No Gold/Silver for the Conquistadors...

Some questions/comments:

What huge plantations? There were no huge plantations. Maybe you are thinking about the french, english and later sugar plantations in the caribbean. In "Tierra Firme" there were no plantations.
Uh, what!? Just because they don't use the English word doesn't mean they didn't exist. Called haciendas, they are the same damn thing.
 

yourworstnightmare

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Would be much harder to conquer them. Without the lure of gold and silver the Spaniards would have problems gathering armies of adventurers. If there's no riches to plunder, there will be no conquistadors.
 
No they aren't Hacienda's were more like medieval manors than plantations, they were more generalized than Plantations and less focused on cash crops
Granted, hacienda is a more nebulous term than plantation and covers many things, but a great many of them, especially in Mexico, were plantations and grew cash crops like sisal for example.
 
Some questions/comments:

What huge plantations? There were no huge plantations. Maybe you are thinking about the french, english and later sugar plantations in the caribbean. In "Tierra Firme" there were no plantations.

Just because it's by a different name doesn't it mean it didn't exist. Either way not a lot changes for the Indians except instead of being slaved to death mining gold and silver, they'll be growing cash crops for very, very little to no recompensation.
 
Just because it's by a different name doesn't it mean it didn't exist. Either way not a lot changes for the Indians except instead of being slaved to death mining gold and silver, they'll be growing cash crops for very, very little to no recompensation.
Exactly. The Yucatan had no gold at all, so you can look at that to see what might happen. The Maya were still slaves or serfs on the sisal plantations and treated very cruelly for centuries.
 
Exactly. The Yucatan had no gold at all, so you can look at that to see what might happen. The Maya were still slaves or serfs on the sisal plantations and treated very cruelly for centuries.

Until they decided to have enough and decided to fight. I considered their fight a very noble cause though one that has been fought in the wrong time period. Had they decided to revolt, I dunno, when the Spanish had just been kicked out of Mexico and in the early, instable years of Mexico's independence, they might had been far more successful in gaining their freedom from both the Mexicans and the Yucateco criollo elite as their own country. The idea of an independent Maya state existing in the modern era intrigues me so.
 
Just because it's by a different name doesn't it mean it didn't exist. Either way not a lot changes for the Indians except instead of being slaved to death mining gold and silver, they'll be growing cash crops for very, very little to no recompensation.

Still, perhaps there's less pressure to expand out of the Caribbean basin? There's no gold and silver just lying around, so instead of sending expeditions hither and yon looking for it, they only send missionaries. And look where that went in Texas or California; there weren't any haciendas or anything of that sort, just isolated mission outposts. Even with God, it might be harder to convince people to sign up for expeditions that quite likely will get them killed withou the promise of Gold.

Another thing I don't think anyone in here has thought about--what about trade with the East? IIRC, Mexican and Peruvian silver bought a *lot* of Chinese, Japanese, Indonesian, and Indian goods...now there isn't any of that. Similarly, there was a developing silver crisis in Europe, which again isn't going to find relief. Devaluation will be the order of the day, I suppose, which can't possibly be good for the general European economy .
 
Without an (in theory) powerful, centralized Aztec Empire to take over, then Cortez would never have been able to administrate that amount of territory.
 
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