Abstract

Abstract:

From an early stage, the economic exploitation of free African descendants preoccupied Spanish officials in the American colonies. Miscegenation complicated the organization of the colonial workforce by rendering any intention to generate a labor system based on a priori divisions between ethnic groups impossible. By analyzing labor proposals regarding African descendants in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Mexico—which had one of the largest populations of free Blacks in the Americas—this article investigates how Spaniards responded to the emergence of new types of peoples who were the unintended consequence of early European colonialism. I further claim that the attempt to implement labor policies toward colonial populations deemed "undesirable" should be understood within the desire of the early modern state to expand its jurisdiction through the development of new conceptualizations of population and wealth.

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