Attempting as it did to bring commercial exchanges, literally from China to Peru, under one vast bureaucratic structure, to funnel the undreamt-of wealth of two continents through the narrow estuary of the Guadalquivir, the system must appear as a first gallant but hopeless effort to construct a planned and controlled world economy: a gigantic Common Market, but scarcely as Ramos describes it, one in which ‘the defence of the consumer was the supreme law’; rather that law was the need of the Spanish Treasury and dynastic wars, overriding the sincere but pathetically ineffective desire to mitigate the exploitation of the Indians, and it was vulnerable to the conflicting interests of pressure groups both in Spain and the Indies. But we must agree with Ramos that, considering the distances and the diverse environments, it seems almost a miracle that some sort of equilibrium was achieved and maintained for three centuries, without more contact with Spain than a few ‘fragile vessels which from time to time…reached a few specified shores.’^[93] Indeed, in the last resort the warranty for what seems crazy over-regimentation by the Crown may be that without such legalistic promulgation of an ideally overriding Law, ever ill-enforced but ever asserted, the Indies might have split up into independent dominions and lordships, internally autocratic and probably in a state of anarchy between themselves.

In this day and age, littered with the débris of such attempts and yet convinced of the inadequacy of laissez-faire, we must have much sympathy with the ideal of a wide-spreading and yet more or less flexibly integrated Commonwealth.- 203 -As with our view of the étatisme of the Byzantine Empire, our changing times mean that we no longer look on such strivings with the pitying contempt of Manchester School economists; rather with a feeling of common cause in the perhaps hopeless endeavour to control economic destinies. Even had the bureaucracies of the Crown and the Casa possessed well-trained development economists from LSE or Harvard or Sussex, in itself an absurd thought, the task would have been too great: as it was, the mass of statistical data they did record, without benefit of computer, compels respect. But the technical means to overcome the giant barriers of distance were just not there: it took five years for the round transit Seville-Manila-Seville, or Lisbon-Macao-Lisbon, and hazardous years at that. ‘One does not construct a firm, or an Empire, on a lucky combination of circumstances. What counts is not getting to America or the Moon, but getting back’; from some hundreds of cases, it can be reckoned that the merchants, officials, and missionaries who went from Europe to these ends of the earth had about one chance in three of making the round trip and returning to live out the rest of their days among their own kin.^[94]

No Crown on earth had the world-wide contacts of that of Spain in 1600; but the strain was too great, too much energy was poured out for too little return, and the returns, vast as they seemed in their day—witness Garcilaso's naïve raptures—were dissipated in the maelstrom of European politics. In that same year 1600, two years after the death of Philip the Prudent, the arbitrista Martin Gonsalez de Cellorigo wrote, with a sombre magnificence perfectly in keeping with his nation and his age, the terrible words: ‘Truly, it seems that this Republic has become a republic of men bewitched, living outside the natural order of things.’^[95] Yet with Don Quixote rode Sancho Panza, and this perishing Republic survived for another two centuries, a monument to ill-directed fortitude.