Empires throughout History: Spanish Empire

Empire that provided much of the inspiration for Western expansion and domination of non-Western areas in the modern era.

The dust had barely settled from Spain's wars of liberation from the Moors when the Spanish Crown began to redirect the aggressive ambitions of its restless population to explore and conquer newer worlds. The fruits of these endeavors left Spain with the largest and richest colonial empire of the 1500s and 1600s and made it a major player in the global economy of that era. This proved to be a double-edged sword, as the effects of these efforts brought lethargy to the Spanish ruling class, while simultaneously making Spain's empire a more attractive target. The eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries saw a steady erosion of Spain's empire, so that by 1898, when the United States virtually finished it off, there was little left compared to the glory days of previous centuries.

Origins
Although the Portuguese were the earliest Western explorers of the modern era, the Spanish quickly caught up with them. In 1490, the Papal Line of Demarcation and the Treaty of Tordesillas divided the world into Portuguese and Spanish halves. While the Portuguese remained content primarily to establish trading posts (Brazil being a notable exception), the Spanish conquered and ruled much of the area they had been allocated. Within two generations of these agreements, Spain ruled most of the Western Hemisphere as well as several island chains in the Pacific, most notably, the Philippines, named for Phillip II, Spain's ruler when it was conquered.

World trade in the sixteenth century consisted largely of the exchange that occurred because of the activities of the Spanish and Portuguese empires. After establishing their empire, the Spanish began to enslave the local populations and organize the production of exports. Three commodities—gold, silver, and sugarcane—comprised the bulk of exports from Spain's empire. All were labor intensive. Spain's harsh treatment of the enslaved population, already severely weakened by the introduction of Old World diseases and the dislocation caused by the Spanish conquest, resulted in the near extinction of the Native Americans of Central and South America. Production, however, had to continue, so the Spanish, mimicking the practices of Portuguese sugar plantations in the eastern Atlantic, began to import African slaves to be their colonial labor force. This greatly increased the volume of the global slave trade as Spain's colonies became massive slave importers beginning in the mid-1500s. As the sixteenth century drew to a close, Spain's empire was the envy of the world and it accounted for a large amount of world trade, both as a production source and a market.