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000933 Visit since August 31, 2004
| TRIUMPHS and TRAGEDY, a History
of The Mexican people (Chapter 1) |
by Prof. German Estrada
September, 2004 |
THE FOREFATHERS (part
17th) continues..
By the middle of the seventeen-century,
Spain had lost its hegemony over Europe, and Castilla
no longer wielded it at home. With the appearance of
the “pronunciamiento”, or military coup,
Castilla’s politics assumed the characteristics
of a comic opera its rulers losing the respect of Europe.
Phillip II bequeathed his throne to his son, Phillip
III, a man of learning who could never make up his
mind. Phillip IV, his successor, tasted defeat at the
hands of the French and lost valuable slices of the
Spanish Empire to Englishmen and the Dutch. His son,
the feebleminded Charles II, allowed the greedy and
powerful to plunder Spain. When the childless king,
the last of the Hapsburgs, died, the French Bourbons
took over. Eager to restore Spain to its old glory,
they committed the mistake of reinstating the hegemony
of Castilla when it no longer sat atop the pyramid.
At this juncture, scholars maintain, Spain had “lost
its sense of national purpose.” Nearly a century
earlier, Don Quixote, Cervantes’s masterpiece,
with its “parable of a nation which had set out
on a crusade only to learn that it was tilting at windmills,” had
aptly captured the gist of what was taking place. Why
had this occurred?
A national bourgeoisie, a
powerful class in England and France, had failed
to develop. The capitalist orders of Aragón were never able to expand and thrive.
Until late in the eighteenth century, Castilla, a semifeudal
kingdom presided over by an absolute monarch and beset
by a decadent nobility, controlled events. The nobility,
an ally of its counterpart in the kingdom of Aragón,
kept the nascent commercial class of the northern cities
of Castilla and of the ports of the Mediterranean on
the periphery of power. The imperialist adventures
of Charles I and Phillip II, as may be expected, squandered
the wealth of México and Peru on foolish wars
and intrigues. The expulsion of he Jews, which set
back capitalist development, was a victory for the
retrograde nobility of Castilla, a mortal enemy of
the coastal cities.
The silver and gold of the
New World, ironically, nailed shut the coffin. As
the riches of the New World flowed into Castilla,
the recipient of the conquistador’s
labors, its lords saw no need to modernize its economy
structure. Precious ores from the Americas nurture
the feudal edifice. What Castilla did not produce,
it imported from England, France, and the Low Countries.
The Conquest of the New World, according to one savant, “provided
Spanish feudalism, almost on its death bed, with a
fresh burst of oxygen” and, at the same time,
suffocated “the nascent capitalism of the Iberian
peninsula.” Moreover, by making the New World
a Castilian preserve, Queen Isabella and her successors
excluded from the benefits of the Conquest the merchants,
traders, and bankers of Aragón, León,
and Valencia, the heart of the Spanish burguesía.
That policy dealt them a mortal blow. Similarly, the
Conquest drained Castilla of some of its most enterprising
young men, who, had they stayed home, might have injected
fresh vigor into its feudal body.
Under the dominance of Castilla,
Mother Spain, the wealth of México and Peru notwithstanding, ended
up being a dependent country, without an industry of
its own and forced to import foreign goods. To supply
its domestic market and its colonies overseas, Spain
looked to the manufactures of England, France, Italy
and Germany, often for articles once produced in Segovia,
Toledo, Valladolid, Barcelona, and Valencia. During
the days of Phillip II, the raw materials taken from
the New World found their way into the hands of merchants
and manufacturers of western Europe. Some of them came
back to Spain in the form of finished articles for
home consumption or for shipment to the New World.
A dependent Spain, itself a colony of the “developing” countries
of Europe, set the stage for the tragedy of Mexican
history. Source: From the book Triumphs
and Tragedy, a History of the Mexican People by his
author Ramon Eduardo Ruiz, and with his authorization.
(W.W. Norton & Company. New York-London). We'll continue with this fascinating
book.
estradanav@yahoo.com
Prof. Germán
Estrada is the author of the best selling book,
"México
Mágico: Everything You Wanted To Know
About... But Nobody Told You..." available in Puerto
Vallarta at The Net House, Mail Boxes, Etc., Books,
Books as well as directly from the author by internet.
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