12 - Social organization and social change

Summary

Sophisticated discussion of Spanish American social organization is extremely rare. But see by James Lockhart, ‘Encomienda and hacienda: The evolution of the great estate in the Spanish Indies’, HAHR, 49 (1969), 411–29; introduction to Ida Altman and James Lockhart (eds.), Provinces of Early Mexico: Variants of Spanish American Regional Evolution (Los Angeles, 1976); ‘Capital and province, Spaniard and Indian: The example of late sixteenth-century Toluca’, in Altman and Lockhart, Provinces of Early Mexico, 99–123. See also Wbodrow Borah, ‘Race and class in Mexico’, Pacific Historical Review, 23 (1954), 331–42; Enrique Otte, ‘Träger und Formen der wirtschaftlichen Erschliessung Lateinamerikas im 16. Jahrhundert’, JGSWGL, 4 (1967), 226–66; and Richard Boyer, ‘Mexico in the seventeenth century: Transition of a colonial society’, HAHR, 57/3 (1977), 454–78. The latter two articles are perhaps more economic than social in orientation. Two broad thematic works by Magnus Mörner cover all Spanish America for the entire colonial period and are in a part social, part legal vein: Race Mixture in the History of Latin America (Boston, 1967), and La corona española y los foráneos en los pueblos de indios de América (Stockholm, 1970). See also Guillermo Céspedes’s synthesis, Latin America: The Early Years (New York, 1974), summarizing much basic research. James Lockhart and Enrique Otte, Letters and People of the Spanish Indies, Sixteenth Century (Cambridge, Eng., 1976) contains analysis of general social types and processes together with specific examples; Otte’s ‘Die europäischen Siedler und die Probleme der Neuen Welt’, JGSWGL, 6 (1969), 1–40 contains additional similar material.