New Granada, Viceroyalty of

Enormous profits obtained from the triangular trade of African slaves for Venezuelan cocoa, which is then shipped across the Caribbean and sold in Veracruz for consumption in New Spain (Mexico), make the Venezuelan coast a regular port of call for Dutch and British merchants.

In an effort to eliminate this illegal intercolonial trade and capture these profits for itself, the Spanish crown in 1728 grants exclusive trading rights in Venezuela to a Basque corporation called the Real Compama Guipuzcoana de Caracas, or simply the Caracas Company.

The Caracas Company proves quite successful, initially at least, in achieving the crown's goal of ending the contraband trade.

Venezuela's cocoa growers, however, become increasingly dissatisfied.

The Basque monopoly not only pays them significantly lower prices but also receives favored treatment from the province's Basque governors.

This discontent is evidenced in the growing number of disputes between the company and the growers and other Venezuelans of more humble status.

In 1749 the discontent erupts into a first insurrectionary effort, a rebellion led by a poor immigrant cocoa grower from the Canary Islands named Juan Francisco de León.

The rebellion is openly joined by the Venezuelan lower classes and quietly encouraged by the elite in Caracas.

Troops from Santo Domingo and from Spain quickly crush the revolt, and its leadership is severely repressed by forces headed by Brigadier General Felipe Ricardos, who is named governor of Caracas in 1751.

The growth of the cocoa trade, the success of the Caracas Company, and the assertion of the royal will manifested by the suppression of the 1749 revolt all help to centralize the Venezuelan economy around the city of Caracas.

In recognition of this growth, Caracas is given political-military authority as the seat of the Captaincy General of Venezuela in 1777, marking the first instance of recognition of Venezuela as a political entity.

Nine years later, its designation is changed to the Audiencia de Venezuela, thus granting Venezuela judicial-administrative authority as well.

Barely three decades later, however, Venezuela will suddenly—after almost three centuries on the periphery of the Spanish American empire—find itself at the hub of the independence movement sweeping Latin America.

The highest officials in Spanish America are known as peninsulares because they mostly come from the Iberian Peninsula.

Spaniards also play a major role in commerce, especially at the wholesale level and in trade with Spain itself, whose government seeks to keep all overseas trade a Spanish monopoly, but after one or two generations of European settlement, the principal owners of the means of production—landed estates, or haciendas, and mining concessions—are mostly criollos (Creoles), that is, persons of Spanish descent born in the New World.

Even while recognizing the right of the natives to keep land of their own, the Spanish monarchy claims ultimate control over property in the conquered territory, and it rewards many of the original conquerors with lavish land grants, which eventually pass to their children.

In other cases, the early settlers and their descendants had been allowed to buy land on favorable terms or simply help themselves to what they had found, assuming that through payment of the necessary fees they could later regularize their title.

Land in itself is of little use without people to work it, but there are a number of ways to obtain the needed labor.

As in the other colonies, one device is the institution of the encomienda, whereby a specific group of natives is "entrusted" to a Spanish colonist to protect them and convert them to Christianity in return for payment of tribute.

This tribute often is paid in the form of labor, although that practice is generally against Spanish policy.

Even when the natives pay their tribute in money, the result is much the same, as they need to work for the newcomers to obtain it.

Although the encomienda never legally entails a grant of land, in practice the Spanish encomendero might well find a way to usurp the property of natives entrusted to him.

Spanish authorities gradually phase out the encomienda system, but natives now pay tribute directly to the state, and they still have to work to earn the money.

Other systems of quasi-voluntary labor develop, too, while in early years some natives had been subjected to outright enslavement.

Enslavement of natives is exceptional in New Granada and never takes root here, but enslaved Africans had soon been introduced, and, although never as important to the overall economy as in Brazil or the West Indies, they have become an appreciable part of the labor force in at least some parts of the colony.

New Granada's dominant criollos pride themselves on their Spanish descent, but bloodlines in practice are often less pure than they might appear.

In order to gain access to higher education, for example, it is technically necessary to prove one's limpieza de sangre, or "cleanness of blood," which means not just European pedigree but freedom from any trace of Jews, Muslims, or heretics in the family tree.

However, both formal marriage and informal unions with the native population produce an ever-larger mestizo, or mixed European and native, population; by the end of the colonial period, this is the largest single demographic group.

For most purposes, the population of mestizos is not clearly differentiated from that of criollos.

Nevertheless, for a mestizo to enter the higher social strata and possibly marry the descendant of some conquistador, it does help to have a light complexion and some respectable economic assets, because upward mobility in colonial society is not easy to achieve.

It is even harder for someone of African or part-African descent to rise in society.

The first enslaved Africans to reach New Granada had arrived with the conquistadors themselves because African slavery existed on a small scale in Spain.

Greater numbers had come later directly from Africa, to work in the placer gold deposits of the western Andes and Pacific slopes, landed estates of the Caribbean coastal plain, and assorted urban occupations.

Few are to be found in the Andean highlands, and roughly the same relative distribution of Afro-Colombian people as in the eighteenth century continues to this day.

Although at first all were slaves, the processes of voluntary manumission, self-purchase (with money slaves could earn by working on their own account), and successful escape into the backcountry has produced a growing population of free blacks.

Free and slave alike mix with other ethnic groups, and some of the free—mainly pardos ("browns") of part-European ancestry—become small landowners, independent artisans, or lower-ranking professionals, but unlike mestizos, anyone with a discernible trace of African ancestry faces not just social prejudice but also legal prohibitions very roughly comparable to the Jim Crow laws that mandate segregation in the United States between 1876 and 1965.

These laws are not always enforced, but they place a limit on the advancement even of free pardos.

Gold is New Granada's only significant export; it alone can support the cost of transportation from the interior to the seacoast, given the primitive state of internal transport networks.

Theoretically, such tropical commodities as sugar can be grown for export along the coastal plain, but New Granadan producers cannot compete with the more developed plantation economies of Cuba or Venezuela.

Hence, gold pays the bill for virtually all New Granada's imports, which are mainly for the upper social strata: wine and oil from Spain, cloth and other manufactured goods either from Spain or from other European countries by way of Iberia (or as contraband bypassing Spanish ports entirely).

Coarser textiles and other handcraft items are made locally, however, and sometimes traded from one province to another.

One example is the cotton cloth produced in the northeastern province of Socorro (present-day Santander Department).

This industry features the putting-out system, whereby an entrepreneur farms out successive stages of the production process to local households.

This system is widespread at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution in Europe and gives full or part-time employment to a significant number of criollos and mestizos.

A guiding motive and justification for Spain's conquests in America is cited at this time as the conversion of the indigenous population to Christianity; it is cited still today by traditionalists who reject the pervasive Black Legend of Spanish cruelty to the native inhabitants.

Proselytism in New Granads had at least superficially been a great success, with most of the native population quickly adopting the new religion.

As elsewhere in America, the native converts had not necessarily abandoned all previous beliefs or ascribe the same meaning to Roman Catholic rituals as did Hispanic Christians, but they had conformed outwardly to those rituals, helped build churches and chapels, and showed the Roman Catholic clergy due respect.

Spanish colonizers are sometimes annoyed when a priest or friar protests against mistreatment of the native population or of enslaved blacks, but they are eager to see the church established on a solid footing in the new lands and give generously of their often ill-gotten gains to that effect.

Likewise, the Spanish state, both from sincere conviction and from a realization of the church's value as an instrument of social control, helps endow the church with property, support its missionary activity, and, to the extent possible, suppress religious dissent.

Extirpation of heresy and heretics, by burning as a last resort, is the special responsibility of the Spanish Inquisition, which has one of its three American headquarters (the least active of the three) at Cartagena.

In the late colonial period, both state support and the missionary enthusiasm of the clergy tend to diminish, but by this time the Roman Catholic Church is firmly entrenched as an institution, with roughly one priest or friar per seven hundred and fifty inhabitants, extensive property holdings, and additional wealth from investments, fees, and the compulsory payment of tithes by the faithful.

This strong position will inevitably influence the course of Colombian history after independence.

Saints' portraits and other religious themes dominate colonial painting, including much popular art of the period, and religious festivals are regular occasions for public entertainment (commonly marked by drunkenness and rowdy behavior that the clergy disapproved).

Formal education is largely in the hands of the clergy, who control the only university-level institutions and are active at other levels too.

The great majority of the population remains illiterate.

For most of the colonial period, the literate are dependent on imported reading matter because the first press is set up in Santa Fe only in 1738, and the first real newspaper does not appear until 1791.

However, the latter development coincides with a wider intellectual awakening to new currents in science and philosophy emanating from the European Enlightenment.

A leader in this movement is José Celestino Mutis, a Spanish-born priest who settled in Santa Fe and won acclaim from European scientists for his work in studying botanical species of the viceroyalty.

Several criollo disciples of Mutis will be active participants in the early nineteenth-century movement for independence.

New Granada in the beginning had formed part of the Viceroyalty of Peru, which was formed in 1544 and comprised all of Spanish South America plus Panama.

However, subordination to the viceroy in Lima was mostly nominal, and in 1717-19 New Granada in its own right attains viceregal status, which it loses in 1723 but regains permanently in 1739.

In its final shape, the Viceroyalty of the New Kingdom of Granada includea Venezuela, Quito (now shorn of jurisdiction over Pasto and Popayan), and Panama.

Venezuela becomes a captaincy general and as such conducts most affairs without reference to the viceroy, exactly as New Granada had done when attached to Peru, whereas Quito is a presidency and not quite so independent of the viceregal capital.

Yet when even a fast courier will take weeks to travel from Santa Fe to Panama or Quito, officials in these outlying areas enjoy substantial autonomy in practice.

Exactly the same can be said of the viceregal administration at Santa Fe vis-á-vis the Council of the Indies and other officials in Spain who in principle exercise supreme executive, legislative, and judicial authority over all Spanish America.

It is understood that sometimes an order from the mother country may be inapplicable in a given colony, whose top administrator can then suspend it while appealing for reconsideration—with a final decision likely to be years in coming, if it comes at all.

Natives account for less than a quarter of New Granada's total of roughly one million four hundred thousand inhabitants by the close of the colonial period,

This change naturally reflects both the expansion of other demographic groups and the drastic fall in native numbers as a result of European diseases, mistreatment, and the widespread disruption of traditional lifestyles.

In some peripheral areas, such as the Colombian portion of the Amazon basin, the Spanish have no incentive to establish effective control, and the ancestral modes of political and social organization remain in effect.

In the central highlands and other areas of permanent Spanish settlement, however, the situation of the indigenous peoples is different.

Imperial policy aims to group them into villages where they will have their own local magistrates and will continue to own lands in common (resguardos) just as before the conquest, although under ultimate control of the Spanish and owing tribute to the crown itself or, especially in the first century of colonial rule, to individual Spanish encomenderos.

In practice, the natives are often irregularly stripped of their lands and compelled to labor for the newcomers.

Willingly or not, they also adopt many aspects of European civilization, from chickens and iron tools to the Roman Catholic faith.

In the Muisca heartland, all have become monolingual Spanish speakers by the end of the colonial period (in return contributing place-names and other terms to the speech of their conquerors).

Agriculture remains the principal activity of indigenous villages, the small farms of many mestizos or poor whites, and the large estates of the socially prominent.

Products are the same as before the Europeans' arrival but with the addition of such novelties as wheat, which is consumed mainly by Spaniards and criollos.

The hacienda owners also take particular interest in raising livestock.

Whether cattle or crops, almost all of this production is for domestic consumption.

Charles Wood, the first to recognize the metal subsequently known as platinum a new element, brings the new metal to the attention of The Royal Society, stressing its possible importance and the need for more investigation.

The seventh of fifteen children of William Wood of Wolverhampton and his wife Margaret, daughter of Richard Molyneux, an ironmonger in that area, he had followed his father-in-law's trade until 1715, when he became an ironmaster too and later entered into a contract to provide copper coinage for Ireland.

He was also a projector, floating his business as an ironmaster as a joint stock company at the time of the South Sea Bubble (1720).

He later sought to develop a new process of ironmaking and to obtain a charter for a "Company of Ironmasters of Great Britain".

However, the process (carried on at Frizington, Cumberland) produced little iron and he probably died in debt.

Charles Wood was a partner in some of the businesses, and certainly in the final one.

His father's will left him a legacy of fifteen thousand pounds, but his father died insolvent.

The result was that Charles and some of his brothers were also made bankrupt in the following years.

Wood had gone out to the Carolinas in 1733 following his bankruptcy but only stayed there a couple of years.

He had returned to Cumberland to marry Anne Piele of Buttermere and then went to Jamaica to superintend lead mines in Liguanea.

They had a child in Jamaica in 1739, but the next was born at Whitehaven, in Cumberland.

Wood had acquired various samples of a mysterious metal, as heavy as gold but silvery in appearance, found in the course of alluvial gold working in what is now Colombia, and smuggled from Cartagena to Jamaica.

He sends these to his relative William Brownrigg, a doctor and scientist who practices at Whitehaven, for further investigation.

Brownrigg writes up Wood's experiments and conducts some of his own.

A particularly serious yellow fever epidemic strikes Cartagena, New Granada, in 1741.