W<scp>hy</scp> I<scp>ndigenous</scp> S<scp>lavery</scp> C<scp>ontinued in</scp> S<scp>panish</scp> A<scp>merica after the</scp> N<scp>ew</scp> L<scp>aws of</scp> 1542
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract A prevailing idea in the scholarly literature is that the New Laws of 1542 outlawed the enslavement of indios (Indigenous people of the Spanish Indies, a category invented by Europeans) in Spanish America. Many see the enactment of this legislation as emblematic of the Spanish crown's exertion of imperial authority over the conquerors who had caused irreparable damage to the Indigenous peoples of the Americas. This article contests this prevailing narrative. It explores how and why the Council of the Indies (the governing council of the Spanish possessions, reporting directly to the king), the Spanish king, and viceroys (or audiencias with viceregal approval) mandated Indigenous slavery for life or for a temporary period. Mandates affected at least 15 Indigenous groups in at least ten locations throughout the Spanish-occupied Western Hemisphere in the seven decades following the passage of the New Laws. I focus on this period to explain the conditions, rationales, legal channels, and procedures used by vassals and local and imperial authorities to authorize the enslavement of targeted Indigenous peoples.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.033 | 0.004 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".