The Great Dying: Grading a Single-Cause Essay
A tenth-grade world history team is scoring essays on the question What caused the demographic collapse of Indigenous populations in the Americas after 1492? One student wrote: Epidemic disease alone destroyed Indigenous populations. Spanish weapons and forced labor were minor factors. The team has assembled a data packet: estimates of central Mexican population falling from roughly 22 million in 1519 to about 1.5 million by 1600; epidemic years of 1520 (smallpox) and 1545 and 1576 (cocoliztli); encomienda and repartimiento labor records; and output figures from the Potosí silver mines. Two teachers want to mark the essay down for factual error. A third argues the student has the facts roughly right and the problem is causal reasoning. The team has 30 minutes to agree on the feedback and decide whether the packet is adequate.
1. Does the packet support the student's factual claims? Separately, does it support the word alone?
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The facts are broadly right; the causal claim is not. The population figures - roughly 22 million to about 1.5 million - are themselves estimates derived from tribute rolls and later projection, and historians disagree about the starting number, so the essay should say estimates rather than assert precision.
What the epidemic chronology does support is the primacy of timing: smallpox reached Tenochtitlan in 1520, before Cortés's final siege, and the cocoliztli outbreaks of 1545 and 1576 killed enormous numbers decades after conquest. But alone is a claim about sufficiency, and the packet cannot test it. Mortality at that scale interacts with social disruption: destroyed harvests, forced migration, and labor drafts raise susceptibility. The same epidemics killed some Spaniards too, which points to environmental and immunological factors that are not either/or. Disease was probably necessary but not sufficient - and every document in the packet was produced by the colonial administration that organized the labor.
2. What comparison would actually test the claim that forced labor was minor?
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A comparison that varies labor coercion while holding epidemic exposure roughly constant. Compare regions with dense encomienda or repartimiento obligation (the central Mexican valleys, the Potosí hinterland) against regions with documented contact but lighter labor demands; or compare the same region before and after a labor reform.
If mortality tracks epidemic dates regardless of labor regime, coercion is at most a secondary amplifier. If mortality is markedly worse where drafts were heaviest, the student's minor is falsified. The 1545 cocoliztli is useful because it struck after the encomienda had been reorganized, so timing and institutions can be partly separated.
Students should also be pushed on units: parish registers count baptisms and burials, tribute rolls count households, mine records count draftees, and each has a different bias. The goal is not to produce a verdict but to show what kind of evidence could change a verdict - which is the reasoning skill the essay is missing.
3. How would you reframe the question so students avoid both single-cause explanations and fatalism?
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Split cause into layers. Proximate: pathogen exposure in a population with no acquired immunity. Structural: the tributary and labor systems that concentrated people, moved them, and disrupted food supply. Then add contingency and agency: some communities recovered faster, some relocated, some negotiated; Indigenous people used Spanish courts and allied with or against Spanish factions.
A question like How did the relative weight of epidemic disease and colonial labor regimes vary across regions and decades? forces comparison and blocks both the single-cause answer and the it-was-inevitable conclusion.
For feedback, credit the chronology and the scale, then target one sentence: change alone to above all in the first decades, and require a paragraph explaining what evidence would show the qualifier is right. That converts a factual spat into an argument about evidence, which is what the standard assesses.