Fitzmaurice, Rosamund; (2024) Precolumbian Mesoamerican Forced Labour and Dependency among Nahua, Mixtec, and Maya peoples CE 600-1521. Doctoral thesis (Ph.D), UCL (University College London).

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Abstract

This thesis examines the presence and operation of forced labour and dependency among the peoples of Mesoamerica from the late Classic to the early colonial period (CE 600-1521). Sources examined include contact and early colonial Spanish and Indigenous documents, Postclassic codices, and Classic and Postclassic artefacts from museum collections. The thesis takes a broad view of Mesoamerican forced labour and dependency, highlighting the nuances between Nahua, Maya and Oaxacan cultures while recognising their shared cultural history and shared understandings of social hierarchy. This study considers a variety of coercive labour practices and defines them based on legal, social, and cultural circumstances. Forced labour can take the form of slavery, debt bondage, penal labour, and corvée (labour taxation), all of which contribute to the complexity of social hierarchy. Much of the forced labour discussed is a consequence of downward social mobility. Those who fall down the social ladder are those most likely to be exploited by those at the top of the social ladder. This thesis examines how these coercive labour practices are presented in a series of written, pictorial, and material sources. The structure of this thesis consists of a series of source analyses and case studies. It begins with an examination of ideas of slavery and forced labour from Europe, in particular Spain. To exemplify this source analysis I present the case study of Malintzin and her supposed origins of enslavement. Next I turn to an analysis of the labour depicted in Postclassic codices, and Classic and Postclassic objects. What follows is another case study, it focusing on the status of small people, people who might have had dwarfism, in Classic Maya art. Finally, the close of this study pulls together all the evidence presented to assess which types of labour were desirable or honourable and which types were simply necessary or quotidian. In other words, which labours were likely to have been performed by elites and commoners, and those which would have been performed by forced labourers.

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