DEMOGRAPHIC AND SOCIAL DIMENSIONS OF EXPANSION
The New World’s indigenous (Amerindian) inhabitants were extremely vulnerable to European diseases and hence suffered catastrophic losses, above all in the century following Columbus’s arrival.
Ralph Davis estimates that the indigenous population of the Americas equalled Europe’s in 1500 but was probably under one-tenth of it by 1600. The greatest devastation occurred in the Caribbean. The estimated three to four million Amerindians who inhabited Hispaniola as of 1492 numbered about fifteen thousand by 1518 and essentially disappeared by 1570. The heaviest preconquest concentration of population, an estimated twenty-five million, lay in the heartland of what became known as New Spain. By 1548 the area’s Amerindians had declined to about a quarter of this figure. Subsequent smallpox and influenza epidemics further reduced it to a little over a million by century’s end. “Spain’s principal gift to the Americas,” writes Davis, “was the destruction of its people.”7 Lyle McAlister concludes that “a demographic disaster of continental proportions occurred in the New World in the sixteenth century.... The quantitative and qualitative devastation of the indigenous population far exceeded anything accomplished by the Black Death in Europe.”8Disease had the opposite effect along the African coastline. Malaria and other tropical illnesses to which Africans had developed some immunity gave the West African coast a well-deserved reputation as “the white man’s grave” until Europeans learned of quinine’s prophylactic powers in the nineteenth century.9 Ghana’s first president, Kwame Nkrumah, only half-jokingly proposed erecting a monument to the anopheles mosquito to acknowledge its contribution in keeping settlers out of his country. Tropical diseases performed a similar deflective role in many parts of Asia.
The result is that European settlers in phase 1 were concentrated overwhelmingly in the New World, the hemisphere in which disease was their ally rather than their foe.
The Americas were demographically rearranged in phase 1, the implosion of indigenous population being accompanied by an explosion of newcomers who constituted racially distinct groups.10 Millions of Europeans arrived as settlers, drawn by many lures: hopes for vast and easily accessible mineral wealth, plentiful and bountiful land, adventure, power, prospects (for men) of sex with non-European women, higher social status, and avoidance of religious persecution. A much larger number came involuntarily as slaves from Africa, responding not to their aspirations but to the demands of European settlers for accessible, low-cost labor in agriculture, mining, and domestic service. In another category were the offspring of sexual unions across racial lines. To use the Spanish terms, unions between Europeans and Amerindians produced mestizos; between Europeans and Africans, mulattoes; between Amerindians and Africans, zambos. The literal embodiment of racial pluralism, these people added further to the complex layering of castelike structures in which status was allocated largely along lines of continental origin and skin color.
Despite their severe early losses, Amerindians remained the largest single racial category in the population of many New World colonies throughout phase i. By one estimate, in 1570 they made up 96 percent and 94 percent of the population in Spain’s and Portugal’s New World empires, respectively. Comparable figures for 1650 were 81 percent and 74 percent. Some 60 percent of Peru’s population as of 1795 was Amerindian.11 A quite dissimilar distribution emerged in the British North American (bna) colonies that eventually formed the nucleus of the United States. Along the coastal zone east of the Appalachians settlers quickly became numerically dominant because of initially small and dispersed indigenous population, the effects of disease and settler attacks upon Amerindians, their withdrawal to lands back of the settler frontier, and a steady stream of new immigrants from the British Isles. By 1700 a quarter million white settlers lived in the thirteen bna colonies, a figure roughly equalling the indigenous population east of the Mississippi at that time.
By 1776 settlers constituted three-quarters of the bna colonies’ population of two and a half million, Amerindians about 4 percent. Black slaves accounted for the remaining 20 percent.12On Caribbean islands and along coastal zones from the southern bna colonies to Brazil, the influx of forcibly transplanted Africans that began early in the 1500s continued unabated through the rest of phase 1. Indeed, more Africans made the dreaded Middle Passage in the 1700s than in either of the preceding centuries. The transatlantic slave trade profoundly affected the racial demographics of Africans’ destination points. By 1650 the black slave population outnumbered whites in Brazil and was five times greater than whites in the Spanish Antilles. The British West Indies’ black population rose from 25 percent of the total in 1650 to 83 percent in 1710 and 90 percent in 1770. For the same years it rose from 3 percent to 24 percent to 39 percent in the southern bna colonies.13
In many New World colonies the percentage of the population that was racially mixed rose steadily over time. And time there was, considering that from the sixteenth century onward, in the Caribbean region and outlying coastal zones, substantial numbers from the Americas, Europe, and Africa lived in close proximity. That the colonial era began so much earlier and lasted so much longer in the Americas than in virtually all parts of the Old World accounts for the growing numerical and social influence of racial categories that were literally new under the sun. By one estimate mestizos composed 3 percent of the Spanish American and 5 percent of the Brazilian population in 1650, with somewhat smaller percentages for mulattoes. In the eighteenth century the mestizo proportion rose rapidly in Brazil and in the principal Spanish territories, New Spain and Peru. By the 1790s mestizos accounted for 22 percent of Peru’s population and perhaps 40-50 percent of New Spain’s. Mulattoes formed a small but socially influential intermediary group in France’s most economically important New World colony, Saint Domingue (Haiti).14
In the Old World the major demographic effect of Europe’s presence was the removal of tens of millions of Africans from their continent of birth.
This process, lasting for more than four centuries, was both cause and consequence of slaveraiding activities among Africans that severely disrupted sub-Saharan economies and social relations. But the transatlantic slave trade did little to change the racial composition of Africa’s inhabitants. Apart from southern Africa’s Khoikhoi and San peoples there was no African equivalent of the decimation of New World populations from disease. Neither did millions of people come from other continents as permanent settlers. In only a few places, such as Cape Town and Luanda, did a mixed-race population of any size arise.In Asia the demographic impact of Europe’s presence was even less significant. Some people were taken from the Dutch East Indies and the Malay peninsula to South Africa as slaves. On Java and in trading enclaves like Goa, Colombo, and Macao a small mixed-race group emerged. But otherwise little change from precontact days took place, in striking contrast to the Americas.