Unsettling the Continent, 1492–1776
It was an age of empires. The great European powers competed for wealth, territory, and global influence. That competition brought hundreds of thousands of Europeans and Africans to the North American continent, where Native peoples had lived for millennia.
What happened next was a profound unsettling of long-established societies. The continent’s population declined in this period, as diseases swept through Native populations that lacked immunity. Beyond that tragedy there would be new conflicts, new forms of freedom, new forms of slavery, and new ways of living together.
The next stop on our tour is behind you.
Spanish New Mexico
Spanish conquerors moved north of the Rio Grande in 1598 hoping to find gold and silver. Instead they found modest towns where Native peoples lived in adobe houses and practiced irrigation agriculture. Spain decided to support a colony at Santa Fe to convert Indians to Catholicism and to keep other European powers out of the region. Tewa, Zuni, Hopi, and other groups banded together to develop a new identity as "Pueblo peoples." Although many adopted Spanish as a second language, they came together to resist Spanish demands for labor and to defend their traditional religious practices.
British South Carolina
In the late 1600s the British established a plantation system in South Carolina, dedicated to production of a single cash crop for export. The colony’s rice plantations offered substantial profits to a few but depended on the forced labor of many.
Enslaved Indians were part of the early workforce, but the British soon turned to importing unfree African workers. By the early 1700s South Carolina had an African majority and a European minority. West Africans brought their own knowledge and beliefs and created a new language and culture in America.
Rice Culture
Rice cultivation was a multicultural invention. It combined West African rice-growing knowledge with British practices of agricultural experimentation. The labor of enslaved Africans guaranteed Carolina’s economic success.
Implements of rice production included a mortar and pestle for milling to remove the husk from the grain. As in West African rice-growing regions, most processing was women’s work.
