Making a New World: Founding Capitalism in the Bajío and Spanish North America

Prologue: Making Global History in the Spanish Empire

Prologue Making Global History in the Spanish Empire The world BeCame whole in the sixteenth century. Population growth, rising trade, and tax collections mandated in silver set off a burgeoning demand for the metal in Ming China just as Spaniards conquered American dominions and found mountains of silver. From the 1550s rising streams of silver from Potosí, high in the Andes, and Zacatecas, far north of Mexico City, flowed west to Europe, to be traded on to China for silks, porcelains, and other goods. Before 1600 a second flow annually sailed west from Acapulco on galleons bound for Manila, again traded for Chinese wares. Silver mined in American colonies of a European empire met a rising Chinese demand, fueling global trade and commercial ways that eventually led to capitalism.1 Globalization began in unplanned and little understood encounters among peoples who lived in villages, mining centers, and trading cities ruled by diverse empires, speaking distinct languages and worshipping in varied ways. Around 1500 Ming China included the largest, densest population of any world region; most people there lived by household production in communities linked by growing local markets and regional trade; an empire that took taxes in silver added pressures to put produce into markets, further stimulating trade. At the same time western Europe emerged from the century of depopulation and depression inflicted by the plague of 1348; the sixteenth century saw its populations finally grow again, its cultivation expand, and its trade deepen, while its states continued to fight for survival and dominance , and Iberians led unprecedented overseas expansion. Meanwhile the Americas faced European incursions, bringing devastating 2 prologue diseases and levels of depopulation approaching 90 percent, opening the way for new empires to rule communities once subject to Andean and Mesoamerican states, and to forge new societies in regions where newcomers found economic opportunity among people long free of state rule, now also facing the devastation of smallpox and other Old World infections. Spain’s Americas generated silver that fueled global trade; Portuguese Brazil pioneered American sugar and slave plantations that made sugar an Atlantic commodity second only to silver and Africans a growing item of trade. The expansion of trade linking Europe and Asia, the opening of the Americas to European colonization, and the rise of the African slave trade combined to transform the world. They began a global commercial dynamic that led to capitalism. Britons and their American offspring dominated the world of capitalism after 1800. That has led to enduring presumptions (among Europeans and their offspring) that capitalism was Europe’s gift to the world (or plague upon it). Classic authors from Adam Smith to Karl Marx and Max Weber promoted these views, as have recent scholars including Immanuel Wallerstein, Eric Wolf, and Fernand Braudel.2 Now analysts as different as Dennis Flynn and Arturo Giráldez, Andre Gunder Frank, and Kenneth Pomeranz have emphasized China’s commercial dynamism and its central role in stimulating global trade from 1500 to 1800. European primacy was a late development—emerging around 1800.3 We face a fundamental rethinking of the rise of capitalism. One conclusion seems set: the accelerating commercialization that began around 1500 was a global process. Ming China was a major participant , as were India, Japan, and the Manila entrepot that tied them to the Americas. European financial centers from Venice to Amsterdam to London were key players, as were the founding Portuguese and Spanish empires, and the Dutch, French, and British regimes that rose to challenge them. No regime, no cartel of merchants designed or ruled the global trade that led the world toward capitalism. There is debate about the relative importance of Europe and Asia and their diverse sub-regions during centuries of foundation; there is debate about why hegemonic power became concentrated in northwest Europe around 1800, and about whether that power was broadly European or mostly British.4 In most discussions and debates, the Americas appear as appendages of Europe. Their colonization surely contributed to the rise of Europe; the importance of colonial extractions is debated. How much did silver or the sugar and slave trades fuel (or inhibit) the rise of Europe and differentiate its regions? Yet if silver was essential to early globalization , should we presume that the American societies that produced prologue 3 it in prodigious quantities were peripheral to global dynamism? This analysis rethinks the role of the Americas, especially Spain’s Americas, and notably...