1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created (6 page)

Walking around the monument, I wished that it were larger, given that it is the closest equivalent to a formal commemoration of globalization we have today. I also wished it were more complete. To truly mark the galleon trade, Legazpi and Urdaneta would have to be surrounded by Chinese merchants: equal partners in the exchange. Such a monument probably will never be built, not least because the worldwide network is still viewed with unease, even by many of its beneficiaries.

Across the street from the monument is another, more popular park, named after José Rizal, a writer, doctor, and martyred anti-Spanish revolutionary who is a national hero in the Philippines. At the center of Rizal Park is a reflecting pool edged with flower gardens and statuary. All the statues are bronze busts on concrete columns. All depict Filipinos who died fighting Spanish rule.

On the side of the pool facing the Legazpi monument is a bust of Rajah Sulayman, identified by a plaque as “the brave Muslim ruler of the kingdom of Maynila (Manila) who refused the offer of ‘friendship’ by the Spaniards … under Miguel Lopez de Legazpi.” (Parentheses in original.) Good editors deride fake quotation marks like those around “friendship” as “scare quotes” and tell reporters not to use them. Here they may be merited. Legazpi approached Sulayman soon after encountering the Chinese. The Spaniards wanted to use Manila’s harbor as a launching point for the China trade. When Sulayman said he didn’t want the Spaniards around, Legazpi leveled his principal village, killing him and three hundred of his fellows. Modern Manila was established on the ruins.

Sulayman and the other people around the pool were, in effect, the first antiglobalization martyrs. They have been awarded a place considerably more prominent than the deserted corner given to Legazpi and Urdaneta. In the end, though, they lost, each and every one of them.

Big speakers mounted on iron columns at the corners of the pool issue bulletins from the redoubts of Classic Rock. Walking around the area, I was nearly run over by a train fashioned into a replica of Thomas the Tank Engine, a children’s-book and -television character owned by Apax Partners, a British private-equity firm said to be among the world’s largest. Over Thomas’s smiling, tooting head I could see the towers of the hotels and banks in Manila’s tourist district. The birthplace of globalization looked a lot like many other places. In the Homogenocene, Kentucky Fried Chicken, McDonald’s, and Pizza Hut are always just minutes away.

REVERSALS OF FORTUNE

The Homogenocene? A new epoch in the history of life, brought into being by the abrupt creation of a world-spanning economic system? The claim seems grandiose. But imagine a thought experiment: flying around the earth in 1642, a century and a half after Colón’s first voyage, threescore and ten after the first Chinese silk from Manila arrived in Mexico. Think of it as a round-the-world cruise at 35,000 feet of a planet in the first stages of a great disturbance. The brochure promises that the cruise will hit the highlights of the nascent Homogenocene. What will the passengers see?

One answer would be: a world bound together by hoops of Spanish silver. Silver from the Americas is well on its way to doubling or tripling the world’s stock of precious metals. Potosí, in what is now southern Bolivia, is the main source—the biggest, richest strike in history. Begin the cruise here, at this central node in the network. Located more than thirteen thousand feet up the Andes, Potosí sits at the foot of an extinct volcano that is as close to a mountain of pure silver as geology allows. Around it is an almost treeless plateau, strewn with glacial boulders, scoured by gelid winds. Agriculture struggles here, and there is no wood for fire. Nonetheless, by 1642 this mining city had become the biggest, densest community in the Americas.

Potosí is a brawling, bawling boomtown marked by extravagant display and hoodlum crime. It is also a murderously efficient mechanism for the extraction and refining of silver ore in appallingly harsh conditions. Indian workers haul the ore on their backs up crude ladders from hundreds of feet below the surface, then extract the silver by mixing the ore with highly toxic mercury. Smelters on the slopes transform the metal into bars of almost pure silver, typically weighing sixty-five pounds and stamped with sigils guaranteeing their quality and authenticity. Other silver is stamped into coins—the Spanish peso is on its way to becoming a de facto world currency, as the U.S. dollar is today. Battalions of llamas—more sure-footed and altitude tolerant than mules and horses—carry the coins and bars down from the mountains, every dangerous step guarded by men with weapons. They hoist the silver onto ships in Arica, on the Chilean coast, which shuttle it to the great port of Lima, seat of the Spanish colonial government. From Lima the silver is loaded onto the first of a series of military convoys that will transport it across the world.

From the plane, follow the silver fleet as it travels north. To the east of the convoy rise the Andean slopes, gripped in ecological turmoil. Humankind has lived here for many thousands of years, erecting some of the world’s first urban complexes in the valleys north of Lima. A hundred and fifteen years before this overflight, smallpox swept in. After it came other European diseases, and then Europeans themselves. Millions died, fearful and suffering, in shattered mountain villages. Now, decades later, slopes terraced and irrigated for centuries remain empty. Shrubs and low trees have overwhelmed abandoned farms. A huge volcanic eruption in 1600 covered central Peru with up to three feet of ash and rubble. Four decades later, little has been cleared away. Andean ecosystems have gone feral. Sailing north, the silver fleet is passing something akin to wilderness, at least in patches.

Some of the vessels anchor in Panama, while others go to Mexico. Watching from the plane, observe that the Panamanian silver crosses the isthmus, bound for Europe, whereas most of the Mexican silver is bound ultimately for Asia. How much goes where is the subject of brisk dispute, both by customs officials in 1642 and by historians today. The Spanish monarchy, perpetually hungry for cash, wants the silver in the home country. Spanish colonists want to send as much as possible to China—coins and bars can be traded there more profitably than anywhere else. The tension leads, inevitably, to smuggling. Official statistics suggest that no more than a quarter of the silver went across the Pacific. In the past historians have largely assumed that government scrutiny kept the smuggling to perhaps 10 percent of the total, meaning that the official statistics were roughly correct. A new wave of researchers, however, argues that smuggling was rampant; China sucked up as much as half of the silver. The debate is more than pedantic. One side regards European expansion as the primary motivating force in world affairs; the other views the earth as a single economic unit largely driven by Chinese demand.

Follow the Europe-bound silver as it is carried by mule train over the mountains to Portobelo, then Panama’s main Caribbean port. Guarded by an armada of galleons, bristling with guns and crewed by as many as two thousand seamen and soldiers, the silver traverses the Atlantic every summer, its departure timed to avoid hurricane season. The convoy bellies up to the mouth of the Guadalquivir, Spain’s only major navigable river, and then sixty miles upstream to Seville.

Unloaded onto the quays, the chests of treasure are the emblem of a paradox: silver from the Americas has made the Europe of 1642 affluent and powerful beyond its giddiest fantasy. But Europe itself is plagued from one end to the other by war, inflation, rioting, and weather calamities. Turmoil is nothing new in Europe, which is divided by language, culture, religion, and geography. But this is the first time that the turmoil is intimately linked to human actions on opposite ends of the earth. Trouble volleys from Asia, Africa, and the Americas to Europe, shuttling about the world on highways of Spanish silver.

Cortés’s conquest of Mexico—and the plunder that came from it—threw Spain’s elite into delirium. Enraptured by sudden wealth and power, the monarchy launched a series of costly foreign wars, one overlapping with another, against France, the Ottoman Empire, and the Protestants in the Holy Roman Empire. Even as Spain defeated the Ottomans in 1571, discontent in the Netherlands, then a Spanish possession, was flaring into outright revolt and secession. The struggle over Dutch independence lasted eight decades and spilled into realms as far away as Brazil, Sri Lanka, and the Philippines. Along the way, England was drawn in; raising the ante, Spain initiated a vast seaborne invasion of that nation: the Spanish Armada. The invasion was a debacle, as was the fight to stop rebellion in the Netherlands.

War spawned war. In 1642, Spain is combating secession in Andalusia, Catalonia, and Portugal, which it has ruled for six decades; France is fighting Spain on its northern, eastern, and southern borders; and Swedish armies are battling the Holy Roman Empire. (Emperor Ferdinand III, the son-in-law of one Spanish king and the father-in-law of another, is so closely allied with Spain that he has often been called a Spanish puppet.) Almost the only European nation not directly or indirectly at war with Spain is England, which is convulsed by its own civil strife—the ascetic Puritan rebellion that will soon lead to civil war and the execution of the king.

The costs are staggering. At the height of the Vietnam War, the United States fielded about 500,000 soldiers. If the U.S. had wanted to send out the same proportion of its men that Spain did in its war with the Dutch, according to Dennis Flynn, an economic historian at the University of the Pacific, it would have had to send
2.5 million
. “Even though all this silver was coming in from Bolivia, Spain didn’t have enough money to pay its army in the Netherlands,” he told me. “So the men mutinied constantly. I did a count once—there were forty-five mutinies between 1572 and 1607. And that was just
one
of Spain’s wars.”

To pay for its foreign adventures, the court borrowed from foreign bankers; the king felt free to incur debts because he believed they would be covered by future shipments of American treasure, and bankers felt free to lend for the same reason. Alas, everything cost more than the monarch hoped. Debt piled up hugely—ten or even fifteen times annual revenues. Nonetheless the court continued to view its economic policy in the optative mood; few wanted to believe that the good times would end. The inevitable, repeated result: bankruptcy. Spain defaulted on its debts in 1557, 1576, 1596, 1607, and 1627. After each bankruptcy, the king borrowed more money. Lenders would provide it—after all, they could charge high interest rates (Spain paid up to 40 percent, compounded annually). For obvious reasons the high interest rates made the next bankruptcy more likely. Still the process continued—everyone believed the silver would keep pouring into Seville. Now, in 1642, so much silver has been produced that its value is falling even as the mines slacken. The richest nation in the world is hurtling toward financial Armageddon. Europe is complexly interconnected; Spain’s economic collapse is dragging down its neighbors.

The silver trade was not the only cause of this tumult—religious conflict, royal hubris, and struggles among classes all were important—but it was an essential part. The flood of precious metal unleashed by Cortés so vastly increased Spain’s money supply that its small financial sector could not contain it. It was as if a billionaire suddenly deposited a fortune into a tiny country bank—the bank would immediately redeposit the cash into other, bigger institutions that could do something with it. American silver overflowed from Spain like water from a bathtub and washed into bank vaults in Italy, the Netherlands, and the Holy Roman Empire. Payments for Spanish military adventures filled coffers across the continent.

Economics 101 predicts what will happen in these circumstances. New money chases after the same old goods and services. Prices rise in a classic inflationary spiral. In what historians call a “price revolution,” the cost of living more than doubled across Europe in the last half of the sixteenth century, tripling in some places, and then rose some more. Because wages did not keep pace, the poor were immiserated; they could not afford their daily bread. Uprisings of the starving exploded across the continent, seemingly in every corner and all at once. (Researchers have called it the “general crisis” of the seventeenth century.)

Hope for the peasantry was provided by American crops, which by 1642 have ridden the silver route across the Atlantic. As the plane sweeps over Europe, it descends low enough for passengers to view the marks of the Columbian Exchange: plots of American maize in Italy, carpets of American beans in Spain, fields crowded with the shining, upturned visages of American sunflowers in France. Big tobacco leaves soak up sunlight on Dutch farms; tobacco is so common in Catholic Europe that Pope Urban VIII has this year denounced its use (in Protestant England, it is endorsed even by the nation’s most notorious killjoy, Oliver Cromwell). Most important will be the potato, which is beginning to fill bellies in Germany, the Netherlands and, increasingly, Ireland. In ordinary times, the quickly increasing agricultural productivity would soothe some of the discontent caused by inflation and war. But these are not ordinary times: the plane’s instruments reveal that the climate itself has been changing.

For almost a century Europe has experienced frighteningly snowy winters, late springs, and cold summers. Frigid Mays and Junes delay French wine harvests until November; people walk a hundred miles across the frozen sea from Denmark to Sweden; Greenland hunters moor their kayaks on the Scottish shore. After three failed harvests, Catholic mobs in Ireland rise up, robbing and killing the hated English Protestants—attacks those Protestants use as an opportunity to seize Catholic land. Fearing that growing Alpine glaciers will overrun their homes, Swiss villagers induce their bishop to exorcise a threatening ice front—an echo of the Spaniards in Santo Domingo, seeking God’s help against the plague of ants. Annual visits from the bishop drive back the glacier by eighty paces. The order of the world seems overturned.