The Spanish Empire in the Americas

The Spanish Empire in the Americas was the first, and for a long stretch the only, continental European empire in the New World, and it remained the largest until the 1820s. The conventional way to tell its story is to emphasize Cortés and Pizarro, silver and missionaries, the Black Legend and the Bourbon reforms. The more interesting way, which follows the work of James Lockhart, Stuart Schwartz, and Peter Bakewell, is to notice that the Spanish empire worked because, within a generation of 1492, Iberian institutions and American collaborators had reinvented them. The Spaniards did not transpose Castile. They improvised a creole state on the bones of the Aztec and Inca empires, and they ran it for three hundred years on the labor of indigenous peasants, enslaved Africans, and a thin layer of peninsular-born officials who never numbered more than a few hundred thousand.

The empire was, by 1600, the single most important political fact in the Atlantic world. Its silver paid for Spanish wars in Europe, financed Genoese and German banking, and traveled across the Pacific to underwrite the Ming and early Qing economies. Its missionaries had baptized millions. Its cities — Mexico City, Lima, Quito, Bogotá — were the largest in the Americas. And its collapse between 1808 and 1824, when the mainland empire dissolved into eighteen republics, was the most consequential political event between the French Revolution and the First World War.

Conquest as Collaboration

The fall of the Aztec Empire between 1519 and 1521 and the fall of the Inca Empire between 1532 and 1533 are usually described as Spanish military victories. They were, more accurately, the result of a particular kind of political opportunity that the Spaniards exploited with ruthless skill. Bernal Díaz del Castillo’s account of the march to Tenochtitlán makes the dynamic clear: Cortés could not have crossed Mexico without the Tlaxcalans, who had been fighting the Aztecs for generations and saw the Spaniards as a useful counterweight. The same was true in Peru, where the Cañari, the Chachapoya, and the subjects of the recently defeated Chimú joined Pizarro in part because Atahualpa’s victory in the Inca civil war had been unusually bloody. The standard English-language military accounts — Ballard’s With Sword and Fire or Thomas’s Conquest — tend to underplay this. Restall’s Seven Myths of the Spanish Conquest (2003) and Matthew Restall and Felipe Fernández-Armesto’s work are the corrective.

Disease was the second decisive factor, and it deserves a separate sentence because it is easy to overstate. Smallpox arrived in central Mexico in 1520 with the Narváez expedition, killing perhaps 25 to 40 percent of the population of the central plateau, including the emperor Cuitláhuac. It reached the Andes around 1524 or 1525, killing Huayna Capac sometime around 1527 and triggering the civil war between Atahualpa and Huáscar that left the empire divided when Pizarro arrived. The epidemics did not “win” the conquests for the Spanish, but they removed enough of the indigenous political and military leadership that small Spanish forces, operating through alliances with indigenous rivals of the Aztecs and Incas, could do so.

The Machinery of Empire

What the Spanish built after conquest was distinctive. The Council of the Indies, established in 1524, and the Casa de Contratación in Seville (1503) were the central metropolitan bodies. In the colonies, two great viceroyalties — New Spain, based in Mexico City, and Peru, based in Lima — were the basic units, to which New Granada (1717) and Río de la Plata (1776) were added. The audiencia, a court of appeal with administrative functions, was the most durable colonial institution. Beneath it lay the corregimiento and the alcaldía mayor, units of rural administration that Locke, one of the great students of Spanish American bureaucracy, has shown survived in some places until the late colonial period.

Two labor systems organized the economy. The encomienda, established in the early 1500s, granted indigenous tribute and labor to Spanish holders; it was supposed to be temporary, and in fact it was largely replaced by the repartimiento (or mita in the Andes) by the mid-sixteenth century. The repartimiento conscripted indigenous men for rotating stints of wage labor, often on public works, in mines, or on haciendas. African slavery, introduced from the beginning, became dominant in the sugar-producing Caribbean and coastal Brazil and in the silver-refining towns of the highlands. The system was brutally extractive, but it was not, pace the Black Legend, uniquely so — Lockhart and Schwartz’s Early Latin America (1983) makes the comparative point that English and Dutch colonial labor systems were, in their own contexts, just as coercive.

The cities are the most visible Spanish legacy. The Laws of the Indies (1573, codifying practice from the 1520s) prescribed a grid plan, a central plaza, a parish church, a town hall, and a cabildo (municipal council). Hundreds of these towns were founded across the hemisphere in the sixteenth century, and the pattern remains the dominant urban form of Latin America today. Mexico City, founded on the ruins of Tenochtitlán in 1521, was the largest city in the Americas until the late nineteenth century. Lima, founded by Pizarro in 1535, was the capital of South America. The universities — Mexico and San Marcos in 1551, later Córdoba, Chuquisaca, and Havana — trained the lawyers, priests, and physicians who staffed the colonial administration. The Mexican press, established by Juan Pablos in 1539 under the direction of the Seville printer Juan Cromberger (although some historians push the start of printing in Mexico back into the 1530s and others question whether Pablos was truly the first), was the first in the Americas and one of the earliest in the non-European world.

The Silver Economy

The economic engine of the empire was silver. The great deposits of Zacatecas and Guanajuato in New Spain, and above all of Potosí in highland Peru, made the Spanish American empire the world’s leading producer of precious metals from the 1550s to the 1690s. Production figures are imprecise, but the best modern estimates put American silver output at somewhere between 75 and 90 percent of the world total in the late sixteenth century. The mercury amalgamation process, developed in New Spain in the 1550s by Bartolomé de Medina (and refined later in Potosí by Pedro Fernández de Velasco), made low-grade ores profitable. Potosí’s cerro rico alone may have produced 40,000 to 60,000 tons of silver over its working life, and the city’s population reached 150,000 in the early seventeenth century — larger than contemporary London or Madrid.

The Spanish state took a fifth of the production, the quinto real, plus a thick layer of additional taxes and the alcabala (sales tax). The silver traveled in two annual convoys, the flota and the galeones, from Veracruz and Cartagena to Seville. Much of it ended up financing Spanish wars against the Protestants and the Ottomans; some of it paid for the Genoese bankers who had lent to the Habsburgs; and a significant share, especially after 1580, crossed the Pacific on the Manila galleons to be absorbed by the Chinese economy. The price revolution of the sixteenth century — a sustained inflation across Eurasia, driven at least partly by the silver inflow — is the clearest trace of this American money in European price records.

The dependence on bullion was also a structural weakness. When the silver veins thinned, the empire’s revenues collapsed. The 1630s and 1640s saw a deep fiscal crisis; the 1690s saw a partial recovery, partly from new Mexican mines like Real del Monte. The colonial economy remained, to the end, heavily export-oriented — silver, sugar, tobacco, cochineal, indigo, hides — and dependent on the metropole for high-value manufactured goods. Brading’s Miners and Merchants in Bourbon Mexico, 1763–1810 (1971) is the best account of the late colonial economy.

The Black Legend, Reconsidered

The leyenda negra — the Black Legend of uniquely Spanish cruelty in the Americas — originated in the propaganda of the Dutch Revolt, in English and French justifications of their own colonial projects, and in the testimony of Spanish reformers. The foundational text is Bartolomé de las Casas’s Brevísima relación de la destrucción de las Indias (1552), which catalogued Spanish atrocities in the Caribbean. The interpretive question, which has occupied historians since the nineteenth century, is whether Las Casas was the source of the Black Legend or merely one of its instruments — and the answer, in the careful reading of Lewis Hanke, is that Las Casas was both. He believed he was writing an honest testimony of Spanish crimes to spur reform; his Protestant translators used the same text as a polemic against Catholic Spain. Both intentions are real.

The Black Legend is also not entirely wrong. The demographic catastrophe that followed 1492 was real, and much of it was driven by Spanish policy as well as by disease. The encomienda and repartimiento were coercive labor systems that killed a great many people. The caci-cazgos in Mexico and the curatos in the Andes were instruments of extraction. The defense of the conquest, popular in nineteenth-century Spanish and Latin American historiography, sometimes went too far the other way; Clendinnen’s Aztecs: An Interpretation (1991) and Todorov’s The Conquest of America (1982) are the modern standard correctives, neither of which flatters either the conquistadors or their apologists. The honest position, which Restall argues, is that the conquest was contingent, collaborative, and catastrophic.

The Bourbon Reforms and the End of Empire

The eighteenth-century Bourbon reforms, launched under Philip V and his minister the Conde de Campillo, and continued by the Marqués de la Ensenada and later Floridablanca, were the most ambitious attempt to reorganize the Spanish American empire. New viceroyalties (New Granada in 1717, Río de la Plata in 1776, Venezuela in 1777) replaced the older two-viceroyalty structure. The intendancy system, modeled on French practice, replaced some of the older corregimiento units. Trade was loosened in 1778 with the Reglamento de libre comercio, allowing most Spanish American ports to trade directly with Spanish ports rather than routing through Veracruz or Cartagena. State monopolies on tobacco, gunpowder, and other commodities were tightened. The creole elite, who had been the principal beneficiaries of the old system, found themselves shut out of the senior colonial offices, and the resentment this bred helps to explain the relative ease of the early nineteenth-century independence movements.

How much the reforms accomplished is genuinely debated. Weber’s The Spanish Frontier in North America (1992) and Brading’s The First America (1991) emphasize that administrative tightening on paper often had only modest effects on the ground; the Bourbon reforms raised metropolitan revenue but did not transform the economic structure of the colonies. What the reforms did do, in the interpretation of most historians from David Brading to Jaime Rodríguez O., was to create a class of creole administrators and intellectuals who had the political capacity to run their own states when the opportunity arose. The opportunity came in 1808, when Napoleon put his brother Joseph on the Spanish throne and triggered the constitutional crisis in the empire.

The Wars of Independence

The dissolution of the Spanish American empire between 1808 and 1824 is conventionally told as a sequence of heroic liberation wars led by Bolívar, San Martín, Iturbide, and others. The reality, which is the subject of Timothy Anna’s Spain and the Loss of the Americas (1983) and Rodríguez O.’s The Independence of Spanish America (1998), is more complicated. The early juntas of 1808 and 1810 were responses to the Spanish political crisis, not incipient republican projects. Most creole leaders wanted to keep the Spanish connection on their own terms. The shift to outright independence came slowly, in stages, and was driven as much by the inability of the restored Ferdinand VII to compromise as by the appeal of republican ideology. The Haitian Revolution, the American Revolution, and the Spanish liberal constitution of 1812 all shaped the discourse; the actual fighting was a long, brutal, and regionally uneven civil war.

By 1825, only Cuba and Puerto Rico remained under Spanish rule in the Americas. The new republics inherited a stratified society, an export economy, a Catholic Church, and a deep suspicion of metropolitan authority — all of which shaped Latin American politics for the next two centuries. The patterns set by the Spanish empire, in other words, did not end with its collapse; they were, in many places, reinforced by it.