Economic Aspects of Spanish Imperial Expansion, 1492–1550

Abstract

MOTIVES FOR EUROPEAN OVERSEAS EXPANSION The discovery (or rediscovery by Europeans) of America in 1492, although in one sense accidental, was also an inevitable feature of a general process of European expansion into the Atlantic, which had gathered pace in the first half of the fifteenth century and of which in 1492 only Spain was capable of taking full advantage in the American hemisphere. Any attempt to distil the complex mosaic of Spanish religious, cultural and economic motives and impulses into a single causal factor explaining its willingness and ability to begin to colonise America in the late-fifteenth century is bound to be simplistic. It is true, however, that for the vast majority of the discoverers and conquerors who followed in the wake of Christopher Columbus, as indeed, for the crown itself, and the tens of thousands of ordinary settlers who migrated to America in the sixteenth century, the quest for wealth (which, it was believed, would bring in its turn power and influence) was of paramount importance. The search for material wealth was also a fundamental characteristic of Portuguese overseas expansion, which had begun in the fifteenth century, and the same motive would also underlie English settlement in North America in the late-sixteenth and early-seventeenth centuries. In the 1570s Martin Frobisher, for example, diverted precious time and resources from his (fruitless) attempts to find a north-west passage to Asia to mine hundreds of tons of black rock in the Arctic, which on being shipped back to England in 1577–78 turned out to be iron pyrites (fool's gold).