I'm really curious of this theory and I wonder if it's the diseases or Spanish control itself, I mean I tend to be skeptical that Spanish policies alone could affect so much as I'm not aware of pre-colonial slavery or exploitation causing such massive depopulation even if arguably it was a lot of times as harsh on the exploited as colonialism.Because Newson's research on the Philippines shows that there appears to be a generally inverse relationship between the strength of the Spanish presence and the beginning of population recovery, one easier to perceive in the Philippines due to geography and the more tenuous nature of Spanish power. This was the case in Cebu compared to Luzon, for instance.
Well the region was experiencing growth during this time, connected to the expansion of Islam, I'm not aware of anything like this happening in the Philippines at the time.It might also be worth comparing the Philippines to eastern Indonesia. Both share similar climatic conditions, and both suffered from the introduction of disease in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries due to low population densities not allowing for Eurasian epidemic diseases becoming endemic. We actively know that disease was a massive killer in early seventeenth-century Indonesia; the Makassar Annals mention the need to "protect ourselves from starvation and raging epidemics" in 1636 (Cummings 2010 translation), and the corresponding VOC archives suggest mortality rates exceeding 40% (the city of Makassar, with a population of perhaps 150,000 in the 1630s, lost sixty thousand people in forty days). Yet it seems that in the case of eastern Indonesia, there was no long-term population decline at all. If anything, the population rose significantly.
Indonesia population tripled during complete Dutch control in the 19th century.The growth only stopped when the area fell under Dutch hegemony and pre-existing economic networks were subverted or destroyed.
But later on you say that colonial policies are not connected to the lack of growth, so which is it? Is merely the presence of Europeans change demographics regardless of what they do?I'm using the Philippines as a shorthand because no sizable Mesoamerican or Andean state retained independence into the seventeenth century, so we can't compare, e.g., an independent Tarascan state with a subjugated Basin of Mexico. Nevertheless, the strongly negative impact of Spanish rule on native demographics seems clear.
I'm not sure how the 2 points connect, you say that the fact that diseases were reintroduced caused further decline(although arguably there is no need for new diseases, in Spain the plague in the 17th century caused more than a million people to die in 3 waves) but then say that the fact that the population was smaller stopped more diseases, wouldn't an earlier growth cause the presence of diseases even during this period? In that case the growht rate would slow as you approach higher numbers.Mesoamerican population recovery is generally credited to the major killers becoming endemic. New diseases being introduced could easily reverse recovery; the Yucatán Maya population entered a recovery phase as early as the 1590s, but this was all brought to naught when African slaves introduced yellow fever and half the Maya died. A disease being established as endemic is dependent on the size of the population; an interactive population of at least 100,000 is usually considered a prerequisite for smallpox endemicity (see Fenner, "Smallpox in Southeast Asia"). It is telling that there was no major epidemic in the Yucatán Peninsula for the entire eighteenth century following one last one in 1726 (probably measles, which requires a particularly large population for endemicity). There was also no major epidemic in the Basin of Mexico from 1741 to 1778.
Wait a second, why would the size of the Pueblo population matter for their recovery? I get that their recovery wouldn't make their community big enough to stay a majority locally but big decline shouldn't preclude growth, it didn't in Mesoamerica.Had New Spain's native population recovery been primarily about colonial policies or climate, we would expect places like New Mexico to also see native population recovery. Yet the Pueblo population was in free-fall throughout the eighteenth century, precisely because the seventeenth century had devastated their numbers beyond the point of recovery. Smallpox hit New Mexico virtually every decade, including a particularly devastating epidemic in the 1770s.
Well I really wonder how smaller it would have been, warfare wouldn't go away, nor would the droughts.Now, there are two reasons why the population would recover faster under native than Spanish rule. First, the initial population loss would not have been nearly as large, meaning a larger pool of disease carriers and a faster "taming" of epidemic diseases.
I'm not sure how the taming of the diseases would have worked, in Spain like I said the growth was stopped by such tamed diseases for a century(although economic problem was also responsible)
The repartimiento was also gone by the mid 17th century.Second, the Spanish presence was not beneficial for population recovery throughout the colonial period, encomienda or no. (Maya writers actually considered the repartimiento far more disruptive.)
But why would the Spanish landowners profit from a reduced labor base and cause stagnating growth? As far as I know there was a continous struggle for labour in New Spain and if the Spanish were importing Africans why wouldn't the native population grow in such conditions? Yes I get they are poorer and have higher mortality rates but I mean it's not like they need to have merchants or native economies to have population growth if they work for Spanish haciendas and aren't effectively resources deprived or economically isolated.In eighteenth-century Michoacán, village elites regularly sold communal land to criollos and other non-Indians, depriving the native population of major resource bases.
Nahua communities all over Central Mexico struggled with foreign landlords over land and water resources throughout the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries because their ancestors had sold much of their land to Spaniards at the height of the population decline, and this lack of access to land and resources meant that population recovery only led to the further impoverishment of the Nahua population. Spanish estates in formerly Nahua land were also often ranches or other forms of inefficient land use.
Things were similar in Oaxaca, with Spanish land use hastening soil erosion. Much of the native commercial economy in Oaxaca also collapsed to state-supported Spanish competition.
Well for sure they would have fared better, but the question is how much. I feel like the climate aspect of it is not explored well enough(hemorragic fever that caused a lot of the early deaths was preceded by droughts afterall and this is the time of the little ice age as well), I'm not aware of the scale of the ranches but I find hard to believe they would fill the place where 2/3 of the food pre-colonial would have been produced.In Maya country (and also the Gulf Coast, but the Gulf Coast population collapsed so rapidly and horrifically that it's hard to tell), free-ranging cattle was absolutely devastating to native agriculture — we have Maya communities launching formal complaints against it, usually to no avail, even at the height of population collapse — and it was customary for Spanish ranchers to use the legal fuzziness of land rights in Maya country to appropriate huge tracts of native communal land.
Nancy M. Fariss says it well in Maya Society Under Colonial Rule: The Collective Enterprise of Survival, on the famines that regularly devastated the eighteenth-century Yucatán (and these famines themselves testify to the consequences of colonial rule, since the Maya had not had many serious issues feeding three times the population prior to Spanish conquest):
We have no way of comparing the mortality caused by famines before and after the conquest. But it is difficult to escape the conclusion that the Maya would have fared better without the sometimes well meaning but almost invariably disastrous intervention of the Spanish.
I wonder if earlier heavier undercount could explain part of the growth away.Censuses, so there's potential for undercount on both sides.
It doesn't but it still gives a fair comparison, also tbf the Philppines trend is more in line with my idea, it ultimately did took almost 3 centuries for the Philippines to grow back to their original level.What privileges Europe as an example and not, say, the Philippines, which recovered from a 41% population collapse in nine decades under (admittedly rather neglectful) colonial rule?
Well yeah it's hard to compare when factoring a group supplemented by migration, I didn't really say that Europeans didn't grow faster, just that they didn't as fast as you imagine Mesoamericans doing(not factoring migration).But they did! Morin's research shows that the growth rate of the Spanish population in Michoacán doubled that of the native population (which, by 1800, represented only 60% of the bishopric's inhabitants). The white population also grew twice faster than the Maya in the eighteenth-century Yucatán (see Patch, Maya and Spaniard). There were some 170,000 criollos in 1650; there were a million or more in 1800. The criollo population sextupled in five or six generations, during which, as we have seen, native populations struggled to even triple.
(To be fair, there was significant immigration from Spain in the eighteenth century, and some of these would have settled and contributed to the ballooning criollo population.)
Well here you enter the problem of you count Mestizos IOTL, you obviously have a native component in it, in any case 1800 isn't far from what I put as as the recovery date, although you would have to factor in for European growth the migration rate, with peninsulares becoming criollos after a generation.Had the Yucatán Peninsula's Maya population grown as fast as its non-native population did, the Yucatán would have recovered 1492 population levels by 1794.
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