What happened to the Spanish Empire?

Great Debates
1

At one point, the Spanish Empire was THE pre-eminent military power in the world, controlling nearly all of Central and South America, large chunks of the Caribbean, as well as the Philippines, Morocco, parts of West Africa, and a few other scattered Islands.

Now, Spain controls… the Canary Islands, a couple of cities in Morocco, and some islands off the coast of Morocco.

I know by the time they were defeated in the 1898 Spanish-American War they were a shadow of their former selves (much like the Ottoman Empire in WWI), and much of this seemed to have stemmed from the power vacuum resulting from Napoleon marching in and taking over the Iberian at the start of the 19th century- Most of Central/South America declared themselves independent and there wasn’t a lot the Spanish could do about it at the time, and afterwards they just weren’t in a position to go and re-take their old Colonial possessions.

But even so, the Spanish basically seemed to go from World Superpower to Target Practice within about 50 years or so.

What happened?

2

The same thing that will happen to Saudi Arabia and the Gulf States when the oil runs out, for the exact same reason. The Spanish empire was based entirely on gold and silver dug up in the Americas. They had no industry, no trade, no science, no cash crops. All they had was money, which they immediately spent in on luxuries and mercenaries. Once the precious metals ran out, all they had left was Western Europe’s most backwards economy and two dozen useless colonies.

3

Some dude agrees with Alessan, for what it’s worth.

4

It’s generally agreed Spain lost its first-rank-power status once and for all with the end of the War of the Spanish Succession in 1714, if not with the Peace of Westphalia in 1648.

5

It’s a bit of elementary economics that people always tend to miss. Gold, silver, etc., are valuable simply because they are relatively scarce, stable, and fungible. When Spain started importing gold from the New World, it increased the available quantity of gold by a significant factor (2X? 3X? I don’t know precisely what – but it was not a low 1.00001X sort of figure).

It’s the distinction between money and wealth. Twice the amount of money representing the same amount of wealth inflates – becomes half the value-per-currency unit it had been. If a car salesman in 1960 buys a $100,000 house by collecting 10% commission on the sale of 100 new cars @ $10,000 – and today his house is “worth” $350,000 but the price of a new car is $35,000 – the only thing that has changed is the value of the dollar; his house is still equivalent to the cost of 10 new cars, or the commission on sale of 100.

Spain had a lot more gold, temporarily equivalent to a lot more money. But it had virtually no added wealth. And when the value of gold dropped, so did Spain’s national gross worth.

The Spanish Empire was governed indifferently, generally for the benefit of the mother country but with the occasional sop to local interests and the occasional reformer. Net result was that there was minimal loyalty to Spain at the turn of the 19th Century – and a great deal of idealism and complaints about misgovernment by the Viceroyalties, Captaincyies General, etc.

Revolts broke out in Mexico, Gran Colombia, Argentina, Chile… were put down and recurred. And in South America, at least, the various revolutionaries were smart enough to develop a flexible joint strategy. The fact that Spain was dealing with restoration of the Bourbons (Borbones south of the Pyrenees) after Napoleonic takeover, made things just that much tougher for the loyalists (mostly in Peru and Bolivia).

When all was said and done, what was left of the Empire was the Canary Islands, three of the Balearic Islands (they got Minorca back later), suzerainty over the Two Sicilies, Puerto Rico, Cuba, and the Philippines. And that was the Spanish Empire through the 19th Century.

Then Spain copped an attitude against the U.S. at a time when Manifest Destiny was a big deal, and William R. Hearst played up Spanish offensiveness to foment war fever in America. Result: the Spanish-American War, U.S. possession of the Philippines and Puerto Rico, and a brief hegemony over Cuba before it was given its independence at the beginning of the 20th Century.

Exit the Spanish Empire, whimpering.

6

and as if that wasn’t bad enough, they were also dusty underpopulated resource-poor country right next to Europe’s two most powerful nations at the time, with a propensity for letting one drag them into a war with the other on a regular basis. Not good.

7

IIRC, James Burke in Day Universe Changed/Connections said Spanish law mandated the building of those lumbering Spanish caravels. The large caravels were good for hauling treasure back from the New World, but not very war-worthy.

8

To echo slaphead’s remarks, Spain was fundamentally a very low-resource country. It had a late start in European affairs, as in its formative period there was endless war in which both the Muslim and Christian powers tried to dominate all of Iberia. Sometimes it went one way, sometimes the other. Spain was not unified as we think of it today until the very time of Columbus! And absent modern transporation, it is a very tough country to earn a living from.

Spain also could not leave off European affairs. Portugal, the Italian states, Austria, and England were all mucking about and Spain often had little choice but to play (and fight) in the same arena. Spain was consistently sucked into various European affairs, and enjoyed considerable military success.

At the same time, Spain took a long time to unify internally. Catalonian nobles feuded with Aragonese, Aragon often shirked financial and military support, the government had to deal with split legal systems. The crown and nobility split the church between them. The Inquisition, which was vastly less terrible in reality than legend, was the creation of the monarchy trying to ensure loyalty. The monarchy got theirs, however, when the nobles and old money monopolized opportunities and offices through the Edicts of Blood. Nobles dominated many church offices, and they tended to rule the peasants like mini-emperors themselves.

In a lot of ways, the real question is not, “Why did the Spanish Empire fall?” Instead, we shoudl probably ask how it grew so large and lasted so long. By any rational measure it had no right to.

9

This is all very interesting an enlightening guys… thanks for the replies!

It’s interesting that Portugal managed to hang onto their Empire until the latter part of the 20th Century, whilst Spain lost most of theirs by the end of the 19th…

10

I’ve also read that Spain did an exceedingly poor job of capitalizing on the tremendous wealth that its colonies generated. It didn’t really have a developed economy so that most of the goods that it needed had to be imported from other European countries. The net result is that most of the money that Spain’s empire generated went to enriching its rivals.

11

They got in on the ground floor of colonial imperialism.

12

That was my understanding, too. They basically started the whole Age of Imperialism/Colonialism and everyone else showed up later after seeing the galleon-loads of loot the Spaniards were bringing back from The New World, AIUI.

13

Paul Kennedy in his book The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers devoted an entire chapter, The Habsburg Bid for Mastery, to why the Spanish/Austrian dynasty failed to unite Europe under a single government. At one point in the sixteenth century, Emperor Charles V could claim (on paper anyway) to be the rightful sovereign of forty percent of Europe. Kennedy goes into detail the “imperial overstretch” that Spain faced: when playing King of the Hill, the guy on top has everyone for his enemy, and that was pretty much the case with Spain. It didn’t help that Spain was a classic victim of “success disease”: having reached a pinnacle of power in the middle-sixteenth century, Spain tried to freeze social and political developement at that level, and the rest of Europe refused to go along. In short, Spain was just able to remain a superpower until it’s enemies and competitors advanced to the point that Spain couldn’t outclass them anymore. For just one example, compare the England that just barely fought off the Armada in the sixteenth century to the England that began ruling the waves in the eighteenth century.

14

It was a bit more than that. Spain enjoyed considerable success in its military endouvers in Europe, but there it was not a conquering power. In the New World, it was first but not by much. It didn’t merely colinize, but assimilated and absorbed a vast domain. Numerous faction, of varying levels of brutality, religious faith, and enterprise settled the New World.

This was probably a huge part of its success. If one group didn’t want to organize an area, another did. At the same time, it drained manpower and intellectual energy from Spain’s European domains by the boatload. C’est la vie.

15

Corruption, naked greed, oodles of silver and some gold at a time when there was no better currencyt, waaay over-the-top military expenditures (especially on ships unworthy of the magnificent Armada) and never-ending, conquest warfare

Add them all up and you have your answer. In fact I daresay there’s much to compare with today’s US’ so-called hegemony. Sort of like a flambé pudding, the flames won’t last long.

<off topic>Ours (gratefully) didn’t last and/or survive the resistance to it, but by the same token I seriously doubt the American one will either. In fact I see many of the same mistakes being repeated…as I also see many parallels</off topic>

16

As soon as I saw your name I figured your post would be a shot at the US.

Personally, I’m not seeing the oodles of silver and gold coming in from our colonies and corruption here is pretty low. No money being spent on ships unworthy of the armada, etc…

The US has no empire to lose. There has been no never ending conquest warfare so the conquests can’t be lost. Spain was a little country controlling a vast empire it lorded over. The US is a big country with next to nothing in outside possessions. Not that it’s power can’t erode, but it’s way different than the Spanish Empire.

17

This.

I’m in the middle of A Brief History of the Caribbean by Jan Rogozinski and this comes up again and again. What drove the incredible expansion of the Spanish Empire was certainly the Gold and Silver Rush, but it was the inefficient management of that Empire that led directly to its downfall. From the Seville’s guild monopoly on trade into and out of the Iberian to the inadequate yearly convoys. What should have been an investment in a business venture (like the Dutch and later the English and French) was instead for Spanish kings a cash cow of future treasure fleets to borrow against to fund European wars in an attempt to maintain European supremacy. Portugal did better because it was a Hapsburg Dominion in the early 1600’s and stayed out of direct European entanglements (it certainly had to deal with the Dutch overseas though).

18

Plus, if we were a conquering, colonizing power, we’d probably have token over Mexico and Canada by now. Not that there weren’t some who wanted to take Mexico as well as Cuba, but their motivations had more to do with ensuring the domination of slavery in American politics than any real desire for Mexican territory.

19

What happened to them? Well, it was full of Spaniards of course…

(Pretty much what’s already been said…when you base your empire on a fixed commodity then you rise and fall by that commodity. If you base your empire on stealing other peoples gold and silver, and by doing so it floods into your country, it devalues the very thing you are prizing. IIRC all that flooded gold and silver did was cause huge inflation as the price of goods and services rose dramatically. Plus, frankly, Spaniards were stupid, arrogant and evil bastards who couldn’t manage their way out of a paper bag, and were almost as priest ridden as the Irish used to be. Their government was corrupt, their nobles were corrupt, their merchants were corrupt, and the priesthood was corrupt…and all of them were getting their little piece of the pie.

It’s a shame that at one point they had a first rate military that allowed them to get away with it as long as they did…and a bigger shame they didn’t get what they deserved and be blotted from the pages of history once and for all.)

-XT

20

What’s really a shame is that Spanish blood/lineage was wasted on many a fool without the slightest clue of what cultural pride means.

Thankfully they comprise a narrow self-loathing minority who know little abouty history:

Our Spanish Heritage

If the only object of this thread is to bash Spain’s Empire, well then, go ahead. But sure as all get-out you won’t be fighting any ignorance.

Was it “good”? No. I don’t care for Empires, never will. Was it what the “Black Legend” most of you have been taught? Certainly not.

For educational purposes:

Black Legend