The relentless revolution: a history of capitalism by Joyce Appleby, Joyce Oldham Appleby Read Free Book Online

Albuquerque found himself imprisoned or shipwrecked more than once. At the insistence of his government, he laid an unsuccessful siege to Aden in 1513, becoming the first European to ply the waters of the Red Sea. Angered by the Egyptians, Albuquerque contemplated laying waste to the country by diverting the course of the Nile! On his return voyage after taking Ormuz in 1515, he died at sea. Commanders like Albuquerque had more in common with medieval Crusaders than modern merchants, as his sobriquet, “the Portuguese Mars,” suggests.
    The Spanish conquests had a similarly aristocratic and military cast. Ardent, fearless adventurers like Christopher Columbus, Hernando Cortés, Francisco Pizarro, Juan Ponce de León, and Ferdinand Magellan planted the Spanish flag from the Canaries to the Philippines. Blocked in their effort to reach the fabulous riches of the East by a westward route, the Spanish began to explore the land they had discovered. The Spanish crown moved in quickly after Columbus’s exploratory voyages to establish settlements throughout the Caribbean. After the conquests of the Aztecs and Incas in Mexico and Peru in the first half of the sixteenth century, the Spanish fell into a gold mine—many gold and silver mines. Better at coercing labor than organizing it, they used the native people to work for them. When they proved resistant, the Spanish began to import African slaves from Portuguese slavers. From their fortified city of Havana in Cuba, the Spanish treasure fleets crossed the Atlantic twice a year, directing to a specie-starved Europe a steady stream of precious metals. Later they established a trade between Acapulco on the west coast of Mexico and Manila in the Philippines, carrying silver west and returning with silk to be transshipped to Europe. Ten percent of this bounty from the New World went straight into the royal coffers.
    The spectacular discoveries of Portugal and Spain prompted the pope in 1494 to suppress any incipient rivalry between the two Catholic monarchies on the Iberian Peninsula. He divided the world between them! The pope recognized Spain’s claim to the Western Hemisphere, except for Brazil, which a Portuguese expedition headed for India had run into by mistake. Portugal gained the western coast of Africa and points east along the route to the Indian Ocean where it had set up several provisioning stations. Spain got the rest. But even the pope could not inhibit this rivalry. After Magellan discovered the Philippine Islands in the 1560s, the Spanish began to settle Manila, demonstrating that the world being round, there was a need for two boundary lines. The Portuguese were finally able to thwart subsequent Spanish intrusion into the East Indies. Originally the Spanish concentrated on establishing encomiendas, large estates in the New World, to exploit native labor while the Portuguese developed trade in the Indies. With the establishment of sugar plantations in Brazil in the late sixteenth century, the two empires came to resemble each other. 3 From 1580 to 1640 they shared a monarch.
    The countries on the Iberian Peninsula were Europe’s trailblazers. Both of them established fortified settlements in their new outposts and insisted upon dominating trade. The Spanish enjoyed a monopoly for a century before other Europeans arrived to challenge their dominance, and the Portuguese imposed monopolies wherever they could. Initially these events represented nothing more than new wrinkles in the old, traditional fabric of European society, but their success had profound implications. Reaching the Orient by ocean changed the geopolitics of Europe. It moved the levers of world trade from the Mediterranean Sea to the Atlantic Ocean, which washed northwestern Europe. Between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries, the momentum of trade and conquest passed from Portugal and Spain to the other countries with access to the Atlantic: the Netherlands, France, England, Denmark, and