Thoughts on Postclassic Mesoamerica and its development

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.
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.

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.
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.

The growth only stopped when the area fell under Dutch hegemony and pre-existing economic networks were subverted or destroyed.
Indonesia population tripled during complete Dutch control in the 19th century.

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.
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?

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.
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.

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.
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.

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.
Well I really wonder how smaller it would have been, warfare wouldn't go away, nor would the droughts.

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)

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.)
The repartimiento was also gone by the mid 17th century.

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.
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 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.​
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.

Censuses, so there's potential for undercount on both sides.
I wonder if earlier heavier undercount could explain part of the growth away.

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?
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.

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 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).

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.
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.
 
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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.
Here a study of The Standford University, that link directo The Abuse of the Mita System by The Spanish and The Low economic development and population growth In Perú and Bolivia
https://www.google.cl/url?sa=t&sour...FjAFegQIAhAB&usg=AOvVaw05YzL4a2yYw08EppN13uLS
 
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
Spanish colonial policies were responsible for eliminating huge segments of the population, though largely indirectly and unintentionally (by disrupting native lifestyles so that the population at large was more susceptible to disease). In certain cases, however, the Spaniards were the direct cause. Massimo Livi-Bacci has demonstrated fairly conclusively, IMO, that the 200,000 or so natives of Hispaniola were almost certainly annihilated by the direct consequences of Spanish colonial policy. His strongest evidence is that there is no conclusive proof of any epidemics before 1518, while the repartimiento of 1514 shows that the natives of Hispaniola living under colonial rule had a man:woman ratio of 1:0.83 and an average of 0.281 children per women. The proportion of children alone would lead to an annual population decline of 3.5%, or a 90% population decline in sixty years. In the absence of certain evidence for epidemics, it is difficult to explain this with anything other than the explanation virtually all chroniclers of the period give: Spanish dislocation of communities and disruption of native lifestyles preventing traditional patterns of marriage and childbirth. Not coincidentally, it is the lack of children that Spanish contemporaries bemoan the most, not disease. (See "Return to Hispaniola: Reassessing a Demographic Catastrophe," Livi-Bacci, Hispanic American Historical Review).

In the case of the Philippines, Newson's conclusion is indeed that the dislocations of Spanish conquest and demands for manpower and tribute from conquered areas to fight resisting Filipinos, Muslims, and the Dutch were the most responsible for collapse, with the colonial regime being a different beast altogether from the loose, gifting-centered government of traditional Filipino chiefdoms:

[T]he decline was highest in those islands that experienced the most sustained contacts with Spaniards... In the interior highlands the decline was probably minimal due to limited contact... Initial Spanish-Filipino contacts resulted in heavy loss of life, with ecclesiastics condemning the activities of the conquistadors and soldiers. The chronicle of conquest differed little from that in many parts of Spanish America. The high level of conflict and bloodshed may be explained in part by the difficulties the Spanish experienced in securing supplies from societies that did not produce large surpluses and in achieving political control of regions where the authority of leaders was not extensive... Although there is some debate over the relative contribution of Old World diseases and conquest to demographic collapse in the Americas, the former is generally considered to have been more significant. In the Philippines, however, the reverse would seem to be the case.
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.
The Philippine's indigenous commercial development, including the spread of Islam, was cut abruptly short by Spanish conquest. And again, why was there this "growth" in eastern Indonesia and not in the Spanish Philippines?

Indonesia population tripled during complete Dutch control in the 19th century.
In nineteenth-century Java, yes (though even that built on eighteenth-century development under the Principalities). In the Early Modern era that we're discussing, Dutch involvement was usually catastrophic for Indonesian populations. See, e.g., M. C. Ricklefs's War, Culture, and Economy in Java, 1677-1726.

But later on you say that colonial policies are not connected to the lack of growth, so which is it?
I'm not sure how the 2 points connect
why would the size of the Pueblo population matter for their recovery
So, the concept of endemicity in epidemiology is, to quote Wikipedia, a state "when that infection is constantly maintained at a baseline level in a geographic area without external inputs." The common cold is endemic in most modern populations. The bubonic plague is not.

It turns out to usually be a good thing in premodern societies when a murderous epidemic disease becomes endemic, since widespread childhood exposure enforces limits on how frequent and destructive epidemics of that disease can be. For diseases like smallpox especially, which can only be contracted once, even partial endemicity means that large numbers of people will have contracted the disease as children and escape the more virulent adult version. Smallpox becoming endemic in Japan in the twelfth century or perhaps earlier was crucial to its economic development in the second millennium (see Jannetta, Epidemics and Mortality). This doesn't prevent smallpox epidemics, which happened in Japan into the nineteenth century, but it makes epidemics significantly less dangerous.

But for a disease to become endemic, there needs to be a sufficiently large pool of people who can contract it. Say smallpox spreads to a hunter-gatherer band. Most people will get it, the survivors will be immune, and the virus will burn out once it has no non-immune people to spread to. But in a large, interactive population, it can float around somewhere in the population indefinitely, thus becoming endemic.

Because Mesoamerican populations were already so large, even after >90% population loss, major diseases could become partially endemic in the population. This is why the Basin of Mexico was spared from major epidemics for forty years, and the Yucatán for sixty or seventy years, in the eighteenth century. This allowed population recovery in Mesoamerica and the Andes despite the suboptimal conditions of colonial rule, although recovery could surely have been faster had living conditions been better (cf. Jesuit Paraguay). In New Mexico, the already relatively few Pueblos were reduced to a few tens of thousands by 1680. This was not enough to "keep" a disease around, so devastating epidemics kept rolling in and populations kept declining.

But this means that population recovery could be reversed when a new, non-endemic disease arrived in the form of a major epidemic. This happened in the Yucatán in 1648, when African slaves introduced yellow fever and killed more than a hundred thousand natives and non-natives alike. But yellow fever had also become endemic by the eighteenth century, allowing the Yucatán population (both Maya and criollo) to enter a renewed phase of demographic expansion.

The repartimiento was also gone by the mid 17th century.
The repartimiento system endured in Maya country for most of the colonial era. Governor Antonio de Figueroa asked King Philip V to relegalize the repartimiento in the Yucatán in 1731, which was granted. The repartimiento was also legal in Guatemala in the 1750s. Besides, the criollo used repartimiento-like systems of extortion even in other provinces.

But why would the Spanish landowners profit from a reduced labor base and cause stagnating growth?
They didn't, and haciendas usually hired large numbers of natives. But every inch of hacienda land was land that used to belong to native farms, and which could surely have supported a much larger native population had they been put back under the control of native communities. The ranches especially.

I find hard to believe they would fill the place where 2/3 of the food pre-colonial would have been produced.
Ranches were not the only cause of famine in the Yucatán. Another thing worth noting about the Yucatán is that the peninsula is not very agriculturally productive; its main precolonial export was salt, and it perhaps imported large quantities of food by canoe. By 1519, an estimated 60% or more of the population lived along trade routes. By 1650, Acallan and the coastline, the former centers of trade, were almost completely devoid of people. The surviving Maya lived primarily in the interior, isolated from trade and the outer world to a far greater degree than their Preclassic ancestors had been.

The formal and informal institutional economy of the Spanish Yucatán was also geared toward serving the mainly criollo populations of the cities, and it was common practice to force large quantities of crops to be sent from the Maya countryside to the cities to maintain price stability there. This, of course, came at a great cost to the people of the countryside ― all Maya.

it ultimately did took almost 3 centuries for the Philippines to grow back to their original level.
No? It took ninety years for the Philippines to "grow back to their original level." The hundred and fifty years before that was a protracted decline.
 
Spanish colonial policies were responsible for eliminating huge segments of the population, though largely indirectly and unintentionally (by disrupting native lifestyles so that the population at large was more susceptible to disease). In certain cases, however, the Spaniards were the direct cause. Massimo Livi-Bacci has demonstrated fairly conclusively, IMO, that the 200,000 or so natives of Hispaniola were almost certainly annihilated by the direct consequences of Spanish colonial policy. His strongest evidence is that there is no conclusive proof of any epidemics before 1518, while the repartimiento of 1514 shows that the natives of Hispaniola living under colonial rule had a man:woman ratio of 1:0.83 and an average of 0.281 children per women. The proportion of children alone would lead to an annual population decline of 3.5%, or a 90% population decline in sixty years. In the absence of certain evidence for epidemics, it is difficult to explain this with anything other than the explanation virtually all chroniclers of the period give: Spanish dislocation of communities and disruption of native lifestyles preventing traditional patterns of marriage and childbirth. Not coincidentally, it is the lack of children that Spanish contemporaries bemoan the most, not disease. (See "Return to Hispaniola: Reassessing a Demographic Catastrophe," Livi-Bacci, Hispanic American Historical Review).
To be honest it's weird that there was no disease when in many other places at first contact during early expansion, also do we have any evidence of low birth rates playing a role in other cases of exploitation pre colonial? It seems weird to me that such trends happen only when concerning early colonial empires.

In the case of the Philippines, Newson's conclusion is indeed that the dislocations of Spanish conquest and demands for manpower and tribute from conquered areas to fight resisting Filipinos, Muslims, and the Dutch were the most responsible for collapse, with the colonial regime being a different beast altogether from the loose, gifting-centered government of traditional Filipino chiefdoms:

[T]he decline was highest in those islands that experienced the most sustained contacts with Spaniards... In the interior highlands the decline was probably minimal due to limited contact... Initial Spanish-Filipino contacts resulted in heavy loss of life, with ecclesiastics condemning the activities of the conquistadors and soldiers. The chronicle of conquest differed little from that in many parts of Spanish America. The high level of conflict and bloodshed may be explained in part by the difficulties the Spanish experienced in securing supplies from societies that did not produce large surpluses and in achieving political control of regions where the authority of leaders was not extensive... Although there is some debate over the relative contribution of Old World diseases and conquest to demographic collapse in the Americas, the former is generally considered to have been more significant. In the Philippines, however, the reverse would seem to be the case.
The population declined from what pre conquest figure?
The Philippine's indigenous commercial development, including the spread of Islam, was cut abruptly short by Spanish conquest. And again, why was there this "growth" in eastern Indonesia and not in the Spanish Philippines?
Well it's not a given that the Philippines would have experienced the same populaiton growth as parts of Indonesia, Malaysia and Borneo for one didn't as far as I know, at least not to the extent of Java.

In nineteenth-century Java, yes (though even that built on eighteenth-century development under the Principalities). In the Early Modern era that we're discussing, Dutch involvement was usually catastrophic for Indonesian populations. See, e.g., M. C. Ricklefs's War, Culture, and Economy in Java, 1677-1726.
Can you quote or paraphrase the important passage? As far as I've read Dutch involvement up was fairy limited during this time and only took off in the 19th century, in Ricklefs' History of Modern Indonesia I don't seem to find any particular mention of Dutch takeover being that disastrous, heck it says the population mid18th century started to grow given the peace that was created.


So, the concept of endemicity in epidemiology is, to quote Wikipedia, a state "when that infection is constantly maintained at a baseline level in a geographic area without external inputs." The common cold is endemic in most modern populations. The bubonic plague is not.

It turns out to usually be a good thing in premodern societies when a murderous epidemic disease becomes endemic, since widespread childhood exposure enforces limits on how frequent and destructive epidemics of that disease can be. For diseases like smallpox especially, which can only be contracted once, even partial endemicity means that large numbers of people will have contracted the disease as children and escape the more virulent adult version. Smallpox becoming endemic in Japan in the twelfth century or perhaps earlier was crucial to its economic development in the second millennium (see Jannetta, Epidemics and Mortality). This doesn't prevent smallpox epidemics, which happened in Japan into the nineteenth century, but it makes epidemics significantly less dangerous.

But for a disease to become endemic, there needs to be a sufficiently large pool of people who can contract it. Say smallpox spreads to a hunter-gatherer band. Most people will get it, the survivors will be immune, and the virus will burn out once it has no non-immune people to spread to. But in a large, interactive population, it can float around somewhere in the population indefinitely, thus becoming endemic.

Because Mesoamerican populations were already so large, even after >90% population loss, major diseases could become partially endemic in the population. This is why the Basin of Mexico was spared from major epidemics for forty years, and the Yucatán for sixty or seventy years, in the eighteenth century. This allowed population recovery in Mesoamerica and the Andes despite the suboptimal conditions of colonial rule, although recovery could surely have been faster had living conditions been better (cf. Jesuit Paraguay). In New Mexico, the already relatively few Pueblos were reduced to a few tens of thousands by 1680. This was not enough to "keep" a disease around, so devastating epidemics kept rolling in and populations kept declining.

But this means that population recovery could be reversed when a new, non-endemic disease arrived in the form of a major epidemic. This happened in the Yucatán in 1648, when African slaves introduced yellow fever and killed more than a hundred thousand natives and non-natives alike. But yellow fever had also become endemic by the eighteenth century, allowing the Yucatán population (both Maya and criollo) to enter a renewed phase of demographic expansion.
I see, although I think it's hard for the pueblo in most cases to maintain number big enough, what was their pre columbian populaiton anyway?

The repartimiento system endured in Maya country for most of the colonial era. Governor Antonio de Figueroa asked King Philip V to relegalize the repartimiento in the Yucatán in 1731, which was granted. The repartimiento was also legal in Guatemala in the 1750s. Besides, the criollo used repartimiento-like systems of extortion even in other provinces.
Oh interesting, although as far as I've read the repartimiento was considered better than the encomienda by most and more tenable with the reduced native population as only portions of any given community would be away at any given point in time.
They didn't, and haciendas usually hired large numbers of natives. But every inch of hacienda land was land that used to belong to native farms, and which could surely have supported a much larger native population had they been put back under the control of native communities. The ranches especially.
I get ranches, but why would non ranches land support more people overall under native control?


Ranches were not the only cause of famine in the Yucatán. Another thing worth noting about the Yucatán is that the peninsula is not very agriculturally productive; its main precolonial export was salt, and it perhaps imported large quantities of food by canoe. By 1519, an estimated 60% or more of the population lived along trade routes. By 1650, Acallan and the coastline, the former centers of trade, were almost completely devoid of people. The surviving Maya lived primarily in the interior, isolated from trade and the outer world to a far greater degree than their Preclassic ancestors had been.

The formal and informal institutional economy of the Spanish Yucatán was also geared toward serving the mainly criollo populations of the cities, and it was common practice to force large quantities of crops to be sent from the Maya countryside to the cities to maintain price stability there. This, of course, came at a great cost to the people of the countryside ― all Maya.
The food was imported from where?

Why would importing more food maintain price stability? In any case how can the small community of Criollo demand so much food that it doesn't allow Maya population to feed off 1/3 of their apparent carrying capacity?

No? It took ninety years for the Philippines to "grow back to their original level." The hundred and fifty years before that was a protracted decline.
Protracted decline or stagnation? Did the decline last until 1700 and suddenly shift to quick growth or was there a sudden decline at conquest and stagnation? If the former is true why would you describe Spanish rule as neglectful when it in effect caused constant decline?
 
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