The obrajes — a colonial textile mill, the law that regulated it, and the report that says the law was never kept
The cloth mills of Spanish America were governed by a title of the code that required a royal licence to found one, forbade any mita or repartimiento of Indians for it, and ordered the mill kept "continuamente abierto, para que entren, y salgan los Indios á su voluntad". A naval officers' secret report on Peru of the 1740s describes the master locking the door and leaving the workers "encarcelados" — and says the government's provisions were serious and never observed.
Why this wins its question: The obraje appears in English-language accounts either as a byword for colonial forced labour with no legal text behind it, or — in defensive writing — as proof that Spanish law protected indigenous workers, with no eyewitness against it. Both halves are printed and both are quoted here from volumes opened page by page: the 1791 impression's título XXVI, which takes the power to licence a mill away from viceroys and audiencias entirely, forbids mita or repartimiento for it, orders it kept "continuamente abierto, para que entren, y salgan los Indios á su voluntad", demands that workers "gocen la misma libertad, que pudieran los Españoles", and threatens demolition and civil damages — and in the same breath admits the ill treatment and says the mills should not grow anyway because they weaken the Castile trade. Against it, the 1826 first printing of the officers' secret report: the door locked at dawn, the midday ration, the hundred lashes counted no other way, the cepos, and the authors' own summary that the ministers had legislated seriously and that in those countries the dispositions of government were never observed. The same object records the reporters' contempt for indigenous character a few pages earlier, so the reader can weigh the witness.
Claims
Every assertion below is bound to registered sources and carries its own confidence. Weight them; do not treat the page as uniformly authoritative.
The obrajes have their own title in the compiled law of the Indies — Libro IV, título XXVI, "De los Obrages", in the fourth impression of 1791. Its first law, taken from Philip IV's Instrucción de Virreyes of 1628, chapter 40, opens with the crown's own finding: "Los excesos cometidos en los obrages de paños, y otros texidos y labores han llegado á tanto extremo, por los impedimentos, que resultan contra la libertad de los Indios, y otras justas consideraciones, que nos obligan á reparar el daño, y procurar el mejor remedio". It then removes the power to authorise them from the colonial authorities altogether: viceroys, presidents and audiencias are not to give licence to make or found any obraje, and if asked for one must consult the Council of the Indies first, expressing the causes and grounds for granting or refusing, giving their opinion with the whole audiencia and remitting the case to the Council "sin entregarlo á las partes, donde se tomará la resolucion, que mas convenga".
The second law of the title (Philip IV, Madrid, 22 November 1621) sets the standard that a licensed obraje must meet. Governors or the superior justice are to verify the cédula, conditions and qualities under which it was granted, inquiring "con la verdad, y christiandad que el caso requiere" into the utility, conveniences or inconveniences that may result "al gobierno público, y bien de los Indios"; if the mill turns out not to be suitable, or the permission was exceeded, they are to reform it, annul it and have what was built demolished, "restituyendo el sitio, y tierra al estado que tenia", and punish the guilty. They are to forbid that any mita or repartimiento of Indians be made for it in any case, and to require that it be kept "continuamente abierto, para que entren, y salgan los Indios á su voluntad, y por ningun caso se les pueda impedir: y no los obliguen á que trabajen involuntarios, de forma que gocen la misma libertad, que pudieran los Españoles". Any governor, corregidor, justice or other minister guilty of such compulsion or of exceeding the provision is to be severely punished "y en consequencia condenado civilmente en todos los daños, intereses, y menoscabos".
The crown printed both of its motives in the same law, and they are not the same motive. Ley iiij (Philip III, San Lorenzo, 11 June 1612; Philip IV, Madrid, 18 June 1624, cap. 43) begins from the ill treatment: having been informed that from the cloth obrajes of New Spain "han resultado algunos inconvenientes, por el mal tratamiento y agravios, que reciben los Indios", and that trading their cloth into Peru had been introduced, the crown orders the viceroys of New Spain to relieve the Indians of this work as far as possible, "pues aunque siempre le han de tener voluntarios, y por sus jornales bien pagados, y con toda libertad, importará ménos que cese la fábrica de los paños, que el menor agravio que puedan recibir". The same sentence then adds the metropolitan interest: the Peru trade was "enflaqueciendo el trato y comercio con estos Reynos", and "por conveniencias del comercio con estos Reynos de Castilla, no se debe permitir su aumento, ni continuarlo con el Perú". A protective rule and a mercantilist rule arrive in one clause, and the law does not rank them.
What an obraje was, in the words of the two naval officers who inspected the viceroyalty of Peru for Philip V. Obrajes are the fourth and last class of estate, "donde al parecer se refunden todas las plagas de la miseria … donde se encuentran las mayores lástimas que puede producir la mas bárbara inhumanidad": the mills where the woollen cloths, bayetas and sargas known throughout Peru as "ropa de la tierra" are woven. Formerly, they write, there were woollen obrajes only in the province of Quito; by the time of writing they had been established in all the others, though what is made south of Quito is only coarse pañetes, xergas and some bayetas, and in the province of Caxamarca there are obrajes for cotton cloth.
The same report describes, point by point, the inversion of the law's central requirement. To judge an obraje rightly, the authors write, one must think of it as a galley that never stops rowing and never reaches port. Work begins before daybreak; each Indian goes to the room that belongs to his trade and receives his task; "luego que se concluye esta diligencia, cierra la puerta el maestro del obrage, y los deja encarcelados". At midday the door is opened for the women to bring in "la pobre y reducida racion de alimento", which lasts a very short time, and they are shut in again. At nightfall the master collects the tasks: those who could not finish are punished "sin oir escusas ni razones", flogged "á cientos, porque no saben contarlos de otro modo", and left locked in the same room as a prison, and although the whole house is one, there is a place kept with cormas or cepos "para castigarlos mas indignamente que se pudiera hacer con los esclavos mas culpables". The mill that the law of 1621 required to stand continuously open, so that Indians might come and go at will and be prevented by no means whatever, is here a building whose door is shut on them by the master at dawn.
The report's own verdict on the law is neither that it was absent nor that it was hypocritical: "Varios Ministros de Su Magestad han conocido esto, y han procurado dar las mas serias providencias que les ha dictado la razon, pero la lástima ha sido, que en aquellos paises nunca se observan las disposiciones del gobierno, como se verá despues." Two officers writing in secret to their own government state both that the ministers had understood the abuse and legislated seriously against it, and that in those provinces the government's dispositions were never observed. That is the claim this object makes, and it is the authors' claim before it is anyone's inference.
The report is evidence, not a neutral instrument, and its own prejudice is on the facing pages. In the chapter on the corregidores the same authors defend the original idea of distributing goods to Indians on the grounds that having something to work with would make them "sacudiesen la pereza" and abandon "la ociosidad tan connatural á sus genios" — a judgement about indigenous character, printed a few pages before the indictment of the obrajes, and reason to weigh their descriptive testimony separately from their explanations. The volume read here is also the London first printing of 1826, prepared by an editor with his own purposes, eighty years after the report was written, and no manuscript is available in this container to collate it against.
The limits of what these two sources establish. The report describes Quito and Peru in the 1740s and cannot be generalised to every obraje across two viceroyalties and two and a half centuries; the code establishes what was ordered from Madrid, not what any particular mill did. Neither source read here gives the number of obrajes, the number of workers in them, how many licences the Council of the Indies granted or refused after 1628, or a single case in which a mill was demolished and its site restored as ley ij required. The same title also shows the crown legislating for the industry in ordinary commercial terms — ley iij (Philip II, Bosque de Segovia, 27 September 1565) extends the Castilian cloth pragmatics to the Indies and requires cloth to be sold measured, cut, shorn and marked, and ley v permits silk looms in the Ciudad de los Ángeles — which is a reminder that the obraje was a regulated trade as well as a labour scandal.