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Was the 16th century a demographic catastrophe for Mexico? Robert McCaa
Department of History, University of Minnesota | |||
Introduction |
The "guerra de números"--the debate over the size of native populations at contact and the degree of depopulation which followed--continues in the 1990s (Rabell 1993:35), although not with the intensity as when the matured research of the maximalists, Sherburne Cook and Woodrow Borah, appeared in the early 1960s. The minimalist camp, founded by Angel Rosenblat, has grown in recent years. (I adopt Hugh Thomas' Latinate nomenclature of "maximalist" and "minimalist" as less inflamatory than the vulgar, Anglo-Saxon "High Counters" and "Low".) Subjected to unrelenting criticism by Angel Rosenblat (1967), neither Cook before his death nor Borah since 1966 when he presented a brief paper to the Americanist Congress in Mar de Plata, Argentina, chose to directly engage their opponents (Borah, 1976). In subsequent decades, Cook and Borah's scenario of demographic doom for the native population of Mexico over the course of the sixteenth century was contested on almost all fronts: their data, methods, manipulations, interpretations, and the entire thesis of demographic disaster (Rosenblat, 1967; Sanders 1976; Zambardino, 1980; Henige, 1992; Brooks, 1993). For the Colombian quincentennary, Denevan offered a timely summary of the debate. Then in 1993, the history of the first virgin soil epidemic to strike Mexico, that of 1520-1521, came under frontal attack. The disaster was reduced to "a mild attack of smallpox, such as occurred in contemporary Europe with some suffering, some deaths, and little further effect" (Brooks, 1993).1 Why do Rosenblat, Sanders, and Florescano discount the smallpox epidemic of 1520-21? This thesis is not new. Angel Rosenblat, William T. Sanders, and, now, Enrique Florescano also discount this epidemic. As this essay will show, Rosenblat simply ignores the evidence for the first smallpox epidemic, and all other evidence on the effects of contagious disease. Sanders sees only two major epidemics in the sixteenth-century--none before 1540--but he does not consider any evidence for 1520. Florescano cites "terrible death tolls caused by the epidemics of 1545-1548, 1563-1564, 1576-1581, and 1587-1588," but, in doing so, exludes all smallpox epidemics from his list and any great contagion before 1540. Florescano seems to endorse Sanders' thesis that no major epidemics struck before 1540. I was surprised to find that Rosenblat, the most unyielding defender of the minimalist camp, also disregards the role of smallpox. My consternation increased when I realized that Sanders and Florescano exclude the smallpox epidemic of 1520 from their lists of deadly epidemics of the sixteenth century. If the orthopox virus did not contribute to demographic collapse in Central Mexico in 1520, then the catastrophe school of contact population history is in error. If the best documented case of a virgin soil epidemic is wrong, extension of the paradigm to other first encounters between Europeans and Native Americans becomes tenuous, if not untenable.2 Fortunately, a re-examination of this case is facilitated by the many extant sources in Spanish and Nahuatl--eyewitness accounts, extensive tax records for a large number of native villages and towns, many inquiries by secular and religious authorities, and chronicles by both conquerors and the conquered. Only in recent decades have many of these sources been subjected to close scholarly scrutiny. To begin my survey of the evidence, I turned to informed historiographical reviews of the epidemiological history of sixteenth-century Mexico.3 The radical implications of the revisionist argument and their tactical, time-saving strategy of favoring philology over quantification, narratives over numbers, were so beguiling that I was lured into sorting out the issues of conquest demography for myself using non-quantitative methods. A cross-examination of published narratives on the first Old World epidemic to strike Central Mexico should help determine whether smallpox was a minor epidemic or a major catastrophe. | |||
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