#1542

Timerra from Fire Emblem Engage

"no questions asked this is the best design in engage. she's so colorful and pretty it's unfair to compare anyone else in this game to her. i love that she has dark hair and dark eyes and is still really really colorful and vibrant"

#1542

Repartimiento

The Repartimiento system was a distribution of rights to Spanish colonialists and municipalities, which allowed them to extract forced but low-paid labour from local communities in conquered territories. Designed to replace the inefficient encomienda system, the repartimiento system was eventually only used for crucial industries such as food and cloth production and precious metal mining.

The Encomienda System

When the Spanish conquistadors arrived in the New World in the 16th century, they searched for and shared out the resources they came across. Initially, this was gold, silver, and other precious materials, but as the European colonization of the Americas got underway, labour and slaves became just as valuable. The right to extract labour from a local population – used for working agricultural lands, particularly plantations, and mines – was awarded by the Spanish colonial administration as a license called an encomienda. The license applied to the individual holder and was not tied to any specific area of land, even a town could hold an encomienda. In return for this free labour, the Europeans were expected to give military protection to their labourers and to offer them the opportunity to be converted to Christianity. A holder of an encomienda, therefore, had to fund a parish priest. Although the system was very close to slavery, license-holders could not sell their labourers. The pope had prohibited the slavery of indigenous Americans in 1537, but this scruple clearly did not apply to imported Africans.

From the viewpoint of the Spanish, the encomienda system worked for a while, but it was highly inefficient. Many indigenous peoples, understandably, made attempts to escape. Many were unused and unsuited to working on large-scale agricultural schemes. European-born diseases devastated local populations making it much more difficult to find the labour the Spanish required. Overexploitation of the labourers they could find – literally working and starving them to death – became such a problem that voices in the Establishment back in Spain began to be raised in protest. It was noted, too, that many license-holders did not fulfil their spiritual obligations to their labourers. Bodies like the Council of the Indies, which managed all of Spain's colonies, began to search for a better alternative to the encomienda system. The twin aims of colonization were the extraction of resources and the saving of souls by converting local peoples to Christianity. The encomienda system seemed to be failing on both fronts. The answer the authorities came up with was the repartimiento system.

With rapacious conquistadors and unprincipled settlers eager to extract all they could from colonies, any attempt at change was bound to face practical problems. The first attempt to abolish the encomienda system came in 1542, and a set of New Laws hoped to reduce its application. These attempts failed. The next serious attempt at reform came in 1573 when Philip II of Spain (r. 1556-1598) outlawed any use of the encomienda system in any new territories. Although it was no longer a major aspect of the colonial economy by the end of the 16th century, it was not until the 18th century that the encomienda system finally died out.