Olive groves in the Indies: a tree that took, an oil that did not, and the labour law that named it
By 1590 the olive was growing in Mexico and Peru and there was still not one oil mill in either: the fruit was cured and eaten, and all the oil came from Spain. The law of the Indies nevertheless made the olive grove a named workplace, and then in 1601 and 1609 forbade allotting Indians to work in one — giving its own reason. The Recopilación prints both that ban and the rule that no wage be paid in drink.
Why this wins its question: The story that circulates about olives and vines in Spanish America is a story about protectionism: that Madrid banned the plantings to keep the Peninsula's oil and wine exports safe. The law actually printed under the Recopilación's own olive-grove heading bans something else — the allotment of forced indigenous labour to vineyards and olive groves — and it prints the reason it gives for doing so, next to a first law that keeps the repartimientos going and a following law forbidding wages paid in wine, chicha, honey or yerba. Alongside that this object sets the sentence that explains the economics without any decree at all: a Jesuit writing in 1590 who says the tree grew in Mexico and Peru, that the fruit was cured and eaten and preferred so, that there was still no oil mill anywhere in the Indies, and that pressing cost more than it earned, so all the oil came from Spain. Read the two together and the question "did Spain forbid American olives?" gets an answer built out of the pages rather than out of the polemic.
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 plainest statement of the case is one sentence written in Peru and printed at Seville in 1590. Closing his chapter on the plants of profit, Acosta writes: "Oliuas, y Oliuares tambien se han dado en Indias, digo en Mexico, y Piru, pero hasta oy no ay molino de azeyte, ni se haze, porque para comer, las quieren mas, y las sazonan bien. Para azeyte hallan, que es mas la costa, que el prouecho, assi q todo el azeyte va de España." The tree had taken in both viceroyalties; the fruit was cured and eaten and preferred that way; and there was, on his information, not one oil mill in the Indies, because pressing cost more than it returned. The oil crossed the Atlantic.
He is not making an aside about a garden tree. The chapter he puts the olive in is capítulo 32, "De Vuas, y Viñas, y Oliuas, y Moreras, y Cañas de Açucar", and it opens with a definition: "PLANTAS de prouecho entiédo, las que de mas de dar que comer en casa, traen a su dueño dinero." Olives are classed with the vine, the mulberry and the sugar cane — the cash crops carried from Spain — and are the last of them he treats before turning to animals. The judgement that the oil was not worth pressing is therefore a judgement about a commercial crop, made by a writer who in the same pages reports what the wine of Ica fetched by the arroba and how many chests of sugar came home in the fleet he sailed with.
In the law of the Indies the olive grove is not a curiosity either: it is a named category of workplace. Libro VI of the Recopilación, título trece, is headed "DEL SERVICIO EN CHACRAS, VIÑAS, OLIVARES, Obrages, Ingenios, Perlas, Tambos, Requas, Carreterías, Casas, Ganados, y Bogas" — the olive grove listed third, between the vineyard and the cloth workshop, in a title that exists to regulate who may be made to work in such places and on what terms.
The operative rule about olive groves in that title is a prohibition, and it states its own ground. Ley vj, rubricked "Que para la Coca, viñas, y olivares no se repartan Indios" and referred to Felipe III's ordenanza 8 of 1601 and to the ordinance of 26 May 1609, cap. 24, reads: "PARA la sementera, beneficio, y cosecha de la Coca no se repartan Indios, guardando las leyes de su título con mucha puntualidad, ni para la cultura de viñas, y olivares, por los grandes inconvenientes que se han experimentado de estos repartimientos." The crown is not restricting the planting of the trees; it is withdrawing forced labour from them, and the reason it gives is experience of what the repartimientos to those crops had produced.
That prohibition sits inside a title whose first law goes the other way, and both belong on the record. Ley j, from Felipe III at Aranjuez on 26 May 1609, continues the mitas and repartimientos "importantes al bien comun", and its stated reasoning is that if the Indians "les quedase libertad, rehusarian el trabajo, y beneficio de estos ministerios, por su natural inclinacion á vida ociosa". The same law then fixes two limits: the obligation is to be so ordered "que no vivan oprimidos con nota, y ocupacion de esclavos", and repartimientos are to be prohibited which "no miran tanto al bien comun, como á las grangerías, y comodidades particulares de los Españoles". The motive, the prejudice it rests on and the limit the crown wrote against itself are three sentences of one law.
The law immediately after the olive-grove ban addresses how such work was being paid, and it is specific about the currency. Ley vij, "Que á ningun Indio se pague su jornal en vino, chicha, miel, ni yerba", from the same 1609 ordinance and from Madrid on 10 October 1618, provides that Indians working "en la labor, y ministerio de las viñas, y en otro qualquiera" are not to have their wage paid in wine, chicha, honey or yerba del Paraguay; that anything so paid is forfeit and is not to be reckoned to the Indian's account; that a Spaniard who attempts to pass it as payment incurs twenty pesos each time; "porque nuestra voluntad es, que la satisfaccion sea en dinero". A prohibition of truck payment in drink, printed in the title that governs vineyards and olive groves, is evidence that payment in drink was the practice being legislated against.
The limits of what is established here are worth stating. Acosta's sentence fixes a state of affairs around 1590 and nothing later: no page read for this entry shows when, or whether, an American olive-oil industry followed, and his "hasta oy no ay molino de azeyte" is his own information, not a survey. The Recopilación prints statutes and not compliance — there is no prosecution, no count of olive groves, no acreage and no wage series in anything opened here, and the fact that the ban on repartimientos to vineyards and olive groves had to be issued in 1601 and repeated in 1609 is evidence that the practice existed, not a measure of how much of it there was or of whether the ban ended it. Both witnesses are Spanish and official, one a Jesuit provincial and one a royal code; no indigenous account of work in an olive grove is cited in this entry.