were slaves until the middle of the nineteenth century. Only in New England were marriages between slaves legally recognized, although, as in Latin America, long-term family relationships developed among enslaved people, though these could be easily broken up by the decision of a slave owner. As the slave population in southern colonies increased, sexual relations between white men and black women did as well. White men's fathering of children with their slaves was not recognized legally and rarely spoken about publicly in polite society, though this was so common over generations that by the nineteenth century a large part of the North American slave population was mixed. In contrast to the hierarchy of categories found in Spanish, Portuguese, and French colonies, however, the British North American colonies and later the United States developed a dichotomous system, in which in theory one drop of “black blood” made one black, though in practice lighter-skinned mixed-ancestry individuals may have passed over without notice into the white world.

  Laws and norms about sexual relations, and the family patterns that resulted from these, were shaped by changing ideas about the differences between human groups. The Spanish system was roughly based on continent of origin, a schema that was later adopted by European scientists, including the Swedish naturalist and explorer Carl Linnaeus (1707–78), who set down the rules that are still used for naming and classifying all living organisms. Linnaeus classified humans into Americanus, Europaeus, Asiaticus, and Africanus, based on the continents then known, and also on skin color and what he saw as dominant temperament and behavior. Colonial powers also increasingly used skin color. The first New Amsterdam and Virginia laws prohibiting sexual relations mentioned above, for example, distinguished between “christian” and “negroe,” but by 1691 Virginia distinguished between “white” men and women and those who were “negroe, mulatto, or Indian.” In its use of “white,” Virginia picked up language first used in a 1661 census in the British West Indies, and later this language spread throughout the British colonies. Other color designations came later, and in the eighteenth century European natural scientists seeking to develop one single system that would explain human differences settled on the concept of “race” to describe these, with the German Enlightenment philosopher Immanuel Kant outlining these in Of the Different Human Races (1775). Intellectual historians disagree about exactly who was the first to use the word “race” in its modern meaning, but Kant is one candidate, and “race” became the primary term for discussing human variety in the nineteenth century and beyond. Today biologists and others who study the human species as a whole avoid using “race,” as it has no scientific meaning, but, like Vespucci's labeling of “America,” it is an incorrect idea that has stuck.

  Social protests, revolts, and revolutions

  Capitalist enterprises, global trade networks, and colonization made some families and individuals fabulously wealthy—Jacob Fugger is not the only one to acquire the nickname “the rich” in this era—but they were also disruptive. Long-distance trade that brought in foreign goods profited individual merchants and lowered prices for consumers, but also put local artisans at risk, as did larger-scale local production organized by capitalist entrepreneurs through which goods were produced more cheaply. Capitalism thus spawned a variety of social protests. Fugger, for example, established a monopoly of silver and copper mining in Tirol, Hungary and Slovakia, employing thousands of workers, including men who worked underground and their wives, sisters, and children who broke the ore apart and washed it. In 1525, miners discontented with their shrinking wages in an era of rising prices rioted and attacked company officials. Fugger brought in cannon cast from the copper in his mines, defeated the workers, and had their leaders arrested and executed. In England, enclosure and sometimes even the rumor of impending enclosure sparked protests, threats, and occasionally riots.

  Famines and food shortages were also important causes for riots and other types of social protests, which numbered in the thousands over the early modern era. Many of these occurred in the countryside, where most people lived. During years with poor harvests, rural crowds tried to prevent grain from being taken away to nearby cities by blocking roads or waterways. This happened in the regions that supplied London in the 1630s and those that supplied Rome in the 1640s; in the latter instance, crowds grew so violent that they killed the local papal governor and burned down his residence. Social protests in cities often centered on food prices. In 1775, a year with crop failures in many parts of France, crowds protesting rising prices gathered in hundreds of towns. They seized wheat, flour, and bread, sometimes for their own use and sometimes to force sales at prices they thought were “just”—that is, lower—what was known as the taxation populaire. These violent actions, later called the Flour War, were eventually put down only when the French monarchy brought in troops. In 1787, a year of famine in Japan, poor people in Edo destroyed stores and took rice that was being sold at high prices or dumped it on the ground; in response the government arrested day laborers who did not have families in the city and transported them to work in gold mines, where most died.

 
; Resistance to moves by landlords or the government could also be less dramatic than a riot or revolt. The political scientist James C. Scott has pointed out that foot-dragging, pilfering small amounts of goods, arson, desertion, feigned ignorance, and sabotage are all “weapons of the weak,” used by poor people against elites or the state. These do not leave as many traces in the sources as do violent forms of social protest, but we begin to find evidence of them in the early modern period, which allows us to see how ordinary people attempted to shape their own circumstances in a time of rapid social and economic change.

  Food and bread riots in Europe were often instigated and led by women, who saw assuring food for their families as part of their role as mothers, but engaged in actions that were not generally viewed as feminine, including shouting, beating drums, carrying weapons, and throwing stones. The women who led such riots were generally older, with reputations for strength and connections to other women in their neighborhoods. Authorities were sometimes more hesitant to use force against women than men, which led in a few cases to men in food riots dressing up as women. Women also participated in other types of popular collective actions and rebellions, but this threatened male authorities and the response could be particularly brutal. For example, English men were horrified at Irish women's support of revolts against English rule in Ireland in the sixteenth century, and saw women's influence over their husbands as yet another sign of Irish inferiority, along with their Catholic religion and “barbarous and brutish” customs. English military actions against the Irish were specifically directed at women as well as men, and included scorched-earth tactics that destroyed crops and villages. Women were not immune from reprisals elsewhere, either. In Japan, women (and children) as well as men were executed as part of the government's response to the Shimabara Revolt of 1637–38. This depopulated the Shimabara peninsula, so the central government gave the land to loyal followers and brought in immigrants from other parts of Japan to farm it.