Abstract
Spain, while dominating and exploiting the New World, was in turn dominated and exploited on the home front by productive and predatory enterprises. It was the lust for gold that turned Latin America into something more than a littoral fringe.
In this chapter the author focuses on the Indies: its people, land and labour, as well as the agriculture, livestock and workshops. The discovery of silver and the role of mercury in mining it supported a lavish lifestyle for certain elements of society while the indigenous miners suffered illness and death.
The colony became to some degree its own metropolis. However the Orient took two-thirds or perhaps three-quarters as much in goods as New Spain sent to Europe. While no other monarchy on earth had the worldwide contacts of Spain, the strain was too great; too much energy was expended for too little return.
Table of Contents
Reina del grand’ Océano dichosa,
sin quien a España falta la grandeza…
¿Cual diré que tú seas, luz hermosa
da Europa?…
No ciudad, eres orbe; en ti admira
junto cuanto en las otras se derrama,
parte de España más mejor que el todo.
(Herrera)
Derramado y sonoro el Océano
era divorcio de las rubias minas
que usurparon la paz del pecho humano…
Y España, con legítimos dineros,
no mendigando el crédito a Liguria,
más quiso los turbantes que los ceros.
Menos fuera la pérdida y la injuria
si se volvieran Muzas los asientos;
que esta usura es peor que aquella furia.
(Quevedo)
Herrera, who died in 1597 (a year before Philip II), rejoices in Seville, the lovely light of Europe, not a city but a world: a part of Spain greater than the whole. Quevedo, born eight years before the Armada and writing long afterwards to Olivares, minister and favourite of the Prudent King's less prudent grandson Philip IV, speaks the sombre truth: once Spain was separated by the Ocean from the mines which have ravished peace from the human heart;- 177 -once she had a valid currency and did not go a-begging to the Genoese; now the usury of their loans—the asientos—is more devastating than that ancient fury of the Moors. The genius of the poet and victim expresses the burden of the plaints of many contemporary arbitristas,[1] and of many modern economic historians, with greater concision, clarity, and poignancy. But not for the first time or the last, the pen of the accountant, not the poet, outmatched the sword.
For the tragedy of Spain was that, dominating and exploiting the New World and the (then-known) Pacific by zealous valour, whether missionary or soldierly, she was in turn dominated and exploited by good business practices, zealous ciphering, and the force of coin—coin struck from her own wealth, a wealth itself basically ill-gotten, wrenched as it was from the agony of millions of Indians. The vast outpouring of American treasure was mediated to the rest of Europe (and much of it ultimately to Asia) by Spanish dynastic wars and follies,[2] by capitalist chicanery, by piracy (or, politely, privateering), by contraband trade carried on (not least by Spaniards themselves) through corruption or ‘at point of pike’; yet without this inflation, without the productive or predatory enterprises which it stimulated, the transition from the late medieval to the modern world would at the least have been much slower, though not necessarily less painful. In 1977, this transition itself may seem a much less assured good than it seemed to the generality of Western observers in 1877 or 1777; and yet, human nature being what it is, it is not very likely that modern times would have been much, or any, more peaceful without American silver. It was in the last resort that auri sacra fames, the accursed lust for gold, which assured that Latin America should quickly become something more than a mere littoral fringe.[3] Alongside the devastation was construction, the mise-en-valeur, as part of the world economy, of great continents.