Spanish Colonization to 1650

Abstract

With Christopher Columbus’s accidental arrival in the Caribbean in 1492, Castile became the first European kingdom to colonize the Americas. The devastation of the indigenous population by epidemic disease allowed Spaniards to quickly lay claim to the islands of the Caribbean, followed by the former Aztec and Inca empires on the mainland. Within 100 years, all of the major Spanish settlements in the Americas had been established. Although older scholarship often focused on the completeness of the Spanish conquest and domination over native peoples, over the past few decades most scholars have offered a more nuanced view that describes the relationship between the Spanish and the indigenous peoples of the Americas as one of negotiation and contestation. In terms of the formation of Spanish colonial society, recent scholarship privileges the complexities of race, class, and gender relations over the establishment and evolution of institutions.