How the Spanish Empire Was Built

"How the Spanish Empire Was Built

By Felipe Fernández-Armesto and Manuel Lucena Giraldo

Reaktion, 352 pages, $40

'The world's most successful empires have been engineers' creations." This assertion, made by Felipe Fernandez-Armesto and Manuel Lucena Giraldo in "How the Spanish Empire Was Built: A 400-Year History," seems bold at first, almost audacious. Yet within the span of the book's first two chapters, the authors' contention seems not only logical and wise but almost irrefutable. "Engineers solve problems," they write. "Historians pose them." The Spanish Empire of the beginning of the 16th century to the end of the 19th, they continue, "would not have functioned without the efforts of the engineers" who made possible the political and cultural consolidation that must follow the initial use of force if conquest is to be any more than fleeting.

Mr. Fernandez-Armesto is a prolific writer and historian of the Spanish world, his works particularly insightful on what used to be called the Age of Discovery. A professor of history at Notre Dame, he has now written, with Mr. Lucena Giraldo -- a historian at the Spanish National Research Council -- a richly researched account of the clever, industrious and deeply practical men who followed in the footsteps, often literally, of Columbus, Cortes, Pizarro, Nunez de Balboa and others. The mission of these takers of territory was completed, the authors argue, by the engineers -- makers of "the scaffolding . . . on which empire was erected."

The verb "built" in the book's title is intended by the authors to describe the literal deployment of blueprints, stone, concrete and wood. Theirs isn't a narrative of the building of empire in a figurative sense. For the best telling of that story -- of the politics, the religion, the economics, the wars, the enslaving and subjugation of peoples, and the complex courtly intrigues -- we must still turn to J.H. Elliott's "Imperial Spain: 1469-1716" (1963); William Maltby's "The Rise and Fall of the Spanish Empire" (2009); Hugh Thomas's sprawling trilogy on Spain's imperium (2003-14); Henry Kamen's "Empire: How Spain Became a World Power" (2003); or the works (in Spanish) of Jaume Vicens Vives (1910-1960), to offer but a few examples.

Messrs. Fernandez-Armesto and Lucena Giraldo turn the spotlight, instead, on the seemingly prosaic undertaking of construction and infrastructure, and on the work of civil and military engineers. This is a book about the planning and building of cities and towns; of squares and churches; dwelling-houses and town halls; granaries and aqueducts; hospitals and barracks; fortifications and ports; canals and piers; and also, most significantly, about the roads that crisscrossed a vast new empire like "veins and arteries."

Spain's empire, the authors emphasize, was preindustrial. Its "conquerors, adventurers, friars, engineers and architects" ventured into a New World that was "measureless and unknowable"; the primary problem was "managing uncertainty." Technical methods acquired and honed in Europe -- and suited to the Iberian Peninsula -- often had to be refashioned or rethought: "Engineers had to turn every surprise into an opportunity."

In the Americas, Messrs. Fernandez-Armesto and Lucena Giraldo remind us, the Spaniards found themselves in lands where there were no horses, mules or draught animals, no iron or gunpowder. The wheel was "unexploited" and the dome, an architectural form that made buildings much more resistant to the elements, unheard of. "Even in the inventive civilizations of the Maya," we are told, "the use of the arch as a means of distributing stress was unknown."

The bridges the Spaniards encountered were primitive (if ingenious) confections of rope, designed to bear the weight only of "lightly laden foot traffic." The authors tell us how an old Inca bridge on the route between Lima and Cuzco -- woven from osier, a fibrous species of willow -- was a great social leveler: "Everyone, from the viceroy and archbishop down, had to dismount and cross it on foot."

We learn that "the effective model of empire" for the early modern Spanish imperialists was, of course, Rome, many of whose structures, such as the aqueduct in Segovia, survive to this day. Engineering was the Romans' "ultimate art," and infrastructure became -- for imperial Spain as it had been for Rome -- the secret "ingredient of success." And so, like the Romans before them, the Spaniards began "refashioning landscape for political ends," their building-work linking "incommensurate" peoples into "a single polity . . . with common ties of belonging and of allegiance." As an analogy, the authors suggest that the 600,000 bridges in the United States have done "more for the Union than all the federal generals of the Civil War."

The most impressive feature of the Spanish Empire -- its landward immensity and its seaborne vastness -- was also its weakness. In remote parts of the empire, local authorities were only loosely supervised, owing to the time it took for metropolitan orders to reach the fringes. "Writers of royal commands had to reckon on about six months from Madrid to Mexico City, perhaps ten months to Santiago de Chile and as much as a year to Manila." The authors describe this as "the tyranny of distance," while also telling us that imperial Spain "covered a wider range of environments than any previous empire" -- from snow-capped mountains to tropical jungles, from flat, fertile plains to deserts of the utmost aridity. There was no "romantic idea" that "primeval nature" be left unmolested. Instead, they tell us, citing the geographer Horacio Capel, that the imperial engineer's vocation was "to remedy with art the deficiencies of nature." Human agency could, it was believed, "enhance God's work." So crucial were the lines of communication to the promotion and establishment of the Old World's civilization in the New World, the authors observe, that what was "formerly an empire with engineers, became an empire of engineers."

Spain's empire was also the "most heavily fortified in history." About Columbia's Cartagena de Indias -- the gateway to 18th-century South America -- the authors write that no visitor today "can feel unmoved by the evidence of indomitable effort that went into the construction of the great seaward walls." Not that those walls were always effective in keeping pirates and marauders at bay: "The fortifications served for psychological effect, even when they functioned poorly as physical protection."

If the Spaniards saw their empire as a 16th-to-19th-century replay of Romanization, there was also a very Iberian supplementary force at work: Christianization or, more specifically, the Catholicization of the peoples Spain encountered and conquered. To this end, the infrastructure put in place by engineers -- the paving of roads, the building of ports and ships -- helped greatly in the pursuit of the empire's theopolitical goals.

In the Hispano-Catholicization of the Americas, the missionaries became important allies to the soldiers and builders -- allies who were, in truth, sometimes ungovernable and recalcitrant. Nevertheless, they played a key role in extending the empire to lands and peoples beyond the easy reach of settlers, traders and bureaucrats. These men of God were also "engineers of empire," the authors tell us, building churches, hospitals and schools. Missions were often the earliest Spanish presence on remote frontiers, doing the work of conquest -- mostly without violence -- that soldiers had done elsewhere with less kindness.

In the course of setting up their empire and in the centuries after losing it, Spaniards, write Messrs. Fernandez-Armesto and Lucena Giraldo, have "compared themselves unfavorably as imperialists" with the Romans. The authors suggest that the Spaniards have been unduly harsh on themselves, and readers should be inclined to agree. A tedious postcolonial self-hatred is, alas, a part of today's Spanish culture, but it can't be denied that Spain's empire was culturally robust, spiritually assertive and frequently reliant on the collaboration of indigenous elites.

Modern Spaniards should find in the Americas a source of pride. Spain's imperial imprint has endured in the New World long after the end of its empire. If many Spanish-speaking countries of the Western Hemisphere are today shoddy and misgoverned, it is not the doing of Spain, and not the fault of the Spanish Empire's stalwart engineers.

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Mr. Varadarajan, a Journal contributor, is a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and at Columbia University's Center on Capitalism and Society." [1]

1.  REVIEW --- Books: Starting From the Ground Up. Varadarajan, Tunku.  Wall Street Journal, Eastern edition; New York, N.Y.. 27 Apr 2024: C.7.