Great question! It’s the kind of statement that textbooks can write or that high school teachers can teach (not insulting high school teachers! Much love and respect!) because there is just enough grain of truth to it that one can’t really say it’s wrong outright. It is perfect for younger students because it marks off clear, easily digestible comparisons between the Spanish and the British. Most importantly for teachers and textbook writers, it is so broad of a statement that it can sum up TWO whole colonial economies in one sentence. Much efficiency! On to the next lesson!

As you might expect, such a statement is SO broad that it is also basically meaningless. It doesn’t really tell you anything about how their economies really worked, how they changed over time, or what life was like for everyday people.

Of course, there is some truth to the extraction statement. The Spanish did extract masses of gold and silver from its colonies in the Americas, most notably Potosí but also the mines at Zacatecas and other places in Mexico. And in Minas Gerais in Brazil. In fact, there were mines all over--any place they could find them. There were also precious stone mines in modern Colombia whose emeralds found their way across Eurasia into the Persian and Indian courts, and pearl beds in the Caribbean so large that they flooded the European market with pearls. The Spanish Crown was supposed to get a fifth of the extracted products, which they then used to pay for armies and doomed armadas. To get these goods, the Spanish and Portuguese developed systems that extracted forced labor from indigenous and African slaves. Supposedly, the entire Spanish American economy doubled down on this system, which eventually hindered development of the modern nation-states (also not true).

But then...what?...is the statement saying that the British didn’t extract things from its colonies? The English colonies never found mineral deposits on the scale of the Spanish or Portuguese, so of course, their economies would be oriented differently. But weren’t Barbados and Jamaica some of the first places to produce sugar and tobacco on a widespread scale? Did they not enslave indigenous peoples and import masses of African slaves to work for them in the Caribbean and in the colonies in North America? And what about the English quasi-colonies in Central America devoted to extracting dyewoods and shipping them back to Europe? Didn’t English privateers exist solely to extract pre-extracted precious cargos from Spanish galleons and merchant vessels?

Isn’t this statement also asserting that there was no production or commerce in Spanish and Portuguese empires for the ENTIRE three to four centuries that they were involved in the Americas? Such a sentiment is absurd. Everyone was producing things and trading with one another ALL the time. There were obrajes (sweatshops) and workshops in Mexico City, Puebla, Oaxaca, Lima, and every other major city, in which free individuals and slaves produced all sorts of goods, which were traded locally and regionally. Every convent and monastery produced or bought and sold goods. Landowners and indigenous communities alike produced all kinds of food that met the needs and desires of the local communities and which were shipped overland and by sea to other markets. Individuals produced the woven textiles, blankets, furniture, tools, hides, tallow, candles from beeswax, paper, nails, booze, toys, religious items, clothes, shoes, musical instruments, artwork, books, and all the rest of stuff that people used, consumed, and enjoyed on a daily basis. Towards the eighteenth century and onward, some Spanish and Portuguese colonies increasingly turned towards plantation agriculture, producing cacao, chocolate, coffee, indigo, and sugar among others. This led to the massive expansion of the African slave trade as well as environmental consequences that came with plantation agriculture. In the eighteenth century, the Spanish Crown and locals alike pushed for greater economic development throughout the Americas and granted all sorts of changes to the economic structures of empire with the goal of modernizing and streamlining trade. Far from backwards economies, we see a vibrant ones, and far from empires perpetually in decline, Spain especially, but also globally Portugal, remained major Atlantic powers throughout the eighteenth century.

One other key element of the early modern world economy was contraband. On paper, the Spanish Crown for example created nice monopolies and tightly controlled trading systems. These did not work in practice. Take for instance the famous transpacific galleons that connected Mexico to Manila with one galleon sailing once per year. It is a classic example of a closed trading system. These ships were supposed to take Asian goods to Mexico and then on to Spain. On the return voyage, the ship was laden with silver from New Spain. In practice, anyone who could figure out a way (Manila residents, sangleys, sailors, Spanish soldiers, and anyone else with connections) loaded as much of their own property onto the ship as possible to sell back in New Spain, including silks, spices, porcelain, and slaves. Contraband took up every nook and cranny of the ship. All of these goods were unregistered, so we don’t know exactly how much, but it was an incredible amount of extra stuff. After decades and decades of this practice, Mexican cities came to be filled with Asian goods AND Asian people. Thousands and thousands of Asian slaves crossed the Pacific this way. The Manila galleon challenges the notion that the closed economic systems that the Spanish Crown put in place ever actually functioned the way they were supposed to. The archives are full of lawsuits in which individuals claimed that a monopoly holder profited illegally, took bribes, did not carry out the terms of the contract, or infringed on someone else’s monopoly.

At the same time, none of early modern empires were ever closed entities. There is an image of a closed Spanish empire, jealously guarding its secrets. Laughable. They were all constantly trading with one another all the time. Ships pretended that they had been damaged in a storm to call in a port, and while they were there, they traded their goods. British and Portuguese slave ships sailed into Spanish ports with their slave license, but then traded tons of other goods too. On desolate shores, people met up and exchanged goods. Foreign communities existed in major ports, who had connections back to merchant communities in other empires. Bordercrossers brought goods and slaves between empires (see the large contraband slave trade in Río de la Plata for example). After major hurricanes in the Caribbean, leaders from different islands would beg foreign ships to call in their ports and bring them much needed supplies. Ships passed each other goods at sea or in desolate harbors. Sailors went ashore to hunt for food, water, slaves, or supplies, which they took or bought from locals they came across. Foreigners traded directly with indigenous communities. “English” ships were crewed by English, Scottish, Irish, Portuguese, Spanish, Spanish American, English American, Native American, and African people, who sometimes jumped ship in foreign ports. These empires were "closed" in theory only.

So where did this statement come from? What exists in textbooks today is fundamentally a holdover from the Black Legend (which said that the Spanish Empire was uniquely abusive of the indigenous people; whereas, the British were especially kind to theirs. This caused their colonists to work harder, which through some convoluted process somehow led to the Industrial Revolution, the Enlightenment, human rights, democracy, the scientific method, and modernity!). It is also a holdover from the field of history’s focus on the development of capitalism. When world history first developed, many historians investigated why capitalism sprang up in Britain and not somewhere else. In the last twenty years, the field has moved pretty decisively away from the tired question of where capitalism came from. Today, we are much more interested in finding the connections between people of the early modern world, the big systems of movement that brought cultures together, and all the messiness that marked the daily lives of individuals. I find these to be much more interesting questions that bring us much closer to understanding what life was really like or how the systems really worked on the ground. Unfortunately, early modern messiness doesn’t fit on the nice little bumper sticker: Spain=extraction. Britain=commerce. Maybe Spain=extraction. Britain=commerce ^(It's complicated).