Looking back, it seems the Spanish should have followed Daedalus’ advice toward his son, Icarus: ‘do not fly too high.’ Instead, the Spanish imperial desires increased exponentially, believing the American riches would never end, and doomed their failure from the very beginning. Retrospect makes one wonder, “whether the Discovery of Peru has been more beneficial, or more mischievous to Europe,” just as an anonymous seventeenth-century writer did. The Spanish management of the Americas and its riches in the century after discovery started them on their journey to financial ruin and relative insignificance. The real cause came from the very beginning, when Spain first integrated the American colonies into its economy. While those dug Spain deeper, they are consequences more than causes. More recent scholarship points to the Crown’s irresponsible policies and loans for the ultimate decline. Along this same trend, Earl Hamilton, in 1938, claimed that “with almost complete unanimity, previous writers since the seventeenth century have regarded the Moorish expulsion of 1609-14 as the overshadowing cause of the Spanish economic decadence.” This vein attributes the Spanish decline to the suppression and absolutism exhibited by the Inquisition and Castilian monarchy, claiming that it stifled progress into the modern era. Anglo-American historians prior to the late twentieth century nearly universally attributed the decline to the “Black Legend,” a trend detailed in depth by Richard L. Numerous historians have offered their own answers to this debacle over the years. What could cause an empire like that simply to disappear? Rushing to the end of the atlas, the rapid disappearance of that Spanish Empire confused me. I knew nothing of atrocity, bureaucracy, or colony, but the size of their empire stuck out to me. Tracing the boundaries of the territory with my hand, I imagined how mighty and prosperous Spain must have been to accumulate such a vast amount of territory. Even as a child, I was astounded by how much land it covered, and naturally I thought that it must have been powerful too. Looking more closely at that map, I saw the legend indicate this color represented the Spanish Empire. KEY WORDS: Spain, empire, decline, Habsburgs, New Worldįlipping through the pages of my children’s historical atlas, I-like so many others-stopped at the sight of the Earth being largely presented in a single color. My ultimate interest is to offer a critical analysis of how colonial Spanish strategy, governance, and reaction kicked off the ultimate decline of the peninsular economy. I finish the essay by analyzing how the New World expansion affected the common people of Spain and the role that they played in the decline themselves. My work traces the root of these policies to the arguably misplaced confidence of the Spanish Crown in the influx of New World silver and gold and expands upon how exactly these policies were shaped and the ways in which they contributed to the ultimate collapse. I then explain how the Spanish Habsburg monarchs implemented careless policies, such as eager military ventures and reckless government borrowing, that furthered the issues that presented themselves after colonization and spelled doom for the future of the Spanish economy. These immediate consequences include the price inflation caused by more gold and silver, the significant cost of establishing new administration, and the compounding cost of defending these new territories. I go beyond the typical scholarship on the topic, beginning at colonization and its immediate effects rather than beginning with the consequences that came from these. This essay traces how this came about by connecting the stream of wealth from the New World and Spain’s ultimate decline. In the span of a few hundred years, Spain transformed from the world’s largest empire, acquiring seemingly endless wealth in the New World, to a modern periphery country, plagued by its economic decline from centuries earlier. ![]() ![]() Spain’s Lesson in Hubris: Tracing Spain’s Financial Collapse to the Beginning of its New World Empireīy Ryan Miller Photo by David Klein on Unsplash
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