Spanish colonization reduced Hispaniola’s native population from 300,000 to under 500 in two decades

Evidence

The results are to be seen in the best estimates that have been prepared of the trend of population in Hispaniola. These place the population in 1492 at between 200,000 and 300,000. By 1508 the number was reduced to 60,000; in 1510 Oviedo doubted whether five hundred Indians of pure stock remained. In 1570 only two villages survived of those about whom Columbus had assured his sovereigns, less than eighty years before, that “there is no better nor gentler people in the world.” — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 624

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: The staggering scale and speed of demographic collapse here grounds the entire premise that the plantation economy required imported African labor.