hacienda
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Hacienda Spanish hacienda refers to an estate hacienda in Latin America . The size of a hacienda varies greatly from region to region, but can cover an area of several thousand hectares. There is often an informal relationship of dependency between the workers and the owner, the hacendado .
Other sources, however, report that the term hacienda rather describes the livestock of an estancia .
Emergence
As a result of the conquistas in the 16th century, a large part of the land in Central and South America fell to the Castilian and Portuguese crowns, who in turn rewarded the conquistadors with tributes ( encomienda ) from indigenous communities for a limited time . In addition, more and more land was subsequently distributed to conquistadors and settlers through donations, illegal occupations and dubious deals. This was favored by the drastic decline in the indigenous population in the 16th and 17th centuries (the so-called “demographic catastrophe”) and encomenderos in particular often founded haciendas as a result. As a result of the expropriation and privatization of church goods, the large estates expanded again in the middle of the 18th century, and the expansion was also facilitated by technological developments, both through better market connections and better production technologies.
Main features
Structural characteristics were the dominance of the markets, the soil and water resources and the workforce by the hacienda and its owners in their surroundings, with other characteristics such as the mainly produced products or the operational organization varied. The highland haciendas produced grain and livestock for nearby mining centers and the colonial towns. Due to the high cost of transportation in the mountainous areas of America, they were limited to regional markets. While its shape remained stable from the 18th to the middle of the 19th century, it then partly approached the plantation because of better connections to the (supraregional) markets .
In general, there was a boom in the hacienda in Latin America in the second half of the 19th century. During a phase of global economic growth and the transition to the model of the desarrollo hacia afuera , Latin American exports of primary goods increased rapidly. This increased the pressure on agricultural land and saw a strong concentration of land in the hands of a few families of the Creole elite. These not only reacted to the increased demand for agricultural goods on the world market, but they also tried to counteract the fragmentation of land ownership - a result of the division of inheritance. The large landowners throughout Latin America appropriated land from smaller landowners and above all from indigenous communities. In addition to the violent land grabbing, there was also the sale of communal property and church property - often through liberal changes in law - and the development of terrenos baldios , such as for world-market- oriented coffee and sisal production in Yucatán, Mexico, or wool export to Europe in the Andes from the 1830s. In Argentina and Uruguay, too, the livestock haciendas were export-oriented. Hand in hand with the process of increasing land concentration, a further concentration of political power can be observed in the class of large landowners, which flourished in this phase. In Ecuador the nexus between the hacienda and the state was so close that one can speak of a “hacienda state”.
Other features were:
- Absenteeism : The owner only leases his land but lives in the city
- In the past, land was mostly cultivated by Indians
- Management through a hierarchical system ( administrator , sub- administrator , foreman , worker, tenant and sub- tenant )
- Indians had to pay taxes to owners and received a piece of land in return
- Livestock and agriculture
Working and living conditions
The employment relationships depended, among other things, on market opportunities and the availability of labor. If labor was scarce, attempts were made to tie them to the estate. B. as a result of the demographic catastrophe. The means to achieve this were wage advances and the resulting debt obligations as well as a lease bound by inheritance, i.e. a form of serfdom. If there was a sufficiently large number of workers, this bond was waived and cheaper seasonal workers were used. If the market opportunities were poor, land was often leased.
The hacienda was a relatively closed social system whose residents had very little contact with the outside world, especially the owner and his deputy. In addition to apartments, it also included a chapel, a shop and often other village-like facilities such as a post office, a prison or a school, and in this respect it was a replacement for the earlier village structure for the indigenous workers. Many of the owners of the haciendas belonged to the regional and national elites because of their income.
See also
literature
- Herbert J. Nickel: Social Morphology of the Mexican Hazienda , Wiesbaden 1978.
- Hans G. Mertens: Economic and social structures of central Mexican wheat haziendas from the valley of Atlixco (1890-1912) , Wiesbaden 1983.
- Klett-Perthes: Foundations - Development in the Tropics and Subtropics (2002).
Web links
Individual evidence
- ↑ Large-scale cattle breeding (The Estancia) in Die La Plata-Land by Herbert Wilhelmy and Wilhelm Rohmeder , p. 177ff
- ↑ a b c Reinhard Liehr: Hacienda . In: Encyclopedia of Modern Times . tape 5 . Stuttgart 2007, p. 15-20 .
- ↑ Olaf Kaltmeier: Hacienda . In: Society for overseas history (ed.): Lexicon for non-European history. Franz Steiner Verlag, Stuttgart 2015.