How Spanish Was the Spanish Conquest?: Reexamining Spanish Success in the New World

Was there a Spanish Conquest? Our textbooks have often retold the story of the Spanish conquistadors’ arrival in the Western Hemisphere and the subsequent destruction of the Aztec and Incan empires. By 1570, there were already 118,000 Spanish colonists in the New World. By the late sixteenth century, Spanish arms had created an empire stretching from Chile to California, and between 1503 and 1660, some sixteen million kilograms of silver and 185,000 kilograms of gold had been shipped from the New World to Spain, funding Spanish hegemony in Europe and the beginning of the capitalist world system.¹ The accidental landing