Dominican Republic - The Council of the Indies
The Council of the Indies, created by Charles V in 1524, was the Spanish crown's main agency for directing colonial affairs. During most of its existence, the council exercised almost absolute power in making laws, administering justice, controlling finance and trade, supervising the church, and directing armies.
The arm of the Council of the Indies that dealt with all matters concerned with commerce between Spain and the colonies in the Americas was the House of Trade (Casa de Contratacion), organized in 1503. Control of commerce in general, and of tax collection in particular, was facilitated by the designation of monopoly seaports on either side of the Atlantic Ocean. Trade between the colonies and countries other than Spain was prohibited. The crown also restricted trade among the colonies. These restrictions hampered economic activity in the New World and encouraged contraband traffic.
The Roman Catholic Church became the primary agent in spreading Spanish culture in the Americas. The ecclesiastical organization developed for Santo Domingo and later established throughout Spanish America reflected a union of church and state closer than that which actually prevailed in Spain itself. The Royal Patronage of the Indies (Real Patronato de Indias, or, as it was called later, the Patronato Real) served as the organizational agent of this affiliation of the church and the Spanish crown.
Santo Domingo's importance to Spain declined in the first part of the sixteenth century as the gold mines became exhausted and the local Indian population was decimated. With the conquest of Mexico by Hernan Cortes in 1521 and the discovery there, and later in Peru, of great wealth in gold and silver, large numbers of colonists left for Mexico and Peru, and new immigrants from Spain also largely by-passed Santo Domingo.
The year 1586 was marked by the capture of Santo Domingo City by the noted English navigator, Sir Francis Drake, during the celebrated cruise on which he took the strongest towns on the Spanish main. On the morning of January 11, 1586, the inhabitants of Santo Domingo City were thrown into consternation at seeing eighteen foreign vessels in the roadstead, in a line which stretched from Torrecilla Point to the slaughterhouse. To the joy of the people the fleet set sail for the west, but their joy was short lived, for the next morning messengers arrived with the news that the enemy had Oliver Cromwell after declaring war against Spain sent a fleet to the West Indies under the command of Admiral William Penn, having on board an army of 9000 men. The fleet appeared off Santo Domingo City on May 14, 1655, and a landing was effected in two bodies, the advance guard under Col. Buller going ashore at the mouth of the Jaina River while the main body under General Venables disembarked at Najayo, much further down the coast. Buller met with strong resistance at Fort San Geronimo and was forced to retire to Venables' intrenchments. The united English forces made several attempts to march on the capital, but fell into ambuscades and sustained heavy losses. Despairing of success, the fleet and army left the island on June 3 and proceeded to Jamaica, which they captured.
The withdrawal of the colonial government from the northern coastal region opened the way for French buccaneers, who had a base on Tortuga Island (lie de la Tortue), off the northwest coast of present-day Haiti, to settle on Hispaniola in the mid-seventeenth century. The creation of the French West India Company in 1664 signaled France's intention to colonize western Hispaniola. Intermittent warfare went on between French and Spanish settlers over the next three decades.
Spain, however, was hard-pressed by warfare in Europe and could not maintain a garrison in Santo Domingo sufficient to protect the entire island against encroachment. In 1697, under the Treaty of Ryswick, Spain ceded the western third of the island to France. The exact boundary of this territory (Saint-Domingue — modern Haiti) was not established at the time of cession and remained in question until 1929.
During the first years of the eighteenth century, landowners in the Spanish colony did little with their huge holdings, and the sugar plantations along the southern coast were abandoned because of harassment by pirates. Foreign trade all but ceased, and almost all domestic commerce took place in the capital city.
The Bourbon dynasty replaced the Habsburgs in Spain in 1700. The new regime introduced innovations — especially economic reforms — that gradually began to revive trade in Santo Domingo. The crown progressively relaxed the rigid controls and restrictions on commerce between the mother country and the colonies and among the colonies. By the middle of the century, both immigration and the importation of slaves had increased.
In 1765 the Caribbean islands received authorization for almost unlimited trade with Spanish ports; permission for the Spanish colonies in America to trade among themselves followed in 1774. Soon duties on many commodities were greatly reduced or removed altogether. By 1790 traders from any port in Spain could buy and sell anywhere in Spanish America, and by 1800 Spain had opened colonial trade to all neutral vessels.
As a result of the stimulus provided by the trade reforms, the population of the colony of Santo Domingo increased from about 6,000 in 1737 to approximately 100,000 in 1790, with roughly equal numbers of whites, free coloreds, and slaves. The size and composition of Santo Domingo's population contrasted sharply, however, with that of the neighboring and far more prosperous French colony of Saint-Domingue, where some 30,000 whites and 27,000 freedmen extracted labor from some 400,000 black slaves.
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