The Spanish American Empire dominates the western half of South America throughout this age; Portuguese Brazil, a unit of the Portuguese Empire, controls the East.

Nombre de Dios in Panama, Vera Cruz in Mexico, and Cartagena in Colombia are the only three ports in Spanish America authorized by the crown to trade with the homeland, beginning early in the sixteenth century.

The system becomes regularized by the mid-1560s, and two fleets sail annually from Spain, one to Mexico, and the other to southern ports.

These fleets then rendezvous at Havana and return together to Cadiz, Spain.

In principle, this rigid system will remain in effect until the eighteenth century.

From the middle of the seventeenth century, however, as the strength and prosperity of Spain declines, annual visits become the exception.

The Roman Catholic Church serves as the main buttress of the Chilean government and the primary instrument of social control.

Compared with its counterparts in Peru and Mexico, the church in Chile is not very rich or powerful.

On the frontier, missionaries are more important than the Catholic hierarchy.

Although usually it supports the status quo, the church produces the most important defenders of the indigenous population against Spanish atrocities.

The most famous advocate of human rights for the native Americans is a Jesuit, Luis de Valdivia (no relation to Pedro de Valdivia), who struggles, mostly in vain, to improve their lot in the period 1593-1619.

Chile—cut off to the north by desert, to the south by the Araucanians, to the east by the Andes Mountains, and to the west by the ocean—becomes one of the most centralized, homogeneous colonies in Spanish America.

Serving as a sort of frontier garrison, the colony finds itself with the mission of forestalling encroachment by Araucanians and by Spain's European enemies, especially the English and the Dutch.

In addition to the Araucanians, buccaneers and English adventurers menace the colony, as is shown by Sir Francis Drake's 1578 raid on Valparaiso, the principal port.

Because Chile hosts one of the largest standing armies in the Americas, it is one of the most militarized of the Spanish possessions, as well as a drain on the treasury of Peru.

Throughout the colonial period, the Spaniards engage in frontier combat with the Araucanians, who control the territory south of the Rio Bio-Bio (about five hundred kilometers south of Santiago) and wage guerrilla warfare against the invaders.

During many of those years, the entire southern region is impenetrable by Europeans.

In the skirmishes, the Spaniards take many of their defeated foes as slaves.

Missionary expeditions to Christianize the Araucanians prove risky and often fruitless.

Most European relations with the native Americans are hostile, resembling those later existing with nomadic tribes in the United States.

The Spaniards generally treat the Mapuche as an enemy nation to be subjugated and even exterminated, in contrast to the way the Incas treated the Mapuche, as a pool of subservient laborers.

Nevertheless, the Spaniards do have some positive interaction with the Mapuche.

Along with warfare, there also occurs some miscegenation, intermarriage, and acculturation between the colonists and the indigenous people.

The Chilean government plays a significant role in the colonial economy.

It regulates and allocates labor, distributes land, grants monopolies, sets prices, licenses industries, concedes mining rights, creates public enterprises, authorizes guilds, channels exports, collects taxes, and provides subsidies.

Outside the capital city, however, colonists often ignore or circumvent royal laws.

In the countryside and on the frontier, local landowners and military officers frequently establish and enforce their own rules.

The economy expands under Spanish rule, but some criollos complain about royal taxes and limitations on trade and production.

Although the crown requires that most Chilean commerce be with Peru, smugglers manage to sustain some illegal trade with other American colonies and with Spain itself.

Chile exports to Lima small amounts of gold, silver, copper, wheat, tallow, hides, flour, wine, clothing, tools, ships, and furniture.

Merchants, manufacturers, and artisans become increasingly important to the Chilean economy.

Mining is significant, although the volume of gold and silver extracted in Chile is far less than the output of Peru or Mexico.

The conquerors appropriate mines and washings from the native people and coerce them into extracting the precious metal for the new owners.

The crown claims one-fifth of all the gold produced, but the miners frequently cheat the treasury.

By the seventeenth century, depleted supplies and the conflict with the Araucanians reduce the quantity of gold mined in Chile.

Most Chileans work in agriculture because precious metals are scarce.

Large landowners become the local elite, often maintaining a second residence in the capital city.

Traditionally, most historians have considered these great estates (called haciendas or fundos) inefficient and exploitive, but some scholars have claimed that they were more productive and less cruel than is conventionally depicted.

The haciendas initially depend for their existence on the land and labor of the indigenous people.

As in the rest of Spanish America, crown officials reward many conquerors according to the encomienda system, by which a group of native Americans is commended or consigned temporarily to their care.

The grantees, called encomenderos, are supposed to Christianize their wards in return for small tribute payments and service, but they usually take advantage of their charges as laborers and servants.

Many encomenderos also appropriate native lands.

Throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the encomenderos fend off attempts by the crown and the church to interfere with their exploitation of the indigenous people.

Enslaved blacks, in comparison, are extremely expensive and are thus used almost exclusively in the lowland plantation culture along the hot, humid coast, where the Sierra natives prove unable to adapt.

Enslaved blacks number some sixty thousand by the end of the colonial period.

Native labor outside the encomienda is most commonly exploited through the mita, modeled after the Inca institution of the same name.

All able-bodied "free" natives are required to devote one year of their labor to some public or private Spanish concern, be it constructing a church, road, or public building, or working in a textile mill.

Although mitayos are paid for their labor, the amount is extremely meager, often less than debts accumulated through purchases from their employer, thus requiring them to continue working, sometimes indefinitely, after their assigned period of service.

In this way, the mita system disintegrates into debt peonage.

Debts are commonly passed on to ensuing generations, in which cases the mita is, in effect, slavery.

Spain's colonies in the New World are, legally, the personal patrimony of the king, and he holds absolute control over all matters in Ecuador.

Colonial administration at all levels is carried out in the name of the monarch.

The king's chief agency in Madrid is the Council of the Indies, which devotes most of its energies to formulating legislation designed to regulate virtually every aspect of colonial life.

The House of Trade, seated in Seville, is placed in charge of governing commerce between Spain and the colonies.

In America, the king's major administrative agents are the viceroyalty, the audiencia (court), and the municipal council (cabildo).

Between 1544 and 1563, Ecuador is an integral part of the Viceroyalty of Peru, having no administrative status independent of Lima.

It remains a part of the Viceroyalty of Peru until 1720, when it joins the newly created Viceroyalty of Nueva Granada; within the viceroyalty, however, Ecuador is awarded its own audiencia in 1563, allowing it to deal directly with Madrid on certain matters.

The Quito audiencia, which is both a court of justice and an advisory body to the viceroy, consists of a president and several judges (pidores).

The territory under the jurisdiction of Quito considerably exceeds that of present-day Ecuador, extending southward to the port of Paita in the north of present-day Peru, northward to the port of Buenaventura and the city of Cali in the south of present-day Colombia, and well out into the Amazon River Basin in the east.

Quito is also the site of the first (founded in 1547) and most important municipal council within the area comprising modern-day Ecuador. It consists of several councilmen (regidores) whose extensive responsibilities include the maintenance of public order and the distribution of land in the vicinity of the local community.

The borders of the audiencia (or kingdom as it is also known) of Quito are poorly defined, and a great deal of its territory remains either unexplored or untamed throughout much of the colonial era.

Only in the Sierra, and there only after a series of battles that rage throughout the mid-sixteenth century, will the native population be fully subjugated by the Spanish.

The jungle lowlands in both the Oriente and the coastal region of Esmeraldas are, in contrast, refuges for an estimated one-quarter of the total native population that remain recalcitrant and unconquered throughout most or all of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

Despite Orellana's harrowing journey of discovery, the Oriente remains terra incognita to the Spanish until its settlement by Jesuit missionaries beginning in the mid-seventeenth century, and it will continue to be largely inaccessible throughout the remainder of the colonial period.

Cotton, grown on the eastern slope of the Andes in Quijos Province, and wool, from imported merino sheep that thrive in the high Andean valleys, provide the raw materials for high-quality textiles that are manufactured in hundreds of sweatshops, called obrajes, and exported throughout Latin America.

Native mitayos, who commonly work from dawn to dusk chained to their looms, provide the labor.

As appalling as are the preindustrial working conditions in the obrajes, most historians agree that they were more bearable than those found in the Peruvian mines at the time.