Abstract
This chapter covers cross-border labor mobility focusing on the saga of the Amerindians—the indigenous populations that lived in the New World before Columbus discovered the Americas. Available literature suggests that almost 90 percent of the Amerindians had perished within 100 years of European colonization of the Americas. Originally, this catastrophic decline in the indigenous population was attributed largely to the population’s apparent incapacity to resist ‘virgin soil pandemic.’ Recent literature however suggests that the trauma of coerced labor and slavery was also largely responsible for the precipitous decline of the population. The slavery and servitude of the Amerindians was indeed the first large-scale exploitation of foreign workers by European colonial powers outside Europe, which had far exceeded that of the black Africans in the fifteenth through the eighteenth centuries.
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Notes
- 1.
Columbus described the people in the newly found land as ‘Indians’ as he thought he had landed in India. Columbus was also unaware of the fact that he had discovered a New World and added two more continents to the existing maritime connections between Europe and Africa. Recent genetic analysis shows that the Amerindian populations that Columbus met originated from their East Asian ancestors between 25,000 and 36,000 years ago, and most researchers agree that they arrived in the Americas through Beringia—the area encompassing parts of present-day East Asia and North America, connected by what is known as the Bering Land Bridge. For further details see Moreno-Mayar et al. (2018).
- 2.
For further details see also Mann (2005), Stannard (1993), Haines and Steckel (2000), http://www.newworldencyclopedia.org/entry/Indigenous_peoples_of_the_Americas, and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Population_history_of_indigenous_peoples_of_the_Americas.
- 3.
Scores of authoritative sources have made this point in recent years, for example, see Gallay (2002), Batstone (2010), and Resendez (2016). Wright (2017, 153) goes even further to argue that in cases where disease had been the only source of demographic pressure, many populations rebounded, for example, Europe recovered from the Black Death and many Asian countries recovered from calamities in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, but that did not happen in the case of the Amerindians.
- 4.
The Spanish Empire encompassed most of the Caribbean Islands, most of Central America, half of South America, much of North America, such as Mexico and the southwestern and Pacific coastal regions of the United States, and the current states of Alaska, Hawaii, Washington, Florida, Arizona, New Mexico, California, Nevada, Texas, and Utah.
- 5.
Columbus’s fleet of three ships left Spain on August 3, 1492, and made landfall in the Bahamas on October 12, after about two months. He then sailed to the island of Hispaniola (in present day Haiti) and built the first Spanish settlement in the New World naming it La Villa de Navidad. His first fort was however destroyed by fire within a year, then he built his next settlement further east in the current Dominican Republic, and named it La Isabela, after Queen Isabella of Spain.
- 6.
The Spanish Crown however was not opposed to slavery itself. When Columbus sailed for the Americas, there were already around 25,000 African slaves in the Iberian Peninsula and the Iberian controlled islands off the coast of Africa—the Canaries, Madeira, the Cape Verde archipelago, and Sao Thome (Fogel and Engerman 1974, 15; Fogel 1989).
- 7.
Tianos are indigenous Arawak people who inhabited the Greater Antilles and the Bahamas when Columbus landed in the Bahamas. Churchill’s (1994) account suggests that the Spanish census of the island in 1514 showed barely 22,000 Tiano’s remaining alive, dropping to just 200 in 1542.
- 8.
Available from https://historynewsnetwork.org/article/7302.
- 9.
See Article II of the UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (1948), available from https://www.un.org/en/genocideprevention/genocide.shtml. For further details about the alleged genocide of Amerindians see also Rosenbaum (1996), Charny (1999), Gellately and Kiernan (2003), Rubenstein (2004), and Churchill (1997).
- 10.
Evidently, Columbus crammed all 550 Amerindians into four small caravels—about 200 of them died during the journey and their bodies were cast into the sea.
- 11.
After Spanish rulers disapproved Columbus’s slavery plans and ordered their return, in the summer of 1500, with the exception of an old man and a little girl, all other Amerindians chose to return to the Caribbean (Resendez 2016, 24–28).
- 12.
Even the Spanish King Ferdinand believed that so many indigenous people died in the early years of Spanish colonization because of the fact that, lacking beasts to carry burdens, the conquistadors “had forced the Indians to carry excessive loads until they broke down themselves.”
- 13.
By then Holland controlled Surinam, Curacao, and Bonaire; the French controlled Martinique, Haiti, Guadeloupe, and French Guinea; and Britain controlled Jamaica, Barbados, Antigua, Trinidad, the Bahamas, and Bermuda.
- 14.
- 15.
The New England colonies were Connecticut, Rhode Island, Providence, Massachusetts, and New Hampshire, which eventually became separate states of the United States of America.
- 16.
The purchase price of slaves from Native Indian sellers varied widely between the French and English colonists. In 1708, English colonists paid 15–16 trade muskets per slave—about £10 to £11 sterling. In 1714, the French governor offered between 100 and 150 livers—about £6 to £10 sterling. Thus, the cost of a Native American slave was between £5 and £10 sterling—they were sold to other colonies at much higher prices generating hefty profits (Gallay 2002, 312).
- 17.
In June 2019, while offering an apology for the slaughter of Native Americans, California’s Governor Gavin Newsom acknowledged it as a genocide. Referring to alleged 16,000 Native American deaths in Californian during the 1840s through the 1870s in the hands of the state and local militias, Newsom declared, “It’s called a genocide. That’s what it was. A genocide. [There’s] no other way to describe it and that’s the way it needs to be described in the history books.” Earlier, in 2009, the United States officially apologized to the American Indians for ‘violence, maltreatment, and neglect,’ without admission of liability https://www.history.com/news/native-american-genocide-california-apology. Also see Barkan (2003) for greater details.
- 18.
As mentioned above, original colonies of the United States however legalized slavery as far back as 1661. After the independence of the United States in 1776, all Native Americans were moved to federally protected reservations under the provision of the US constitution. It should however be noted that Native American collusion with the British during the American Revolution, and subsequently during the War of 1812 between the United States and the United Kingdom (often described as the Second US War of Independence) exacerbated American hostility and suspicion toward them.
- 19.
There were other considerations as well. West African blacks were familiar with large-scale agriculture, labor discipline, and making of iron or steel tools. In addition, they also shared with the Europeans a resistance to Old World diseases (Davis 2006, 89–99).
- 20.
Even Columbus’s first fort, La Villa de Navidad in present day Haiti, apparently caught fire because drunk sailors were chasing Amerindian women. Promiscuous non-wedlock sexual exploitation of Amerindians throughout the Spanish rule resulted in the birth of a distinct group of people in South America known as Mestizos, who historically suffered racial as well as social discrimination and were often denied access to respected occupations. By the end of the colonial era, almost 30 percent of the South American population were believed to have belonged to such mixed races (Potts 1990, 33–34).
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Dowlah, C. (2020). Slavery in the New World: The Saga of the Amerindians. In: Cross-Border Labor Mobility . Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-36506-6_4
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