Ecuador SPANISH COLONIAL ERA
Aerial view of Cuenca
Courtesy Martie B. Lisowski Collection, Library of Congress
Spain's colonies in the New World were, legally, the personal
patrimony of the king, and he held absolute control over all
matters in Ecuador. Colonial administration at all levels was
carried out in the name of the monarch. The king's chief agency in
Madrid was the Council of the Indies, which devoted most of its
energies to formulating legislation designed to regulate virtually
every aspect of colonial life. The House of Trade, seated in
Seville, was placed in charge of governing commerce between Spain
and the colonies. In America, the king's major administrative
agents were the viceroyalty, the audiencia (court), and the
municipal council (cabildo).
Between 1544 and 1563, Ecuador was an integral part of the
Viceroyalty of Peru, having no administrative status independent of
Lima. It remained a part of the Viceroyalty of Peru until 1720,
when it joined the newly created Viceroyalty of Nueva Granada;
within the viceroyalty, however, Ecuador was awarded its own
audiencia in 1563, allowing it to deal directly with Madrid
on certain matters. The Quito Audiencia, which was both a
court of justice and an advisory body to the viceroy, consisted of
a president and several judges (oidores). The territory
under the jurisdiction of Quito considerably exceeded that of
present-day Ecuador, extending southward to the port of Paita in
the north of present-day Peru, northward to the port of
Buenaventura and the city of Cali in the south of present-day
Colombia, and well out into the Amazon River Basin in the east.
Quito was also the site of the first (founded in 1547) and most
important municipal council within the area comprising modern-day
Ecuador. It consisted of several councilmen (regidores)
whose extensive responsibilities included the maintenance of public
order and the distribution of land in the vicinity of the local
community.
The borders of the Audiencia (or kingdom as it was also
known) of Quito were poorly defined, and a great deal of its
territory remained either unexplored or untamed throughout much of
the colonial era. Only in the Sierra, and there only after a series
of battles that raged throughout the mid-sixteenth century, was the
native population fully subjugated by the Spanish. The jungle
lowlands in both the Oriente and the coastal region of Esmeraldas
were, in contrast, refuges for an estimated one-quarter of the
total native population that remained recalcitrant and unconquered
throughout most or all of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.
Despite Orellana's harrowing journey of discovery, the Oriente
remained terra incognita to the Spanish until its settlement by
Jesuit missionaries beginning in the mid-seventeenth century, and
it continued to be largely inaccessible throughout the remainder of
the colonial period.
The coastal lowlands north of Manta were conquered, not by the
Spanish, but by blacks from the Guinean coast who, as slaves, were
shipwrecked en route from Panama to Peru in 1570. The blacks killed
or enslaved the native males and married the females, and within a
generation they constituted a population of zambos (mixed
black and Indian) that resisted Spanish authority until the end of
the century and afterwards managed to retain a great deal of
political and cultural independence.
The relative autonomy of this coastal region nearest to Quito
enhanced the effect of the Andes in isolating the Ecuadorian Sierra
from the rest of the world during most of the nearly three
centuries of colonial rule. Behind these barriers a social system
was established that was essentially a replica of the Spanish
feudal system at the time of the conquest, with the
peninsulares (Spanish-born persons residing in the New
World) being the ruling, landed elite and the Indians being the
subject people who worked the land. Although a few towns,
particularly Quito, Riobamba, and Cuenca, grew along with the
administrative and Roman Catholic bureaucracies and the local
textile industries, colonial Ecuador was essentially a rural
society.
The most common form in which the Spanish occupied the land was
the encomienda. Settlers were granted land, along with its
inhabitants and resources, in return for taking charge of defending
the territory, spiritually indoctrinating the native population,
and extracting the crown's annual tribute (payable half in gold,
half in local products) from the encomienda's Indian
population. By the early seventeenth century, there were some 500
encomiendas in Ecuador. Although many consisted of quite
sizable haciendas, they were generally much smaller than the
estates commonly found elsewhere in South America. A multitude of
reforms and regulations did not prevent the encomienda from
becoming a system of virtual slavery of the Indians, estimated at
about one-half the total Ecuadorian population, who lived on them.
In 1589 the president of the audiencia recognized that many
Spaniards were accepting grants only to sell them and undertake
urban occupations, and he stopped distributing new lands to
Spaniards; however, the institution of the encomienda
persisted until nearly the end of the colonial period.
Land that was less desirable was never distributed, but rather
was left to traditional Indian communities or simply remained open
public land. In the late sixteenth century, the estimated one-
quarter of the total native population on such public lands was
resettled into Indian towns called reducciones in order to
facilitate the collection of the Indians' tribute, their conversion
to Christianity, and the exploitation of their labor.
Outside the encomienda, Indian labor was most commonly
exploited through the mita, modeled after the Inca
institution of the same name. All able-bodied "free" Indians were
required to devote one year of their labor to some public or
private Spanish concern, be it constructing a church, road, or
public building, or working in a textile mill. Although
mitayos were paid for their labor, the amount was extremely
meager, often less than debts accumulated through purchases from
their employer, thus requiring the them to continue working,
sometimes indefinitely, after their assigned period of service. In
this way, the mita system disintegrated into debt peonage.
Debts were commonly passed on to ensuing generations, in which
cases the mita was, in effect, slavery. Black slaves, in
comparison, were extremely expensive and were thus used almost
exclusively in the lowland plantation culture along the hot, humid
coast, where the Sierra Indians proved unable to adapt. Black
slaves numbered some 60,000 by the end of the colonial period.
The best estimates of the size of Ecuador's native population
at the time of the conquest range between 750,000 and 1 million.
Diseases imported by the Spanish, particularly smallpox and
measles, virtually wiped out the indigenous coastal population
during the sixteenth century and also decimated the Sierra
population, although not as thoroughly as in the Costa or many
other areas of Latin America. Despite a succession of deadly
earthquakes and volcanic eruptions, the native population increased
steadily during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries except in
the 1690s, when an epidemic of smallpox and diphtheria was reported
to have killed one-third of Ecuador's population.
Ecuador's Indians probably owe their relative prosperity during
the colonial period to the audiencia's lack of mineral
resources. The hardships of working in the silver and mercury mines
of Peru cost the lives of millions of Indian mitayos;
Ecuador, in contrast, had only small deposits of gold and silver in
its southern provinces of Cuenca and Loja, and these deposits were
depleted by the end of the sixteenth century. Its serrano
economy was based, instead, on agriculture and textiles. Cotton,
grown on the eastern slope of the Andes in Quijos Province, and
wool, from imported merino sheep that thrived in the high Andean
valleys, provided the raw materials for high-quality textiles that
were manufactured in hundreds of sweatshops, called obrajes,
and exported throughout Latin America. Indian mitayos, who
commonly worked from dawn to dusk chained to their looms, provided
the labor. As appalling as were the preindustrial working
conditions in the obrajes, most historians agree that they
were more bearable than those found in the Peruvian mines at the
time.
The coastal economy revolved around shipping and trade.
Guayaquil, despite being destroyed on several occasions by fire and
incessantly plagued by either yellow fever or malaria, was a center
of vigorous trade among the colonies, a trade that was technically
illegal under the mercantilist philosophy of the contemporary
Spanish rulers. The guiding principle of mercantilism in the New
World was that the colonies existed to serve the commercial needs
of Spain. Since trade among the colonies would not enrich Spain, it
was banned. In addition to textiles and other light manufactures
from the Sierra, hardwoods and cacao from coastal plantations were
exported from the port of Guayaquil to points all over Spanish
America, while a wide variety of items were imported, including
foods and wines from Peru. Guayaquil also became the largest
shipbuilding center on the west coast of South America before the
end of the colonial period.
The Ecuadorian economy, like that in the mother country,
suffered a severe depression throughout most of the eighteenth
century. Textile production dropped an estimated 50 to 75 percent
between 1700 and 1800. Ecuador's cities gradually fell into ruins,
and by 1790 the elite was reduced to poverty, selling haciendas and
jewelry in order to subsist. The Indian population, in contrast,
probably experienced an overall improvement in its situation, as
the closing of the obrajes commonly led Indians to work
under less arduous conditions on either haciendas or traditional
communal lands. Ecuador's economic woes were, no doubt, compounded
by the expulsion of the Jesuits in 1767 by King Charles III.
Missions in the Oriente were abandoned, and many of the best
schools and the most efficient haciendas and obrajes lost
the key personnel that made them outstanding institutions in
colonial Ecuador.
The Bourbon kings were best known for their economic and
administrative reforms, which, like the expulsion of the Jesuits,
were designed to enhance the flagging power of the crown in Spanish
America. As a result of those reforms, the Quito Audiencia
was transferred in 1720 from the authority of the Peruvian
viceroyalty to the newly created Viceroyalty of Nueva Granada,
whose capital was in Bogotá. In the process, the Quiteño
authorities gained jurisdiction over their own political and
military affairs, while the audiencia's southern and eastern
boundaries were delineated more specifically and retracted. A royal
decree (cédula) in 1802 further shrank the area of the
audiencia by transferring the provinces of Quijos and Mainas
in the Oriente to Peru. Another decree by Charles IV in 1803
transferred the port of Guayaquil to Peru, but resistance by port
citizens led to its being returned to the jurisdiction of Quito in
1819.
Between 1736 and 1745, a French scientific mission with some of
the best minds in Europe resided in Quito and contributed to the
development of ideas in Ecuador. While carrying out their
scientific mission--measuring the earth's circumference at the
equator--the members of the mission disseminated the message of the
Enlightenment, which stressed nationalism, individualism, and a
questioning of authority and tradition. Works of Voltaire, Jean-
Jacques Rousseau, and Thomas Paine, introducing such revolutionary
concepts as equality and freedom, managed to elude the censors of
both the Inquisition and a languishing political authority, and
penetrated Ecuador's historical cultural isolation. The most famous
Ecuadorian intellectual of the age, Eugenio de Santa Cruz y Espejo,
was a physician and a writer who advocated emancipation from Spain
and a republican, democratic system of government. Honored today as
the precursor of Ecuadorian independence, Espejo was imprisoned for
his ideas and died in jail in 1795.
The coming of independence was also foreshadowed by the
numerous civil disturbances that rocked the Ecuadorian Sierra from
the 1760s until the end of the colonial era. In 1765 the Quiteño
white and mestizo or cholo (a person of mixed white and
Indian ancestry) population revolted against reforms in the
colonial tax system. Potentially more serious was a subsequent
series of Indian rebellions in Latacunga and Riobamba. Although
clearly of a political nature, calling for the overthrow of the
Spanish regime and the expulsion of all the whites from the land in
addition to putting an end to the odious mita system, these
uprisings never led to such large-scale insurrections as occurred
in Peru at the same time. Ironically, the passing of the colonial
era, according to most historians, occasioned a worsening of
conditions for the indigenous population.
Data as of 1989
|