Birth of the Modern World
This lecture explores how studying colonial Latin America means studying the birth of the modern world itself—the origins of global capitalism, the invention of race, and the creation of “Western civilization.” Using Latin America in Colonial Times by Matthew Restall and Kris Lane. (Commissions earned)
The textbook is titled Latin America in Colonial Times, but there’s a problem with that title. If you were actually living in colonial times, you would never have called this place “Latin America.” The term wasn’t invented until the 1850s or 1860s, after most of these countries had already gained independence. It was largely popularized by the French, who wanted to group themselves with former Spanish and Portuguese colonies against the growing influence of the United States. “Amérique Latine” began as a political term before becoming a geographical one.
Most of the USA Was Latin America
If we take the term seriously and include all territories explored or controlled by Spain, Portugal, and France, we’re talking about almost all of South America (except Suriname and Guyana), most of the Caribbean, and a stunning portion of North America. Looking at a map of the Spanish and Portuguese Empires around 1790, Spanish control extended from present-day Alaska through California, all of Mexico, Cuba, Puerto Rico, and deep into South America. Portugal controlled all of Brazil. The French had settlements throughout the interior of North America.
This means almost all of what is now the United States was once under either Spanish or French control. When we learn about “colonial America” in school, we learn about a tiny slice of what was happening in the Northeast. At the time, a few goofy Anglos sitting out in Massachusetts somewhere weren’t the main story. The Spanish, Portuguese, and French were the big players. If you’ve ever lived or been west of the Mississippi, or down to Florida, you’ve been in what was once Latin America. This class should really be called “The Americas from 1500 to 1800” because we’re talking about our own history.
The Invention of “The West”
The colonial experience in the Americas also gave birth to the idea of “Western civilization” itself. We sometimes imagine that Western civilization was born with Plato and continues smoothly through Europe until it reaches us in college. What really happened is quite different. The ancient Greeks probably considered themselves more oriented toward the East than the West. During the European Middle Ages, that classical knowledge largely disappeared from Western Europe. The people who preserved the ancient texts of the Greeks were actually Muslims, who worked on them and eventually reintroduced them into Spain and Portugal, which had been under Islamic control.
It was during the 1500s and 1600s that Europeans rediscovered these texts and began positioning themselves as the inheritors of ancient Greece and Rome. Minor places like Portugal and Spain, which didn’t seem particularly big or important, started building global empires and claiming to be the descendants of classical civilization. The whole idea that there is a “West” emerged during this empire-building process. The birth of the modern world and the birth of “Western civilization” are the same story.
Silver, Sugar, and the Birth of Global Capitalism
Two enormous developments in colonial Latin America were crucial to the emergence of the global capitalist economy. The first was the massive extraction of silver, especially from Potosí in present-day Bolivia. This single location produced something like half to two-thirds of the world’s silver supply. As Europe was trying to get into Asian trade routes, this activation of the monetary economy was essential. Kris Lane, one of our textbook authors, has written an entire book on Potosí and its world-changing significance.
The second crucial development was sugar. The greater Caribbean became a hub for sugar plantations worked by enslaved Africans. Anthropologist Sidney Mintz has shown how sugar became one of the main sources of calories for many people around the world, literally powering the workers who would later fill industrial factories. The word “azúcar”—Spanish for sugar—is itself derived from Arabic, introduced by Muslims to the Iberian peninsula. Mintz argues that the plantations also provided a template for factory production: the work hours, the regimentation of labor, the brutal efficiency. It’s hard to imagine the Industrial Revolution without the silver fueling trade and the sugar powering workers.
This colonial reshaping of the world preceded anthropology by centuries. When anthropologists emerged in the late 19th century, they stepped into societies already transformed by silver extraction and plantation slavery. For how this shapes our understanding of the discipline itself, see Anthropology and the Origins of Global Capitalism.
The Colonial Roots of Race
This period also gave us ideas we’re still carrying around and struggling to work out. Before the colonial period, people talked about physical differences and biological differences, but the idea that people belonged to discrete racial categories—Black, White, Indigenous or Indian—emerged from the experience of the Americas. Grouping together and separating people on a transoceanic scale created something new. People didn’t think about themselves or others as belonging to racial groups in this way before colonial times.
The biggest debates in Spanish colonialism were over the rights of Indigenous peoples. Are they part of the human condition? Do they deserve to be treated as human beings? These questions about who counts as human, what human nature is, and how we’re obligated to treat each other were confronted on a global scale for the first time during this period.
Environment and Extraction
European attitudes toward the Americas as some kind of Garden of Eden, a blank slate where they could simply take whatever they wanted, also come from this time. Indigenous peoples of the Americas had very different ideas about property ownership and relationships to the land. Europeans developed ideas about extraction, production, and appropriation during this period whose consequences we’re still living with today.
As Charles Mann put it in 1493, Europe’s encounter with the Americas “revolutionized trade, ecology, and life on Earth.” Studying colonial Latin America isn’t just memorizing facts about the past. It’s understanding how we became a globally interconnected world, how the idea of “the West” was invented, and how the systems we live within—economic, racial, environmental—were forged in this encounter. These questions first confronted on a global scale during the colonial period continue to shape everything.
Course Navigation
This introductory lecture on the birth of the modern world uses Latin America in Colonial Times by Matthew Restall and Kris Lane. (Commissions earned) Part of the Colonial Latin America course. The next class explores Native America before European contact. For broader context, see the Global Transformations Hub and The Americas Hub.