Encomienda

A grant from the Spanish Crown giving its holder the right to collect tribute and demand labour from a named population, in exchange for protecting them and having them instructed in Christianity.

The protection and the instruction were the part written down. The collection was the part that happened, and the arrangement produced widespread abuse across the Spanish empire, including here.

It matters to this course as the first of four parts of a cheap colonial machine. The archipelago had no silver mines and, for a long time, no export agriculture worth building a heavy apparatus around, so Spain assembled extraction out of grants, compulsory labour, a licensed trade monopoly and a local office it did not have to pay.

Source: The general definition is standard and uncontested. This course’s own research base flags the Philippine detail as currently resting on encyclopedic summaries rather than specialist literature, and names the book that owns the topic: John Leddy Phelan, The Hispanization of the Philippines: Spanish Aims and Filipino Responses, 1565 to 1700, University of Wisconsin Press, 1959, which is library-only and has not been consulted for this build.

First used in: 1.2 · The office that was paid by the people it governed