Earle, Rebecca (2014) Indians and drunkenness in Spanish America. Past & Present, Volume 222 (Supplement 9). pp. 81-99. doi:10.1093/pastj/gtt030

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Abstract

In a sixteenth-century report into the treatment of Amerindians in its new world colonies, the Spanish Council of the Indies noted that ‘all Indians are inclined to vice and drunkenness and laziness, never applying themselves willingly to any sort of labour’.1 Indians, a Spanish physician concurred, were ‘given to wine and drunkenness’.2 A few decades earlier a colonial account of pre-conquest indigenous culture in Peru similarly concluded that ‘drunkenness and intemperance in drinking was a characteristic passion of these people’.3 In the late eighteenth century a priest in colonial Mexico commented that ‘everyone knows the Indians’ predisposition to drunkenness’.4 One could easily cite a stream of comments spanning the intervening two hundred years, and from across Spanish America, that make the same observation about Amerindians and their tendency to get drunk. Proclivity to drunkenness, in short, was one of the criticisms most frequently levelled against Spanish America’s native peoples during the colonial era.5

Item Type:	Journal Article
Divisions:	Faculty of Arts > History
Journal or Publication Title:	Past & Present
Publisher:	Oxford University Press
ISSN:	0031-2746
Official Date:	2014
Dates:	Date Event 2014 Published
Volume:	Volume 222
Number:	Supplement 9
Page Range:	pp. 81-99
DOI:	10.1093/pastj/gtt030
Status:	Peer Reviewed
Publication Status:	Published
Access rights to Published version:	Restricted or Subscription Access

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