The Medium Term: The Sixteenth to Nineteenth Centuries in Yucatán

The Spanish brought to the Americas a long cultural tradition of conquest, settlement, and subjugation that had been perfected during the centuries long Reconquista. Within the cultures of the New World, they recognized tribute and service systems similar to their own tradition. There was no need to replace or create a new system; instead the Spanish merely co-opted the existing native structures of kin-ordered production and tributary organization to meet their needs. Out of this appropriation grew the coercive institution of the repartimiento, which the Spanish used to draw both goods and native production into capitalist exchange networks. This emerging system of capitalist circulation represented the first stage in the historical articulation of capitalist and noncapitalist modes of production leading to the formation of the hacienda in Yucatan.