10. How did 168 Spanish Conquistadores Capture an Empire?
Europeans in the New World
In 1532 a motley band of 168 Spanish soldiers arrived on the outskirts of Cajamarca, the capital of the mighty Incan empire in present-day Peru. Already on his third expedition to the New World, Francisco Pizarro had one aim: to find gold and claim it for the Spanish king. He first sent his trusted captain, Hernando de Soto, to meet with the Incan emperor – Atahualpa – and invite him to a meeting. De Soto rode out on his horse. It was the first time Atahualpa had ever seen such an animal. Impressed with his strange visitor, he agreed to meet Pizarro the next day.
Pizarro, however, had different plans. He prepared an ambush and then, when Atahualpa arrived with 6,000 unarmed men, attacked with 106 soldiers on foot and 62 on horses. The Incas were completely caught off guard; about 2,000 Inca died in the volleys of gunfire that ensued. In what is now known as the Battle of Cajamarca on 16 November 1532, Atahualpa was captured and used to extract a massive ransom from the Incas over the next few months: enough gold to fill a room and silver that could fill two, worth nearly half a billion US dollars today. Once Pizarro believed there was not much more that could be extracted, he asked that Atahualpa be baptised and then executed. Atahualpa’s last words reflected his continuing disbelief at what had happened: ‘What have I done, or my children, that I should meet such a fate? And from your hands, too, you who have met with friendship and kindness from my people, with whom I have shared my treasures, who have received nothing but benefits from my hands!’ After Atahualpa’s death, the Spanish continued their violence against the inhabitants of the area until the last Inca monarch was murdered in 1572, four decades after Pizarro’s arrival.
But was the conquest really so easy? Were the Incas so impotent as to be unable to protect themselves against 168 Spanish soldiers? Of course not. It helps to know a bit of what happened before Pizarro’s arrival. Atahualpa had just concluded a civil war with his half-brother, Huáscar. In fact, the news of the final victory arrived on the same day that Pizarro and his troops arrived in the town of Cajamarca. Atahualpa’s strongest armies and smartest generals were far away from Cajamarca. Pizarro and his men not only faced a much-weakened enemy, but they had three things that counted in their favour. First, the Inca empire was already suffering from smallpox and other diseases that Europeans had brought with them on previous trips. Second, Pizarro had, on his way to Cajamarca, made alliances with smaller indigenous groups that were upset with Atahualpa. Third, Pizarro was quick and ruthless. He used the surprise of his guns and horses on people who had never seen these technologies before, to stunning effect.
Atahualpa’s story is one of the most dramatic in the colonisation of the Americas, but it is not unique. Wherever Europeans arrived, indigenous ‘Americans’ suffered, either through direct conflict, such as in the case of Atahualpa, or, most often, through disease and loss of resources. It is very difficult to know exactly how many people died; numbers are, at best, fragmentary, even for those regions with prolonged European contact. Our best guesstimate is that 37 million people lived in Mexico and Central and South America in 1492, the year Christopher Columbus reached the Americas. That would imply a death rate of about 80 per cent by 1650, when only 9 million people remained. It would only be by the late nineteenth century that Latin America’s population numbers again reached the same level as in 1500.
Let us pause for a moment and reflect on the pre-Columbian civilisations of the Americas.1 How could they sustain such large populations? The answer is simple: the Incas (1438 to 1533), the Aztecs (1300 to 1521), and the Maya (250 to 1697) had access to one of the most productive crops: maize. Already as early as the first millennium BCE, the Olmecs, the first known major Mesoamerican civilisation occupying the modern-day Mexican states of Veracruz and Tabasco, cultivated crops like maize, beans, squash, cassava, and sweet potato. Later pre-Columbian civilisations also relied heavily on two other crops domesticated in South America: potatoes and tomatoes.
The arrival of Europeans in the Americas by the end of the fifteenth century initiated a profound transformation of both ecosystems and societies. The Columbian Exchange marked the widespread transfer of plants, animals, culture, human populations, technology, diseases, and ideas between the Americas (the New World) and Europe, Africa and Asia (the Old World). In Europe, the introduction of New World crops such as maize and potatoes transformed the demography and economic livelihoods of Europeans; Nathan Nunn and Nancy Qian calculate, for example, that the introduction of the potato accounts for approximately one-quarter of the growth in Old World population and urbanisation between 1700 and 1900.2 Even the Scottish philosopher Adam Smith noted the advantages of potatoes over other Old World crops: ‘the food produced by a field of potatoes is … much superior to what is produced by a field of wheat. … No food can afford a more decisive proof of its nourishing quality, or of its being peculiarly suitable to the health of the human constitution.’3 It was the sudden overreliance on this wonder crop that caused events like the Great Irish Famine of 1845-1850, killing a million and a half people and causing hundreds of thousands to flee the country, many to America.4
The largest effects of the Columbian Exchange would, however, be felt in the Americas, where indigenous societies experienced not only demographic upheaval but also large-scale economic disruption. Europeans came not only to extract resources but also to set up colonies all across the Americas, from modern-day Canada in the north through Central America and the Caribbean to Argentina in the south. They divided the lands with little regard for the native inhabitants; the Treaty of Tordesillas, for example, signed in 1494 in Spain and ratified in Portugal, divided the newly discovered lands outside Europe between Portugal and Spain along a meridian almost 2200 kilometres west of the Cape Verde islands. This treaty assigned lands east of the line to Portugal and those to the west to Spain. It is for this reason that Brazilians today speak Portuguese and the rest of Latin America Spanish.
The impact of European conquest and settlement varied. The places most sought after by the Europeans were those in the tropical climates. This was because farming there was incredibly profitable; European settlers could produce and sell commodities such as sugar and tobacco to the ‘Old World’ and so attain remarkably high standards of living. In 1700, for example, inhabitants of the British colonies in North America had incomes similar to European settlers living in Mexico. European inhabitants of Barbados and Cuba, by contrast, had incomes that were at least 50 per cent higher. Even in 1800, on a per capita basis, Haiti was probably the richest country in the world, and the Caribbean was still more affluent than the territories that would become the United States.
Today we know things are very different. The United States is one of the richest countries in the world (with GDP per capita in 2022 of $58,487), while Haiti is one of the poorest ($1,546).5 To put it another way, the average person in the United States is thirty-eight times more affluent than the average person in Haiti. How can we explain this reversal of fortunes?
One feature of the Caribbean colonies, as well as other tropical regions, was a high marginal product of labour – in other words, they attained more output from employing additional labour. Crops such as sugar, coffee, rice, cotton and tobacco flourished. These crops demanded a large labour force. When there were not enough European labourers settling in the area – or not enough of them who could survive malaria and other tropical diseases – a substitute was found. Millions of Africans were shipped to the Americas as slaves to work on these plantations. This gave rise to a specific production system: large landholdings (owned by European settlers or absentee European landlords) with large numbers of African slaves working in the fields. This system was naturally characterised by high levels of inequality.
This system was not found everywhere in the Americas. In the more temperate zones of the northern United States, Canada and Argentina, a different production system arose. It was not profitable to employ slaves on these farms because of the comparably low marginal product of labour (the value of output each additional worker could produce). Instead, most European households farmed by themselves, usually with grains or hays, perhaps employing a few recent European immigrants as wage labourers during the harvest season. These new immigrants would only work until they had enough saved up to purchase their own (small) farms. In these temperate zones, a far more equal distribution of income existed.
The economic historians Stanley Engerman and Kenneth Sokoloff help us to understand how these early conditions would affect the development paths of these regions.6 In the tropics, the small elite (the landowners) that emerged because of the system of production began to adopt institutions that protected their privileges. They first ensured that only they had political rights, and thus had a controlling say over the laws and other institutions of the country. This enabled them to impose land policies that benefited themselves, often through measures that discriminated on the basis of race. It also enabled them to restrict education to their own children. In addition, they closed off the country to other Europeans immigrants, which meant they did not have to share their privileges with more people. In short, they ensured that only a small group of European settlers and their descendants had access to the things that make economic freedom possible. The rest of society, the indigenous populations and the slaves from Africa, obtained none of these freedoms.
Almost the exact opposite happened in the temperate zones. There, farms were smaller, often equal in size and owned by those who worked the land. Although there was a degree of inequality – some people had arrived earlier and thus had more time to develop their farms – an elite that could prevent immigrants from obtaining the political and economic rights they needed to prosper never emerged. This meant that these regions were more democratic in their political systems (although women and freed slaves were often still excluded) and education was more widely accessible than in tropical regions. Immigration was also rarely inhibited, so that throughout the seventeenth to the early twentieth centuries there was a constant stream of new migrants from Europe (and, later, from elsewhere in the world).
Engerman and Sokoloff argue that these institutions explain the reversal of fortunes that the different regions of the Americas experienced between the eighteenth and twentieth centuries. Severely unequal societies developed institutions that protected the privileges of a few. While this made them initially quite wealthy, it came ‘at the cost of society not realising the full economic potential of disadvantaged groups’.7 More equal societies shared their economic and political freedoms, giving everyone a chance to live the ‘American dream’. The consequence was that, once modern economic growth began in the nineteenth century, it would be the societies with better education, greater political rights and a more equal distribution of property and income that would benefit most. The roots of America’s prosperity and Haiti’s poverty, according to Engerman and Sokoloff, lie in the institutions set up by the early European settlers on their arrival in the New World.
‘Pre-Columbian’ simply refers to the era before Christopher Columbus, the Genoan explorer who sailed under the Spanish flag, arrived in 1492.↩︎
Nunn, Nathan, and Nancy Qian. "The potato's contribution to population and urbanization: evidence from a historical experiment." The quarterly journal of economics 126, no. 2 (2011): 593-650.↩︎
A. Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, edited by E. Cannan (London: Methuen & Co., 1904), pp. 67–68↩︎
Mokyr, Joel. Why Ireland starved: a quantitative and analytical history of the Irish economy, 1800-1850. Routledge, 2013.↩︎
These figures are calculated using the Maddison Project GDP estimates. Bolt, Jutta and Jan Luiten van Zanden (2024), "Maddison style estimates of the evolution of the world economy: A new 2023 update", Journal of Economic Surveys, 1–41.↩︎
S. L. Engerman. and K. L. Sokoloff, Economic Development in the Americas since 1500: Endowments and Institutions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012).↩︎
K. L. Sokoloff and S. L. Engerman, Institutions, factor endowments, and paths of development in the New World, Journal of Economic perspectives, 14 (3), 2000, 230.↩︎