Spanish Empire

It began as a speculation about Asia. Columbus sailed west under a contract with the Catholic Monarchs, reached the Bahamas in October 1492, and spent the rest of his life insisting that he had found the outskirts of China. What he had found was a hemisphere of peoples who had no immunity to the diseases he and his men carried, no horses, no iron, and no reason to expect that the strangers' arrival would end their world. Within two generations the Caribbean had been emptied of most of its inhabitants, Mexico and Peru had been conquered, and silver from a mountain in the Andes was being minted into coins that circulated from Seville to Canton.

Its importance is not only that it was large. The Spanish Empire was the first European polity to rule territory on both shores of the Pacific as well as the Atlantic, the first to run a currency that circulated worldwide, and the first to argue, in public and at the king's expense, about whether its conquests were lawful. It produced the modern law of nations out of a dispute about the Indies, and the largest demographic catastrophe in recorded history out of the same enterprise. It also produced the model of the composite monarchy — a union of crowns in which each kingdom kept its own law — which is the ancestor of much of the political architecture of early modern Europe, and whose failure in Spain is one of the reasons that Latin America is a continent of republics.

Contemporaries did not call it the Spanish Empire. They spoke of the monarchy, of the Catholic Monarchy, of las Indias — the Indies — which were reckoned not colonies but kingdoms attached to the crown of Castile, each with its own law and its own privileges. The phrase "Spanish Empire" is a later coinage, useful for a map and misleading for a government. The map in this entry shows a year in which the thing was already old: 1697, the last decade of the Spanish Habsburgs, when the monarchy still held everything it had ever claimed in America except the western third of Hispaniola, ceded to France at the Peace of Ryswick in the same year.

At a glance

How did a Castilian voyage of 1492 become an American empire?

The enterprise began as an Atlantic gamble at the end of a war. Castile took Granada on 2 January 1492, ending eight centuries of Muslim rule in the peninsula, and within months the Catholic Monarchs had agreed to back a Genoese navigator's plan to reach the Indies by sailing west. The contract, the Capitulations of Santa Fe, made Columbus governor and viceroy of whatever he found and gave him a tenth of the profits. He left Palos on 3 August with three ships and about ninety men, and made landfall on 12 October on an island in the Bahamas that he named San Salvador.

What he found was not Asia but the Caribbean, and the first decade of Spanish settlement there set the pattern for everything that followed. Hispaniola was colonised in 1493 on the second voyage, with seventeen ships and more than a thousand men, most of them hoping for gold and none of them intending to farm. The mines of Cibao were worked by the Taíno, first by barter and then by compulsion; by 1503 the crown had authorised the governor, Nicolás de Ovando, to grant the labour of Indian communities to settlers, and the encomienda was in being. The result was a catastrophe. War, forced mining, flight and disease destroyed the Taíno population within a generation, and from 1501 the crown began to license the import of enslaved Africans to replace them.

The legal title came from the papacy and from a treaty. Alexander VI's bulls of 1493 granted Castile the lands to the west of a line in the Atlantic, on condition that the inhabitants were converted; the Treaty of Tordesillas of 1494, negotiated with Portugal, moved the line 370 leagues west of Cape Verde and gave Portugal the Brazilian coast. Neither document described what was actually there, and neither settled the question that mattered to the settlers: by what right did one man take another man's labour? The crown's answer was a stream of legislation — the Laws of Burgos in 1512, the Requerimiento of 1513, the New Laws of 1542 — each of which assumed that the Indians were free vassals who owed tribute and service, and each of which was evaded where it could not be ignored.

Expansion went faster than government. Puerto Rico was conquered in 1508, Jamaica in 1509, Cuba from 1511; Vasco Núñez de Balboa crossed the isthmus and reached the Pacific in 1513, and Ponce de León went to Florida in the same year. Each new island repeated the pattern of Hispaniola: a grant of people and their labour, a rush for gold, the collapse of the native population, and a demand for more labour from somewhere else. By 1519, when a minor gentleman named Hernán Cortés sailed from Cuba with a private army, the Spanish had a working model of conquest and no working model of government.

Why did the war in Mexico, 1519–21, decide the shape of the empire?

Cortés landed on the Mexican coast in the spring of 1519 with about five hundred men, sixteen horses and a few guns. He founded a town at Veracruz, renounced the authority of the governor of Cuba, and sent a letter to the king announcing that he was acting in the royal service. Then he marched inland, into a country of perhaps twenty million people ruled by an alliance of three cities that took tribute from most of central Mexico.

The Aztec Triple Alliance was not a state that could absorb a foreign army; it was a hierarchy of tribute-taking cities with a great many resentful subjects. Cortés exploited that. He made an alliance with Tlaxcala, a small state that had resisted Aztec conquest for generations, and with it and other disaffected towns he entered Tenochtitlan on 8 November 1519. The city astonished the Spaniards — larger than any in Spain, built on a lake, with markets, canals and a zoo — and the emperor Moctezuma received them as guests; Cortés took him hostage within a week. The alliance broke in 1520. A massacre of nobles during a festival, the death of Moctezuma, and the arrival of a Spanish force sent to arrest Cortés turned the occupation into a war, and on the night of 30 June the Spaniards were driven out of the city with heavy losses.

What saved them was disease and diplomacy. Smallpox, carried by a member of the expedition sent against Cortés, broke out in Tenochtitlan in 1520 and killed a large part of the population, including the emperor who had succeeded Moctezuma. Cortés spent a year rebuilding his army, collecting reinforcements from Cuba and the islands, and having thirteen brigantines built in pieces on the lake shore. The siege of Tenochtitlan lasted from May to 13 August 1521. The fighting was done largely by indigenous soldiers — the Tlaxcalans alone supplied tens of thousands — and the city fell when its water and food ran out. The last emperor, Cuauhtémoc, was taken trying to escape across the lake.

The consequences were structural. Mexico City was rebuilt on the ruins, and New Spain became the base from which the empire expanded north to Zacatecas and New Mexico, south into Guatemala and Honduras, and west across the Pacific. The conquistadors were rewarded with encomiendas carved out of the tribute rolls of the defeated cities, which is why the Mexican encomienda was from the beginning an institution built on existing tax records rather than on land. And the crown, alarmed by Cortés's independent style, moved quickly to put the new kingdom under officials it controlled. The pattern of conquest followed by royal consolidation, tried first in the Caribbean, was repeated on a continental scale.

How was the mainland empire governed after 1521?

The first instruments of government were improvised. A royal audiencia — a court with executive powers — was set up in Santo Domingo in 1511 to hear appeals from the islands, and the Casa de Contratación, founded in Seville in 1503, regulated trade, kept the registers of ships and passengers, and acted as a clearing house for the crown's commercial monopoly. The Council of the Indies was created in 1524, during the reign of Charles V, as a standing committee of the crown for everything touching America: legislation, appointments, justice in the last instance, war and the church. It sat until 1834, eight years after the last viceroyalty on the mainland had fallen.

In New Spain the audiencia of Mexico was established in 1527, and in 1535 the crown appointed Antonio de Mendoza as the first viceroy. The viceroyalty of Peru followed in 1542, with Blasco Núñez Vela arriving to take possession in 1544. The viceroy was the king's alter ego: he held the royal patronage, commanded the militia, supervised the treasury and presided over the audiencia. But he did not legislate, he did not control the judges, who corresponded directly with the council, and he could not be everywhere. The audiencias of Guatemala (1543), Guadalajara (1548), Bogotá (1550), Quito (1563), Charcas (1559) and Chile (1609) each governed a district and each guarded its own jurisdiction against him.

Below the audiencias the empire ran on corregidores and alcaldes mayores, royal officials who administered a district, collected tribute, supervised the repartimiento of labour and, in practice, traded on their own account. Below them were the cabildos, the town councils, which in the Spanish towns were elected by the local notables and in the Indian towns were often in the hands of the native nobility. The system was designed to prevent any one man from becoming too strong, and it succeeded at the cost of coherence. The viceroy's instructions were advisory; the audiencia's opinions were appealable; the council's orders took a year to arrive and were routinely softened on the spot with the formula obedezco pero no cumplo — I obey but do not comply.

The great exception to improvisation was the viceroyalty of Peru under Francisco de Toledo, who governed from 1569 to 1581 and spent five years travelling the Andes. Toledo resettled the Indian population into compact villages, or reducciones; fixed the tribute rolls; created a corps of corregidores de indios; established the mita of Potosí; founded the mint; and left behind a body of ordinances that governed Peruvian administration for two centuries. His work was the closest the Habsburgs came to a planned colonial state, and it was built on Inca precedents as much as on Spanish ones: the reducciones used the Andean ayllu, and the mita was the Inca labour levy turned to silver mining.

What was the encomienda, and why did the crown turn against it?

An encomienda was not a grant of land. It was a grant to a named Spaniard of the tribute and labour of a particular community of Indians, with the obligation to protect them, to see them instructed in the faith, and to provide for their defence. The land grants came separately, through mercedes and municipal allotments; the encomienda was a claim on people, not on soil. The distinction matters because the usual picture — a feudal manor transplanted to the Indies — obscures what the crown was doing. It was rewarding conquerors without giving them lordship over territory, which would have created a colonial nobility it could not control.

The crown never resolved the contradiction at the heart of the institution. If the Indians were free vassals, they could not be compelled to labour for a private individual; if they were compelled, they were not free. The Dominicans raised the question in Hispaniola at Advent 1511, when Antonio de Montesinos preached that the settlers were living in mortal sin. The Laws of Burgos of 1512 tried to regulate hours, wages, food and religious instruction, and were largely ignored. The Requerimiento of 1513 required Indians to acknowledge the pope and the king before they could be attacked, a document read to people who did not understand a word of it. Bartolomé de las Casas, who had himself held an encomienda, gave his up after a conversion in 1514, joined the Dominicans, and spent the next half-century arguing that the conquest was unlawful.

The New Laws of 1542 were the crown's most serious attempt to act. Promulgated on 20 November, they abolished the enslavement of Indians, ordered that encomiendas should not pass to heirs, required royal officials to surrender their own grants, and provided for a general visitation of the Indies. In Peru the viceroy's attempt to enforce them provoked a rebellion: Gonzalo Pizarro raised the colonists, defeated and killed Núñez Vela in 1546, and held Lima until the crown's commissioner, Pedro de la Gasca, defeated him in 1548. The crown retreated. Within three years it had withdrawn the clause ending inheritance, and the encomienda survived in many districts into the seventeenth century, gradually dissolving into the hacienda and the repartimiento of goods and labour.

The argument moved to Valladolid in 1550. A junta of theologians and jurists met to hear Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda, the crown's chronicler, defend the conquest on Aristotelian grounds — that some peoples are natural slaves, that the superior may rule the inferior for their own good, and that a war to end human sacrifice and cannibalism was just. Las Casas replied with an Apología that took days to read, arguing that the Indians were rational, that their polities were legitimate, and that the only lawful means of conversion was persuasion. The junta never reached a verdict. The crown's practical response was to stop licensing great conquests, to license "pacifications" instead, and to leave the moral question open, which is where it has stayed. The debate did not end the encomienda. It did establish that the crown had a conscience and that its American subjects had rights that could be argued in a court of law.

What did silver do to New Spain and Peru?

Silver made the empire worth governing. The mines of Potosí, in the Andes of Upper Peru, were discovered in 1545 — according to the usual account by an Indian prospector named Diego Huallpa — and the mines of Zacatecas, in northern Mexico, in 1546. Within fifty years Potosí was regarded as the largest industrial complex in the world, and the hill above it, the Cerro Rico, was honeycombed with galleries worked by thousands of men. By 1650 the city had about 160,000 inhabitants, making it one of the largest in the Western Hemisphere.

The technical history matters, because it explains why the boom lasted. The first ores were rich enough to be smelted in small clay furnaces on the hillside. As the surface deposits were exhausted, the miners turned to amalgamation with mercury, a process worked out at Pachuca in New Spain around 1554 and brought to Potosí in the 1570s. Mercury came from the mines of Huancavelica, discovered in 1563, and from Almadén in Spain; the crown kept the mercury trade as a monopoly and used it to control the silver producers. Water-powered crushing mills, fed by a system of artificial lakes that UNESCO describes as a hydraulic system of aqueducts and reservoirs, replaced hand labour in the refining. Toledo set up the mint at Potosí in 1572.

Labour was the binding constraint, and the answer was the mita. Toledo's ordinances of 1573 required sixteen highland provinces to send a rotating draft of adult men to the mines, for a year at a time, at wages fixed by the crown. The system was compulsory, it removed men from their communities for months at 4,000 metres, and it killed them in large numbers; the mitayos who survived returned with debts and without the labour their fields needed. The mita has been called a form of disguised slavery, and the description is not unfair. It was also, in the crown's eyes, a way of making the Indian population pay its share of the imperial burden in silver rather than in kind.

The output moved the world. Potosí's production peaked in the 1580s and 1590s, declined as the richest veins were worked out, and recovered in the seventeenth century as the hydraulic works were extended. New Spain's mines — Zacatecas, Guanajuato, San Luis Potosí, Parral — grew steadily and, by the eighteenth century, outproduced Peru. The silver went by two routes: to Seville and Cádiz in the fleets, and across the Pacific from Acapulco to Manila. The crown took a royal fifth, reduced in some districts and periods to a tenth, and mortgaged the proceeds years in advance to Genoese, Portuguese and later Dutch bankers. Spain's American silver did not make Spain rich. It made Spain creditworthy, which is a different thing, and it made the world's first global currency.

What happened to the people the empire ruled?

The demographic catastrophe is the central fact of Spanish American history, and it is still argued over. Central Mexico probably held between fifteen and twenty-five million people in 1519; by 1600 it held little more than a million. Hispaniola's population collapsed within thirty years. The Andean population fell heavily as well, though the estimates are even wider than for Mexico. The causes were epidemic disease, war, forced labour, famine and the disruption of agriculture — in that order of lethality, though historians differ about the weights.

The epidemics are documented. Smallpox arrived in 1520; measles in 1531; influenza in 1558; and a series of devastating outbreaks that the sources call cocoliztli in 1545 and again in 1576, which killed perhaps a third of the remaining population of New Spain. The "virgin soil" model, which explains the collapse by the absence of acquired immunity, is now regarded as necessary but not sufficient: the death rate was made worse by the concentration of survivors into towns, the demands of the mita and the repartimiento, and the destruction of the irrigation works and terraces that had sustained dense populations. What is not in dispute is the scale. It was the largest loss of life from disease and conquest in recorded history.

The survivors rebuilt. The crown recognised a "republic of the Indians" alongside the "republic of the Spaniards", with its own courts, its own nobility and its own communal lands, and in the sixteenth century the native elites used that status to keep their privileges and their language. Nahuatl remained the lingua franca of central Mexico; Quechua spread as the language of the Andes; Maya survived in Yucatán, where the Itza held out until 1697. But the republic of the Indians was also a machine for extracting tribute, and the caciques who ran it were increasingly indistinguishable from the Spanish landowners around them.

Africans replaced Indians where Indians could not be had. The crown licensed the slave trade through asientos — contracts with private merchants, Genoese, Portuguese, Dutch, French and finally British — and the ports of Cartagena de Indias, Veracruz and Buenos Aires became the gateways. The numbers shipped to Spanish America were smaller than those sent to Brazil or the British Caribbean, but they were large, and in the seventeenth century most of them entered through Cartagena and Buenos Aires. By the eighteenth century the free population of African descent outnumbered the enslaved in much of the Spanish Indies, and the militia companies of the Caribbean coast were largely black and mulatto.

The society that emerged was neither a two-caste system nor a melting pot. It was a hierarchy of legal statuses — español, indio, mestizo, mulato, zambo, negro — in which colour, legitimate birth, occupation, wealth and residence all counted, and in which the boundaries were porous in practice and rigid in law. The casta paintings of eighteenth-century Mexico, with their named mixtures and their households, are a taxonomy of that anxiety. At the bottom were the enslaved, who were property and had almost no standing in law; at the top a small peninsular elite, born in Spain, which held the great offices of church and state, and which the Bourbons tried, with limited success, to keep for peninsulars.

How did the empire reach the Pacific?

The Pacific was a Spanish lake before it was anything else. Balboa saw it in 1513; Magellan crossed it in 1521 and died in the Philippines; and the crown spent forty years trying to find a way back across it, because the prevailing winds made the return voyage the hard problem. Andrés de Urdaneta solved it in 1565, sailing north from the Philippines to the latitude of Japan and catching the westerlies across to California. In the same year Miguel López de Legazpi established the first permanent settlement in the islands, and in 1571 he founded Manila.

The Manila galleon was the result. One or two great ships a year left Acapulco with silver and returned with Chinese silk, porcelain, spices, ivory and cotton. The trade was regulated by decrees that tried to keep it small — the ordinance of 1593 limited it to two ships and 300 tons, and later caps fixed the value of the cargo — and it was evaded by everyone, including the viceroys who were supposed to enforce it. The merchants of Mexico City and Manila, the Chinese traders of the Parián quarter, and the religious orders all had a stake in the traffic, and the annual fair at Acapulco was one of the great commercial events of the Pacific.

The Philippines never paid for themselves. The colony was administered from Mexico, its governor was subordinate to the viceroy of New Spain, and its deficit was covered by an annual subsidy, the situado, shipped from Acapulco. What the islands provided was a foothold within reach of China, a base for the missions, and a defensive screen against the Dutch, who took Malacca in 1641 and attacked Manila in the 1640s. The Spanish never conquered China, never converted Japan — the missionaries were expelled in 1614 and the trade cut off — and never made the Philippines profitable. They did, however, connect the silver of Potosí to the silk of Canton, which is the single most important commercial link of the early modern world.

The link broke slowly. The Bourbons tried to reform the colony, gave it a Royal Company of the Philippines in 1785 and tried to develop its agriculture, but the galleon survived until the last ship sailed from Acapulco in 1815. Mexican independence in 1821 cut the situado and forced the islands to pay for themselves, and the Philippines remained Spanish until 1898, by then a colony in the modern sense rather than a viceregal outpost.

How did the Habsburgs govern so many kingdoms?

The Spanish monarchy was composite before it was Spanish. Charles V inherited Castile, Aragon, the Habsburg lands in Austria and the Low Countries, and was elected emperor in 1519; his son Philip II added Portugal in 1580 and with it the Portuguese empire in Brazil, Africa and Asia. Each of these possessions kept its own laws, its own taxes and its own representative institutions. The king ruled them through his councils — Castile, Aragon, Italy, Flanders, Portugal, the Indies — and through viceroys who represented him locally. There was no imperial parliament, no imperial tax and no imperial law.

The American half of the system was attached to Castile, not to Spain as a whole. The Indies were the lordship of the kings of Castile, which is why Castilian law, the Castilian customs and the Castilian coinage went with them, and why the Council of the Indies sat alongside the Council of Castile rather than above it. The viceroy was the king's image; the audiencia was the king's court and the guardian of his conscience; the corregidor was the king's presence in the district. The system worked by negotiation, by the sale of offices — which from the 1550s became a regular source of revenue — and by the willingness of local elites to buy into it. Its characteristic vices were corruption, jurisdictional conflict and delay.

Money held it together and pulled it apart. The crown's American revenue came from the royal fifth on silver, the alcabala, the tribute of the Indians, the sale of offices and the ecclesiastical subsidies, and it was never enough for the wars in Europe. Philip II's bankruptcies of 1557, 1575 and 1596, and Philip IV's of 1627, were defaults on short-term loans secured on the next fleet. The asientos of the Genoese bankers turned American silver into Flemish tercios; the Army of Flanders was paid, when it was paid at all, with money that had crossed the Atlantic and the Alps. The Dutch revolt, the wars in Italy and the Thirty Years' War consumed the empire's American income, and the American kingdoms, which had no say in those wars, paid for them.

The Habsburg style was to govern as little as possible and to arbitrate between competing jurisdictions. That was cheap, and it preserved local loyalty; it also meant that the crown could not extract more than the local elites were willing to give. The Portuguese secession of 1640 and the Catalan revolt of the same year showed the limits of the model. The American kingdoms did not revolt, but they did entrench: by the end of the seventeenth century the cabildos, the local merchants' consulates and the creole clergy ran much of Spanish America, and the crown's officials governed at their pleasure.

What did Portugal's secession in 1640 mean in America?

Portugal and Spain shared a king from 1580, when Philip II pressed his claim to the Portuguese throne and the Portuguese Cortes accepted him. For sixty years the two empires were one, and the American consequences were immediate. Brazil's frontier with Spanish America ceased to be an international boundary; Portuguese expansion up the Amazon and south along the coast continued without legal obstacle.

The union also brought Portugal's enemies into the Americas. The Dutch, at war with Spain from 1621, attacked Portuguese Brazil — Salvador in 1624, Pernambuco from 1630 — and the Spanish monarchy had to defend a colony that was not its own. The Portuguese, for their part, resented paying Spanish taxes and fighting Spanish wars. When the Catalan revolt broke out in 1640 and the count-duke of Olivares demanded yet more money and men, the Portuguese nobility and clergy rose in Lisbon on 1 December 1640 and proclaimed the duke of Braganza king as John IV.

The Iberian Union was over, but the war was not. Spain fought Portugal until the Treaty of Lisbon in 1668, and the American dimension of that war was mostly commercial. Portuguese ships supplied Buenos Aires with slaves and manufactured goods and took away silver from Upper Peru, in defiance of the Seville monopoly; the Portuguese crown licensed the trade and took a cut. The Spanish crown could neither stop it nor do without it. When the war ended, Spain recognised Portuguese independence but not a boundary. The two crowns spent the next century arguing about the Amazon and the Río de la Plata, and the argument was settled on the ground by Portuguese settlers and missionaries rather than by treaties.

The most visible result was Colônia do Sacramento. Founded by Manuel Lobo in January 1680 on the northern bank of the Río de la Plata, opposite Buenos Aires, it was a smuggling post disguised as a town, and the Spanish attacked it within months. It was restored to Portugal in 1681, occupied by the Spanish in 1705, and returned to Portugal in 1715 under the Treaty of Utrecht. By then the Portuguese empire in America was a separate system again, and the Spanish monopoly of trade with its own colonies was a fiction that the British and French were about to make permanent.

Why did the dynasty change in 1700, and what did Utrecht settle?

Charles II of Spain died on 1 November 1700, childless and physically incapable, leaving his entire monarchy to Philip, duke of Anjou, grandson of Louis XIV. The will was a gamble to keep the Spanish inheritance intact; it failed. The Grand Alliance of England, the Dutch Republic and the Habsburg emperor fought to put Archduke Charles on the throne, and the war that followed was fought in Italy, the Low Countries, Germany, Spain and the Atlantic. Its American theatre was mostly at sea — a privateering war in the Caribbean and a constant threat to the fleets that carried the silver — while in Europe the Anglo-Dutch attack on the treasure fleet at Vigo in 1702, the capture of Gibraltar in 1704 and the loss of Minorca in 1708 shifted the balance.

The peace was signed at Utrecht in 1713. Philip V was recognised as king of Spain, the first of the Bourbon line, on condition that the crowns of Spain and France should never be united; the Spanish Netherlands, Milan, Naples and Sardinia went to the Habsburgs; Britain kept Gibraltar and Minorca; and Spain granted Britain the asiento de negros, the monopoly contract for supplying enslaved Africans to Spanish America, together with the navío de permiso, the right to send one 500-ton ship a year to the fairs of Portobelo and Cartagena. The treaty text is explicit: the asiento contract signed at Madrid on 26 March 1713 was to be "deemed and taken to be part of this treaty, in the same manner as if they had been here inserted word for word". The treaty also bound Spain never to alienate any part of the Indies to France or to any other power.

For Spanish America the settlement was less a territorial loss than a commercial one. Spain kept everything it had in America; it lost the legal monopoly of its own trade. The asiento gave British merchants a licensed foothold in the Caribbean and the navío de permiso gave them a legal cover for a much larger contraband. The South Sea Company's annual ship was, in practice, a floating warehouse, and the Spanish coast guard's attempts to stop the trade led to the War of Jenkins' Ear in 1739 and to the end of the asiento in 1750. Utrecht is therefore the point at which the Spanish Empire's American economy stopped being a closed system and became a contested one.

What did the Bourbons try to change?

The new dynasty brought a new theory of government. The Habsburgs had ruled by negotiation between kingdoms; the Bourbons wanted administration. Philip V abolished the crown councils of the realms of Aragon, replaced them with secretariats, and applied the same logic to America. The Casa de Contratación was moved from Seville to Cádiz in 1717; the viceroyalty of New Granada was created in the same year, suppressed in 1723 and restored in 1739 with its capital at Bogotá; the fleet system was gradually replaced by licensed single ships, the navíos de registro, which sailed when trade demanded rather than when the convoy could be assembled.

The great reformer was Charles III, who reigned from 1759 to 1788. His visitor-general in New Spain, José de Gálvez, spent six years reorganising the viceroyalty's finances and defence; the Jesuits were expelled from every Spanish dominion in 1767, and their estates, missions and schools were seized; the viceroyalty of the Río de la Plata was created in 1776, with Buenos Aires as its capital; and the intendancy system, already tried in Spain, was extended to America in the 1780s, replacing the old corregidores with officials directly responsible to the crown. The free-trade decree of 12 October 1778 opened the principal American ports to trade with a long list of Spanish ports and broke the Cádiz monopoly in law.

The reforms worked, in the narrow sense that they raised money. Trade grew, customs revenue rose, and the Spanish navy was rebuilt. They also offended almost everyone. The intendancies displaced the creole officials who had bought their posts; the expulsion of the Jesuits removed the schools and the mission economies that had sustained the frontier; the new taxes and the tighter control of the tobacco and alcohol monopolies provoked riots. The great Andean rebellion of 1780, led by Túpac Amaru II and crushed with the execution of him and his family in Cusco in 1781, was a response to the fiscal pressure and to the contempt with which the new officials treated the Indian nobility. The Comunero revolt in New Granada in 1781 was a response to the same pressure in a different key.

The reforms did not create a loyal empire. They created a more efficient one, staffed increasingly by peninsular Spaniards, and they taught the creoles that they were subjects rather than partners. When the monarchy collapsed in 1808, the machinery that Charles III had built was still working, and it was the creoles who had been excluded from it who took it over.

How did the Spanish Empire in America end?

The end began in Europe. Napoleon invaded Spain in 1808, forced Charles IV and Ferdinand VII to abdicate at Bayonne, and put his brother Joseph on the throne. The Spanish resistance organised itself in juntas, first provincial and then a Central Junta at Seville, and claimed to govern in Ferdinand's name; the American kingdoms, which had never been consulted, did the same. In 1810 juntas took power in Caracas, Buenos Aires, Bogotá, Quito and Santiago, and in Mexico a rural insurrection under Miguel Hidalgo began in September of that year. The Cortes of Cádiz, meanwhile, wrote a constitution in 1812 that declared the Indies to be provinces of Spain and their inhabitants Spaniards — a revolution in theory that the crown repudiated in practice when Ferdinand returned in 1814.

The war that followed was not a single war of independence but a series of civil wars within a monarchy that had lost its head. Royalist armies held Lima, Mexico City and Upper Peru for years; the viceroyalty of Peru was the last bastion, and the royalist general José de la Serna made it the centre of a counter-revolution. The turning point was the Spanish liberal revolution of 1820, which forced Ferdinand to restore the constitution and divided the royalist cause in America. Mexico became independent in 1821 under Agustín de Iturbide, a royalist officer who changed sides; Bolívar's victory at Ayacucho on 9 December 1824 ended Spanish rule in Peru; and the last royalist garrisons in Upper Peru and at Callao surrendered in 1825 and 1826.

What survived was the empire that the constitution of 1812 had imagined: Cuba, Puerto Rico, the Philippines and Guam, governed as overseas provinces and, after 1837, as colonies again. Cuba's ten-year war of 1868 was followed by the war of 1895, and in 1898 the United States intervened, destroyed the Spanish fleet at Manila and Santiago, and took the last of the American and Pacific empire. Spain kept only a few African possessions. The monarchy that had once governed two oceans had become a European state with a memory.

The legacy is not a monument but a structure. Spanish America kept the language, the religion, the legal system, the municipal grid and the university, and it kept the social hierarchy that the empire had built. It also kept the argument. The debate at Valladolid about whether the conquest was just was the first great European argument about the rights of peoples who had been conquered, and its terms — natural law, consent, the rights of the governed — are still the terms in which those questions are argued.

Common myths about the Spanish Empire

Timeline of the Spanish Empire

What the map shows next

At 1521 on the map the empire is still two beachheads: the Caribbean islands and the valley of Mexico, with a few posts on the mainland coast and no presence in Peru. The conquest of the Andes is a decade away, and the silver that would make the empire pay for itself has not yet been found.

At 1600 on the map the two viceroyalties are drawn, Potosí and Zacatecas are producing, and the galleon route to Manila is running. At 1789 on the map the Bourbon map is a different shape: New Granada and the Río de la Plata have been carved out of Peru, the frontier missions have moved north and south, and the empire is at its administrative maximum a generation before it breaks. At 1821 on the map much of South America is governed from republics, Mexico is about to declare independence, and the Spanish flag is left on the islands and in the Philippines.