JosephWorld
Banned
Part VII: The decadence of the Spanish Empire.
The unexpected discovery of the Americas by Christopher Columbus in 1492 gave Spain its heyday in the 16th century. However, by the 1620s and the accession of Philip IV to the throne, Spain was clearly in economic and political decline. This was also true for the Portuguese monarchy, which had just been united with Spain in 1580 in a dynastic union. Portugal's sovereignty was thus undermined, for example, it was deprived of a separate foreign policy from Spain.
In the New World, Spanish and Portuguese hegemony was also increasingly challenged by Dutch merchants, who had just founded the Dutch West India Company in 1621, by England, which had established itself in North America as early as 1607, and by Antarctic France in the Southern Cone.
This decadence of the Spanish Empire was particularly visible in the far south of the Americas, in the Silver River Basin and in the Captaincy General of Chile: the regions south of Potosi offered no fossil resources to exploit for the Spanish cash crop. The Silver River basin could have become a major port centre, and could have been used as a waterway to evacuate gold from Cuzco and silver from Potosi to the metropolis, but Spanish sailors preferred the Peruvian port of Callao in the Pacific.
These peripheral regions in the Southern Cone were therefore widely left out of the Spanish Empire, and were extremely poorly supplied, forcing the inhabitants of the cities of Buenos Aires, Asuncion or Santiago to smuggle goods in order to survive. In Chile, devastating earthquakes and attacks by the indigenous Mapuche made the region really unviable, settlements in the region were regularly razed to the ground.
The balance of power will thus very quickly turn to the advantage of Antarctic France...
The unexpected discovery of the Americas by Christopher Columbus in 1492 gave Spain its heyday in the 16th century. However, by the 1620s and the accession of Philip IV to the throne, Spain was clearly in economic and political decline. This was also true for the Portuguese monarchy, which had just been united with Spain in 1580 in a dynastic union. Portugal's sovereignty was thus undermined, for example, it was deprived of a separate foreign policy from Spain.
In the New World, Spanish and Portuguese hegemony was also increasingly challenged by Dutch merchants, who had just founded the Dutch West India Company in 1621, by England, which had established itself in North America as early as 1607, and by Antarctic France in the Southern Cone.
This decadence of the Spanish Empire was particularly visible in the far south of the Americas, in the Silver River Basin and in the Captaincy General of Chile: the regions south of Potosi offered no fossil resources to exploit for the Spanish cash crop. The Silver River basin could have become a major port centre, and could have been used as a waterway to evacuate gold from Cuzco and silver from Potosi to the metropolis, but Spanish sailors preferred the Peruvian port of Callao in the Pacific.
These peripheral regions in the Southern Cone were therefore widely left out of the Spanish Empire, and were extremely poorly supplied, forcing the inhabitants of the cities of Buenos Aires, Asuncion or Santiago to smuggle goods in order to survive. In Chile, devastating earthquakes and attacks by the indigenous Mapuche made the region really unviable, settlements in the region were regularly razed to the ground.
The balance of power will thus very quickly turn to the advantage of Antarctic France...
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