Indigenous population collapse, not royal decree, drove African labor demand

Evidence

The world for which Chilam displayed such poetic nostalgia ended quickly. Within nine decades “diseases, wars, relocations, and the ecological changes wrought by Spanish settlement and control” and (it should be added) slave labor had reduced the number of indigenous inhabitants to an estimated 1,075,000.27 The Conquest had an even more insidious effect. As early as the 1514 census, according to C. O. Sauer, the repartimiento records of natives on Santo Domingo, working land seized for the crown, indicated an average of less than one child per family. Las Casas had indicated that in the period immediately prior to the Conquest, Indian women had averaged between three and five children each. Elsewhere, “Jaramillo Uribe remarks that at the beginning of the seventeenth century it was common in New Granada to find that half the Indian couples had no children. On the average they had only two children, and the family with four offspring was exceptional.” Sanchez-Albornoz concludes: “It is evident that the Indians decreased not only on account of deaths, but also partially because they did not ensure the normal replacement of the generations.” This decimation of the “Indian” population, rather than the controversial royal decrees of 1542 (the Nuevas Leyes) that “prohibited the further enslavement of Indians except as punishment for rebellion against Spanish rule,” resulted in a significant demand for additional labor toward the second half of the sixteenth century. Ultimately, the source of that labor was to be the west coast of Africa. — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 628

Categorization

• XREF: Causal backbone for the entire book: which origins the Atlantic slave trade. The catastrophic fertility collapse (fewer than one child per family) is the deeper driver than the 1542 laws.