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Environmental Thought During Spain's Golden Age, 1492-1618 by Harley

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Environmental Thought During Spain's Golden Age, 1492-1618 by Harley Managing the Empire’s Wealth: Environmental Thought during Spain’s Golden Age, 1492-1618 By Harley Davidson Submitted to the graduate degree program in History and the Graduate Faculty of the University of Kansas in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. ________________________________ Chairperson, Luis Corteguera ________________________________ Sara Gregg ________________________________ Greg Cushman ________________________________ Anton Rosenthal ________________________________ Santa Arias Date Defended: April 8, 2016 ii The Dissertation Committee for Harley Davidson certifies that this is the approved version of the following dissertation: Managing the Empire’s Wealth: Environmental Thought during Spain’s Golden Age, 1492-1618 ________________________________ Chairperson, Luis Corteguera Date approved: April 8, 2016 iii Abstract During the sixteenth century, or Spain's so-called "Golden Age," Spain's understanding of wealth, resource management, and cosmology underwent massive evolution in the face of gaining an empire in the Americas. Before the conquest of the Americas, resource scarcity and the need for careful resource management defined Spanish environmental thought. Afterward, the idea that the Americas could provide infinite wealth took precedence. But as the century progressed and the empire declined, people from different parts of Spanish society--municipal councilmen, conquistadors, royal cosmographers, and royal reformers--reconciled these two ideas into one line of thought: abundant wealth could be harmful if not managed correctly. This dissertation situates Spanish economic thought within the broader discussion on European economic history, the history of science, and environmental thought. iv CONTENTS 1 Introduction: Early Modern Spanish Discourses on Money and Wealth 27 Chapter One: Reconciling Mediterranean History with Spanish Imperial History 41 Chapter Two: Claiming the Hinterlands: Municipal Conservation Legislation and Land Management 75 Chapter Three: Conquistadors and the Question of Settlement in the Americas 113 Chapter Four: Reforming the Colonies: The Conservation of Peoples and the Measuring of an Empire’s Wealth 149 Chapter Five: Curse of Empire: Early Modern Spanish Debates on Prosperity, Abundance, and Decline 181 Conclusion: Redefining Knowledge-Building in Early Modern European History 195 Bibliography 1 INTRODUCTION Early Modern Spanish Discourses on Wealth and Land Management “Pecunia pecuniam non parit: money is sterile”- Cristóbal de Villalón (1546)1 Cristóbal de Villalón, a Castilian economist and member of the School of Salamanca, was preoccupied with the nature of money and the growth of a credit economy in early modern Spain. The literal translation of the Latin phrase, “Pecunia pecuniam non parit,” is roughly: “money does not allow more money to flower.” The actual translation, noted above, is far more evocative and points to the revolution in economic thought that was happening in Spain during the sixteenth century. The burgeoning credit economy, spurred on by Spain’s imperial successes and the growth of a merchant-class in Spain itself, was troubling to Villalón. From his perspective, commerce had always been based on the transaction of tangible goods and people had traded items that served some sort of practical purpose. For example, one could trade a bushel of wheat, a foodstuff necessary for life, for wool sweaters, items that would keep the body warm. But with the advent of paper money and credit, the value of a good became more abstract. Villalón rejected this vision of the future, arguing that money in itself had no intrinsic value and that it could not lead one to prosperity. Thus, an economy based on credit and paper money was destined to fail. Over the course of the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, the Iberian kingdoms of Castile and Aragon entered a so-called “Golden Age” that witnessed Iberian expansion into the 1Cristóbal de Villalón, Provechoso tratado de cambios y contrataciones de mercaderes y reprovación de usura (Madrid: 1546), f.1, page 39; in Michael Thomas D'Emic, Justice in the Marketplace in Early Modern Spain: Saravia, Villalón and the Religious Origins of Economic Analysis (2014), 19. 2 Americas and beyond. While this period of Habsburg dominance2 created lasting social, economic, and political upheaval on both sides of the Atlantic, the arrival of empire also affected an epistemological crisis in Europe generally and in Iberia in particular. Two central concerns defined this crisis: the need to reconcile medieval European cosmology with the “discovery” of the Americas, and the breakdown of the medieval socio-political order caused by Spain’s sudden rise to power and the influx of new wealth brought from the Americas. This epistemological crisis defined early modern Spain’s Golden Age and also underlined the peculiar difficulties Spain would encounter as it constructed an Atlantic empire. Donald Worster has argued that the Eurasian encounter with the Americas in 1500 ushered in the modern era, an era defined by an “unprecedented natural abundance” that fundamentally altered humanity’s material living conditions. Christopher Columbus sought a quicker way to wealth and, in the process, to transcend Europe’s centuries-long battle with its own ecological limits.3 When the twentieth century arrived, Worster argues, humanity believed that this era of abundance was coming to an end.4 As early modern Spain’s empire grew and as its society learned more about the Americas, Spanish society’s fundamental understanding of wealth and management shifted to reflect altered realities. Medieval Castile was an economic and political backwater of Europe. By the end of the sixteenth century, it was the leading power in Europe. Yet somehow the socio- economic situation in the kingdom actually began to deteriorate during the Golden Age, leading many contemporary economists, religious leaders, and high-ranking Crown officials to examine 2From the fourteenth century through the First World War, the House of Habsburg dominated European politics through a series of dynastic marriages. Charles V (1500-1558) would eventually inherit the Iberian kingdoms of Castile and Aragon, the Low Countries, the Franche-Comté, the kingdoms of Naples, Sicily, and Sardinia, and the Holy Roman Empire. 3Donald Worster, Shrinking the Earth: The Rise and Decline of American Abundance (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016), 14. 4Ibid., 6. 3 how such a thing could be possible. But this conversation was not restricted solely to intellectuals at the top of early modern Spanish society. Indeed, municipal councils, royal forest managers, conquistadors, theologians, economists, and royal reformers were all having conversations about the origins of wealth, how that wealth should be managed, and how that wealth then affected society and the república5 at large. As Kenneth J. Howell argues, early modern peoples of many stripes were all wrestling with “dramatic changes in their conceptions of the universe.”6 Economic historians of the early modern period have detailed the impact that the conquest of the Americas had on European society at large.7 The arrival of massive amounts of American gold and silver in Europe during the sixteenth century caused what economic historians call the “Price Revolution,” a roughly two century period when the price of goods rose sharply and inflation wrecked European economies. From the 1520s to 1540s, there was increased commercial traffic to and from the Indies that coincided with a population expansion in Castile and Aragon. The merchant-class, who represented around 3-5% of the total population during the sixteenth century, benefitted most from this time of rapid expansion. But as mid- century dawned, prices quadrupled while salaries remained stagnant. Agricultural production declined and foreign merchants siphoned Spanish wealth off to their own homelands.8 As early 5Early modern Spain’s political reformers and theorists often referred to their polity as the república or as España. To avoid an anachronistic use of the term “Spain,” this dissertation uses república in most instances. When “Spain” or “Spaniard” is employed here, it refers to the territorial state controlled by the Spanish Habsburgs in the early modern period and the people who lived there, not the modern nation-state and the associated connotations that come with being a modern nation-state. 6Kenneth J. Howell, God's Two Books: Copernican Cosmology and Biblical Interpretation in Early Modern Science (Notre Dame, Ind: University of Notre Dame Press, 2002), 1. 7This is a vast historiography that I have only begun to examine. For a concise introduction to medieval and early modern European economic history, see Barry Gordon, Economic Analysis Before Adam Smith: Hesiod to Lessius (New York: Barnes & Noble Books, 1975); Alejandro Antonio Chafuen, Faith and Liberty: The Economic Thought of the Late Scholastics (Lanham, Md: Lexington Books, 2003); Odd Langholm, The Legacy of Scholasticism in Economic Thought: Antecedents of Choice and Power (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1998). 8D’Emic, 2-3. 4 as 1517, Nicolas Copernicus was aware of the deleterious effect of New World precious metals.9 But it would not be until the latter half of the sixteenth century that Spanish intellectuals would fully engage the economic and moral problems associated with precious metals. In particular, early modern Spanish historians have emphasized two schools of
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