How the West Won: The Neglected Story of the Triumph of Modernity (40 page)

The question persists: why did none of the many pre-Columbian societies of the Western Hemisphere ever learn to work metal other than gold and silver, which are too soft to use for tools or weapons? This is especially hard to explain since both North and South America are abundant in iron ore, copper, and tin (for making bronze), and since a number of pre-Columbian cultures knew how to mine. Nevertheless, when the conquistadors arrived, it was wooden clubs against steel cutlasses.

What seems even more remarkable is that this has become a semitaboo topic. It is taken up only in books by generalists having secure circumstances (as in the present instance); there is no ongoing discussion in scholarly journals, an outlet sustained by academics, many of them lacking tenure and most of them vulnerable to politically correct criticism.

In any event, among those who have addressed the topic, there is widespread agreement that a major factor in the lack of progress in the Western Hemisphere was the absence of large, domesticated mammals, chiefly cattle, sheep, horses, donkeys, camels, and water buffalo. In the more advanced parts of the globe these animals supplied a great deal of animal protein as well as the power to pull plows, carts, and chariots. They also provided mounts for cavalry as well as messengers. Jared Diamond insightfully noted that although the Spanish had been established in Panama for more than twenty years before Pizarro marched against the Incas, and although he had made two previous sorties into Incan territory, the Incan leaders remained ignorant of the existence of Spaniards until Pizarro marched inland in 1532. Diamond attributed this ignorance to the lack of communication within the Incan empire resulting from its having no written language and no mounted messengers.
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As Thomas Sowell pointed out, horses and camels had connected Europe and China, thousands of miles apart over the Silk Road, but given the animals’ absence in the Western Hemisphere, it was not possible “to connect the Iroquois on the Atlantic seaboard of North America with the Aztecs of Central America … or even be aware of their existence.”
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In addition, before the invention of wind and water power, oxen, horses, water buffalo, and sometimes even camels were a major source of mechanical power. “In contrast,” Diamond wrote, “the Americas had only one species of big domestic mammal, the llama/alpaca, confined to
a small area of the Andes and the adjacent Peruvian coast.… [But] the llama never bore a rider, never pulled a cart or plow, and never served as a power source or vehicle of warfare.”
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Finally, microbes originating in mammal species have frequently crossed over to humans; they were the origin of the infectious diseases to which Europeans and Asians had developed substantial immunity and which, upon contact, ran rampant among the indigenous Americans.
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The lack of large mammals was no doubt a major factor in the gap between Europeans and Indians, as the radical transformation of the Plains Indians once they had horses would attest. But much more must have been involved. Granted that the Indians lacked horses or oxen to pull wagons, but surely they would have been better off pulling wagons by hand rather than toting everything on their backs. They knew about the wheel (but used it only on toys), and the Aztecs, Incas, and Mayans even had roads—but they continued to use humans as their beasts of burden. Perhaps this resulted partly because they lacked the idea of progress. But many societies had no such notion and still advanced far beyond the Aztecs, Incas, and Mayans, let alone other Indian societies. Consider that the Iron Age began more than three thousand years ago, and Bronze Age societies flourished in Sumer and Babylon more than six thousand years ago. But five hundred years ago even the Incas and the Aztecs were essentially still in the Stone Age, using flint arrowheads and tipping their wooden clubs with rocks.

Other scholars have suggested that Europeans benefited greatly from the fact that the Eurasian landmass, lying essentially from east to west, occupies a limited range of latitudes and therefore has only modest variations in climate. This climate facilitated the spread of plants and animals (and of technologies involving both), and the same basic crops, such as wheat, grow nearly everywhere. In contrast, the north-south layout of the Western Hemisphere maximizes climatic variations and impedes the spread of plants and animals. As Sowell put it: “Bananas could not spread from Central America to Canada.”
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Indeed, the temperate zones of North and South America are so distant, and separated by such a wide tropical belt, as to make transmission of knowledge or of crops unlikely. Consequently, there were no potatoes or tomatoes in what is now Idaho, nor were there pumpkins or corn (maize) in what is now Argentina.

The more advanced a society is, the less its technology has originated locally: it learns of, and builds on, innovations from far and wide. In that
sense, debates about whether stirrups and gunpowder were independently invented in Europe or imported from China are pointless. What matters is that Europeans had both and made great use of them—and of innumerable other inventions and new techniques that spread among them, often with amazing speed, as in the case of cannons. In contrast, the Western Hemisphere saw minimal diffusion of innovations.

This brief sketch suggests several promising lines toward a general explanation of the relative lack of technological progress in the pre-Columbian Americas. It would seem to be a worthwhile intellectual challenge for someone to pursue.

The Universality of Colonialism

Perhaps the primary conclusion to be drawn from these historical episodes involves the fundamental similarity of human nature. Just as there is nothing surprising about the fact that the Mayans, Aztecs, and Incas imposed great empires on those unable to resist them, so too it was to be expected that Europeans would impose empires on the people of the New World, especially since those indigenous peoples lacked metal weapons but were not short of precious metals. It surely is an instance of moral progress that colonialism has become unacceptable—at least in most Western societies. But it is pointlessly anachronistic to suppose that sixteenth-century Europeans, Aztecs, or Incas should have known better.

12

The Golden Empire

“S
pain” did not fully exist until nine months before Columbus sailed on his first voyage. Isabella I of Castile had married Ferdinand II of Aragon in 1469, enabling the merger of the two kingdoms, but the reconquest of Granada from Muslim rule was not achieved until January 2, 1492. Even then, having a population of fewer than eight million people, Spain was only a minor power in Europe. That quickly changed in 1516, when Charles V became king of Spain. Charles was a Habsburg and heir to several other crowns, making him ruler of huge areas of Europe. The Spanish Empire was born.

Charles came by these territories through legitimate succession. He defended and expanded them with a powerful army and navy financed by the incredible flow of gold and silver from his colonies in the New World. Charles was succeeded in 1555 by his son Philip II, under whom the empire reached its zenith. In addition to all his father’s crowns, Philip was king of Portugal and briefly held the title of king of England and Ireland, by his marriage in 1554 to Queen Mary I (known to history as “Bloody Mary”). When Mary died in 1558, Philip lost his claim to the throne, which went to Elizabeth I, who was soon to become his nemesis. Eventually, Philip’s efforts to impose Spanish rule on England failed when his “Invincible Armada” was thwarted by Elizabeth’s “Sea Dogs.” Then Philip’s campaigns to stamp out the Reformation ended in the defeat of his army in the Netherlands, leaving Spain buried in mountains of debt, having nothing left of the incredible riches brought from the New World.

It soon became obvious that, even at its imperial height, Spain had remained a backward nation.
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Even so, Spain had accelerated the rise of the West by opening the New World, pushing England into a global role, and spurring the rise of Dutch capitalism.

Building an Empire

The conquest of Granada from the Moors was a long and expensive undertaking. The need for new sources of income to offset these costs is thought to have been an important consideration in Queen Isabella’s change of heart about funding Columbus. Of course, she had in mind profits from voyages to the real Indies to obtain cargoes of spices and silks. As things turned out, Columbus’s mistake yielded far greater wealth, all of which was spent on a century of imperial undertakings.

Torrents of Gold and Silver

Spanish gold fever began when Columbus noticed that many Indians wore golden trinkets. Forty years later, when Pizarro demanded a room filled with gold as ransom for the ill-fated Atahualpa, the Incas brought more than fifteen thousand pounds of the precious metal. The next year, when the Spanish took the Incan capital of Cuzco, they captured an even larger amount of gold. Soon the Spanish also began to export silver, which was far more abundant than gold, albeit less valuable. Between 1521 and 1590 an astonishing two hundred tons of gold and more than eighteen thousand tons of silver were exported to Spain. And these are only the official figures. It is estimated that as much as an additional 50 percent was smuggled into Spain to avoid giving the crown its legal share.
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To grasp the magnitude of this flow of precious metals, consider that, even counting only the official figures, these imports tripled Europe’s supply of silver and increased the gold supply by about 20 percent.
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Initially the gold and silver came from stocks in the possession of Indians. But by midcentury the overwhelming amount came from mines, some already in use by Indians but many newly discovered—in Mexico, Peru, Colombia, and elsewhere. In 1546 the Spanish found the incredibly productive silver mines at Petosí in what is now Bolivia. Despite its extreme altitude, being 13,420 feet above sea level, for a few years Petosí became a boomtown with perhaps one hundred thousand residents.
At first the mining at Petosí and elsewhere was done by a mixed labor force—some Indian slaves (despite efforts against it) but mostly hired workers, many of them Indians and some Spaniards. But in 1608 black slaves began to work the mines, and soon they did most of the mining.

Because precious metals are heavy, elaborate arrangements were needed to transport them to Spain. First, llamas or mules were used to carry the refined metals to the western coast. Then ships carried the gold and silver to Panama. Mule trains hauled the treasure across the isthmus to the Atlantic shore, where it was stored under guard and periodically loaded on ships forming the Spanish treasure fleet, consisting of big, well-armed carracks, and later galleons, that convoyed the treasure back to Spain. Such security was necessary because pirates and privateers lurked everywhere, as will be seen.

Empire via Inheritance

Against all odds, Charles V was heir to three of Europe’s most powerful royal dynasties. First was the House of Habsburg, rulers of much of modern Germany and Austria. Second was the House of Valois-Burgundy, rulers of the Burgundian Netherlands and kingdoms stretching from the North Sea to the Alps, among them Brabant, Limburg, Luxembourg, Holland, Zeeland, Namur, Franche-Comte, Flanders, and Artois. Finally, Charles was heir to the House of Trastámara of Castile and Aragon (which now formed Spain), as well as Sicily, Sardinia, and Naples—the last three covering all of Italy south of the Papal States. This immense patrimony made Charles the most powerful ruler in Europe. In 1519, after paying stupendous bribes, he gained the title of Holy Roman Emperor. Given the Spanish possessions in the New World as well as Asia, his was the first empire on which it was said “the sun never sets.”
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But Charles was not content. In 1527 his superbly armed troops (most of them mercenaries) overwhelmed a force assembled by France, Venice, Milan, and the pope, and took Rome. Unfortunately, Charles already was afflicted by what became a chronic problem for the new empire. Despite the immense influx of gold and silver, his debts had mounted rapidly, and hence his troops had gone unpaid for some months. The result was that when they entered Rome, the imperial soldiers broke ranks and went on a spree, looting and setting fire to the city.
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Although Charles expressed his most sincere regrets for the “Sack of Rome,” as it became known all across Europe, this outrage worked to his advantage—never again did
either he or his son Philip face papal opposition. To the contrary, the Vatican became a willing and substantial source of imperial loans. In addition, a year later Genoa allied itself with Charles. In 1530 he took control of Florence, and five years later Milan became part of the Spanish Empire. All seemed well.