Free and Unfree Labor in the Colonial Andes, 16th and 17th Centuries

GIL MONTERO, RAQUEL

Düsseldorf

Workshop; Fifth Workshop of the Global Collaboratory on the History of Labour Relations. Work: Ethics, Norms, Valuations, Ideologies. Global Perspectives, 1500-1650.; 2009

Instituto de Historia Social de Holanda y Fundación Gerda Henkel

After the conquest, the Spaniards reorganized the American world in order to satisfy their primary needs: food, labor, and transportation–amongst others. For the organization of the mining labor force, they moved thousands of persons per year. In the decades around 1600–during the silver boom–the most important mining city in the Andes surpassed 130.000 inhabitants, and there were many other settlements around smaller mining centers. All these urban inhabitants needed to be fed, and because of the location of these cities, food was often brought from distant places. The aim of this paper is to analyze the importance of free and unfree labor in the Andes. I will use both quantitative and qualitative sources. As for the first, there is little information about population, so I will pull all the available data together and propose some estimations about these laborers and their relationship. As for the second, I will analyze two different "visitas": one from 1567, 30 year after the conquest, to a very rich herder population on the Titicaca basin; and an other one from 1603 also to a herder region (Lipez) but where many of them lived at the margins of the empire. These are two different examples amongst many others about labor relations during colonial time in the Andes, that allow us to rethink the quantitative data.