Espejitos

Ask anyone around here about the colonial period and a familiar refrain emerges: Spain enriched itself at the expense of the indigenous peoples of Central America, extracting their wealth in return for 'espejitos'.

Without wishing to deny the exploitative nature of the empire, it should also be noted that it had fairly terrible effects back 'home' too.

In the middle ages Spain had a population of 18m. This had declined to as low as 7m by the end of the eighteenth century, a drop which can be explained in part by the voracious financial requirements of the imperial system, which were ultimately met by establishing sheep — in order to produce Merino wool, then a most valuable cash crop — on the former communal lands of Spanish peasants.

Sustainability, especially of the poorer classes, went out the window. The most familiar colonial architecture here in Guatemala, 'Spanish terracing', has nearly vanished in the southern part of the Iberian peninsula, where the forests were depleted in order to build fleets of ships. Wealth was not only transferred TO Europe, it was both transferred and trashed in perhaps unexpected ways within Europe.

One could be forgiven for thinking that the poorest regions of Western Europe today were always undesirable backwaters. Yet several of them, Wales and Sicily for example, were once rather rich in resources. Take a look at the Roman road system in Britain and you get a clear sense of how valuable they believed Wales to be. Yet today it is Western Europe's poorest nation.

It's comparatively easy to collect metals and other minerals from close to the surface and to strip whole areas of their forest cover and this is what happened in ancient and medieval times, according to the needs of the larger commercial and political blocks, many of which were still not operating as nation states in the modern sense. 

 

The Romans had treasured Hispania as their equivalent of the Mid-Western grain basket, and this pattern of agriculture was at first maintained by both Visigoth and Moor. 

 

 

But the Spanish empire was a muddle from the start, with Conquistadors determined to set themselves up as feudal potentates in the New World, while back home the treasure had a corrosive effect on the old society and much of it ended up funding the rise of capitalism in Northern Europe, leaving Spain socially and economically unequal almost to an extreme. ‘One foot in Africa’, as people used to say, even after democracy had been restored. 

 

Alongside the flourishing of the Christian imperial system, Spain experienced a form of Reformation from within, whereby the corruption of Rome was rejected and a more localised form of austere, goose-steppy Catholicism was absorbed into the newly authoritarian state as its essential component.