This page presents information related to the tenth class session of J. B. Owens's fall 2002 upper-division undergraduate and graduate course, History 360/560, The Spanish Empire. This course is part of the core curriculum in comparative and world history of the Department of History, Idaho State University. The sole purpose of this page is to provide an orientation to the reading assignments and class session for those students enrolled in History 360/560. See the source page for the complete Dublin Core standard metadata.

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Human migrations and information networks: living and working in Castilian and Portuguese America

An examination of the developing social and cultural environments of Iberoamerica. Special attention to what it meant to be of African ancestry in the Iberian world. An examination of the transformation of the cultural environment of peoples of African origin as they were drawn into the social environment of the developing Atlantic world, with an obvious emphasis on slavery.

Reading: Burkholder and Johnson, ch. 6; Thornton, chs. 6, 7, and 8.

  1. How did the elite families of Castilian and Portuguese America manage to sustain their status in the face of periods of economic disruption and recession?
  2. What impact did the sale of offices have on the quality of American administration?
  3. What impact did Crown influence over the distribution of positions in the secular church have on the quality of religious leadership?
  4. What was the impact of the frequent resort to monopolistic commercial practices?
  5. Because slaves were usually expensive, why didn't slave owners with poor soil resources for the production of a major cash crop turn to the production of slaves?
  6. Why would the government be willing to intervene to guarantee markets and stable prices for plantation owners in certain areas?
  7. Why wasn't the entail of estates more common as a vehicle to maintain for many generations the existence of major agricultural and mining enterprises?
  8. What family survival strategies were developed by the members of non-elite groups in rural and urban areas to deal with potentially unfavorable economic conditions?
  9. In what ways did the developing commercial and cultural networks of the Americas shape the roles and conception of women in the Western Hemisphere's social and cultural environments?
  10. Why didn't cities in Castilian and Portuguese America have zoning ordinances to keep separate zones of commerce, manufacturing, and residence?
  11. Why were the conquered Indian peoples allowed to use the Castilian judicial administration to defend their interests?
  12. Why were corporate institutions weaker in Brazil than in Castilian America?
  13. What was the economic impact of the development of negative stereotypes about people of color (meaning those whose appearance displayed Black and Indian genetic inheritance; castas)?
  14. What contributions did different groups make to the available cuisines in the Americas?
  15. Why were universities so well developed in Castilian America and absent from Brazil?
  16. Why did so many slave traders maintain slaves in such terrible conditions on the voyages to the Americas when so many of them were dying in transit?
  17. What impact did the horrors and human degradation of the Atlantic passage have on the African slaves forced to make such a voyage?
  18. Why did the work environment of African slaves vary from region to region in the Americas?
  19. What factors accounted for the sex distribution of African slaves in different communities?
  20. What factors permitted African slaves in the Americas to maintain contact with their African homelands and familiar practices and interpretive schemes?
  21. In what ways were African and American-born Blacks able to sustain a cultural and social life?
  22. What conditions permitted a significant percentage of African and African-American slaves to exercise a great deal of independent control over their economic and personal lives?
  23. What impact did the institutions of the Roman Catholic Church have on the lives and treatment of African slaves in Castilian and Portuguese territories?
  24. Why were Africans able to develop reasonably self-sustaining slave communities in the Americas?
  25. What types of social and cultural environments developed within the slave societies of the Atlantic basin?
  26. Why didn't people in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries feel that each distinct "nation" (defined in ethnolinguistic terms) ought to have its own "state" (meaning only a single territory with some common governing authority)?
  27. Why did distinct zones, with their own social and cultural environments, exist along Africa's Atlantic coast? What factors contributed to a reduction of social and cultural diversity among the peoples of this region?
  28. What factors contributed to the decisions slave owners made about the degree to which they would mix slaves from different African regions in their labor force?
  29. Why did authorities of the Roman Catholic Church in Castilian and Portuguese domains encourage the development in cities of African religious brotherhoods?
  30. Why did Afro-Atlantic "culture" tend to become "more homogeneous than the diverse African cultures that composed it" (Thornton, 206)?
  31. How does Thornton define "culture"? How is his definition different from Jeffrey Alexander's definition of the "cultural environment"? What elements of Thornton's definition of "culture" would fall within the sphere of Alexander's definition of the "social environment"?
  32. How does Thornton define "language"?
  33. How does Thornton define "religion"?
  34. What other categories of "culture" does Thornton examine?
  35. What factors influenced "cultural change" among Africans in the Atlantic world outside of Africa?
  36. What is a "pidgin" language? a "creole" language?
  37. What factors led to the development of pidgins and creoles in the Atlantic world?
  38. Why did Africans often use kinship terminology to integrate people who were not kin into human collectivities?
  39. What sort of corporate forms of organization were familiar to Africans?
  40. Under what circumstances did African slaves in the Atlantic world outside of Africa elect kings and queens?
  41. Why were aesthetic principles "the element of African culture that survived and endured the best in the Americas" (Thornton, 221)?
  42. How does Thornton define "aesthetics"?

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J. B. Owens
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Revised: 31 August 2002




URL:  http://www.isu.edu/~owenjack/spemp/readver5.10.html