Free Empires of the Atlantic World: Britain and Spain in America 1492-1830 by John H. Elliott Page B

Discourse of Western Planting, `by their discoveries have found such occasion of employment, that these many years we have not heard scarcely of any pirate of those two nations: whereas we and the French are most infamous for our outrageous, common and daily piracies.' In contrast with Spain, `many thousands of idle persons are within this realm, which having no way to be set on work be either mutinous and seek alteration in the state, or at least very burdensome to the common wealth'.107 Colonization, therefore, became a remedy for the home country's social and economic problems, as Hakluyt conjured up for the benefit of contemporaries and posterity the vision of a great English commercial empire, which would redound both to the honour of the nation and the profit of its industrious inhabitants.
    It was ironical that, at the very time when Hakluyt and his friends were vigorously arguing the case for overseas empire, a number of informed and sophisticated Spaniards were beginning to question its value to Spain. In his great General History of Spain, written in the early 1580s, Juan de Mariana summed up the increasingly ambivalent feelings of his generation towards the acquisition of its American possessions: `From the conquest of the Indies have come advantages and disadvantages. Among the latter, our strength has been weakened by the multitude of people who have emigrated and are scattered abroad; the sustenance we used to get from our soil, which was by no means bad, we now expect in large measure from the winds and waves that bring home our fleets; the prince is in greater necessity than he was before, because he has to go to the defence of so many regions; and the people are made soft by the luxury of their food and dress.'108
    Mariana's words were a foretaste of things to come. The years around 1600, when the ominous word `decline' first began to be uttered in Spain, saw the beginnings of an intensive Castilian debate about the problems afflicting Castilian society and the Castilian economy.109 From the earliest stages of this debate, the alleged benefits to Spain of the silver of the Indies were the subject of particularly critical scrutiny. `Our Spain', wrote one of the most eloquent and intelligent of the participants, Martin Gonzalez de Cellorigo, `has its eyes so fixed on trade with the Indies, from which it gets its gold and silver, that it has given up trading with its neighbours; and if all the gold and silver that the natives of the New World have found, and go on finding, were to come to it, they would not make it as rich or powerful as it would be without them."10 In this reading, precious metals were not after all the true yardstick of wealth, and real prosperity was to be measured by national productivity, and not by a fortuitous inflow of bullion.
    This was a lesson that still had to be learnt, outside as much as inside Spain itself. The insistence of Hakluyt and his friends on an empire based on the exchange of commodities rather than on the acquisition of precious metals played its part in helping to give merchants and their values a new prominence in the English national consciousness at a moment when in Castile a minority was struggling against heavy odds to promote a similar awareness of the crucial importance of those same values for national salvation." English merchants, too, benefited from a social and political system which offered them more room for manoeuvre than their Castilian counterparts, who found it difficult to protect their interests against the arbitrary financial requirements of the Spanish crown.
    The fact that the English were embarking on overseas colonization at a time when their society was acquiring a more commercial orientation in response to internal pressures and to a changing climate of national and international opinion about the relationship of profit and power,'12 inevitably gave a slant to the English colonial enterprise that was not to be found in the opening stages of