Would Spain have been better off without its American colonies?

Now are you going to tell me that poor people in Rome did not benefit from empire?

I'm not arguing with any of your points. However, many of them involved the poor people leaving the metropolis to live somewhere else. They also involved said poor people being used in the war machine to build more empire, and hold on to the empire it already held. The poor people still living in Rome did benefit, but this was mostly a form of crowd control. The rich people benefited vastly more from empire than the poor. And when the empire collapsed, Rome was left as a shell of its former self for centuries. Not to mention the fact that the importance of Rome as a capital waned during the empire's last couple of centuries.

Are you telling me that the people living in slums in Victorian London, toiling away in the workshops, shipyards etc. paid a pittance, with a lower life expectancy (for a long time) than people still in the countryside, benefited from the British Empire to the same extent as the British elites did? (Mind you, London has survived (and thrived) since the end of the British Empire.)
 
It wasn't just the American gold and silver that did it. The money that flowed in from that was actually a fraction of Spain's overall income. Far more damaging was their horrible taxation system. Due to the way Spain was set up the only place that could really be effectively taxed was Castille. Spain's growing Imperial commitments meant it constantly needed more money to support its efforts, and those taxes all, or almost all fell on Castille. Castille was the richest area of Spain of coruse, but the taxes basically destroyed it economically. Meanwhile the lack of investment in Spain itself as money was drained to other parts of Europe meant that as inflation hit from the increased amounts of specie meant Spain was becoming poorer relative to Europe vs say the Netherlands or England.

One could say the America gold enabled this system to remain instead to be reformed and, moreover, allowed the King to not care about the Estates and rule from an absolute manner - some Oil-producing Gulf countries have practically no taxes because of this - which is very bad for develloping good democratic traditions.
 
I'm not arguing with any of your points. However, many of them involved the poor people leaving the metropolis to live somewhere else. They also involved said poor people being used in the war machine to build more empire, and hold on to the empire it already held. The poor people still living in Rome did benefit, but this was mostly a form of crowd control. The rich people benefited vastly more from empire than the poor. And when the empire collapsed, Rome was left as a shell of its former self for centuries. Not to mention the fact that the importance of Rome as a capital waned during the empire's last couple of centuries.

Are you telling me that the people living in slums in Victorian London, toiling away in the workshops, shipyards etc. paid a pittance, with a lower life expectancy (for a long time) than people still in the countryside, benefited from the British Empire to the same extent as the British elites did? (Mind you, London has survived (and thrived) since the end of the British Empire.)

Veii is just next door to Rome! How could settling it, and incorporating it to Rome, be seen as leaving the metropolis! If you ask the poor plebians being settled in Veii in their own plot of land just a few miles across the Tiber if they're actually leaving Rome, they'll laugh and say no.

It doesn't matter how much vaster the rich benefited from the empire more than the poor. It only matters that the poor also benefited, and thus, their lives were better before the acquisition of empire. Thus, ordinary Roman plebs were vaster better off than they were before Rome's acquisition of empire. It's not a game of relative benefits, but of absolute benefits, and thus, both rich and poor benefited.

And yeah, so what if the poor people were soldiers? Those people gain a lot from fighting and conquering. Loot, plunder from defeated enemies, the enemies' land as farms for their landless kin, salaries, etc. Those were no mean things in the Ancient World, and it vastly exceeds their ordinary income in peace. And it was an honor to fight for Rome during the Republic, and during the empire.


And Rome and Italy are the metropolis. People leaving Rome and settling in other parts of Italy aren't really leaving the metropolis. At first, Rome was only the metropolis, but by the first century B.C., all of Italy could be considered such.

So what if it is crowd control? They still benefited from the empire. They got free food, free entertainment, a better standard of living, etc. And that would not be possible without the empire giving free things to Roman Citizens. Our welfare system today would might as well be labeled crowd control to prevent people from rioting and dying.

As for what Rome was after the empire collapsed, that doesn't matter to the Roman poor and plebs when empire first came and during it's height, since that are we are talking about.

What matters for this discussion is that when it could, the Roman Republic and Empire gave lots of benefits and services to the poor plebians, and it was real and they felt it as real too.

Are you still insisting that the poor Romans didn't benefit from Empire? Because they most certainly did!

As for Victorian London, I'm going to leave that to other people more knowledgeable to me. But even if your point on London stands, the thing I'm trying to disprove is that all empire tend to not benefit the metropolis at all. One counterexample would disprove that, and show that, while it might be true in some cases, it is not in other cases.
 
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In the long run, we are all dead.

The empire made them the strongest nation on Earth, unparalleled in scope and prestige.
 
The empire made them the strongest nation on Earth, unparalleled in scope and prestige.

The Ottoman Empire was stronger still, forcing the Hapsburgs to pay yearly tribute. But yes, the American empire gave them a lot of resources.
 
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Deleted member 94708

I'm not arguing with any of your points. However, many of them involved the poor people leaving the metropolis to live somewhere else. They also involved said poor people being used in the war machine to build more empire, and hold on to the empire it already held. The poor people still living in Rome did benefit, but this was mostly a form of crowd control. The rich people benefited vastly more from empire than the poor. And when the empire collapsed, Rome was left as a shell of its former self for centuries. Not to mention the fact that the importance of Rome as a capital waned during the empire's last couple of centuries.

Are you telling me that the people living in slums in Victorian London, toiling away in the workshops, shipyards etc. paid a pittance, with a lower life expectancy (for a long time) than people still in the countryside, benefited from the British Empire to the same extent as the British elites did? (Mind you, London has survived (and thrived) since the end of the British Empire.)

I think you're unfairly conflating difficulties that are universal to industrialization with those caused by the existence of an empire. Without the empire, Britain would would have had an Industrial Revolution, but without the captive markets, first of America, and then of India, this industrialization wouldn't have made them fabulously wealthy in a way that ultimately made possible a large middle class.

Furthermore, while Britain thrived after the end of the Empire, that doesn't imply that it never benefited from it. Had the Second Empire never come about, Britain would be unrecognizable today.
 
Spain pre-1492 was a rather poor country. And its chances of emerging as a stable, prospering commercial economy were pretty strongly scrapped by the expulsion of the Moors and Jews from Spain. Doing so effectively closed the door on centuries of a rather advanced commercial economy in Spain because it decapitated the rich, productive class of merchants, burghers, and financiers which were the primary roles played by the Jewish and Muslim communities of Spain, one of the largest and most pronounced legacies of Al-Andalus. Expelling this group of society effectively reverted Spain to a feudal, agrarian-driven economy not terribly dissimilar to those of most other European states at the time. It also cemented Spain as a top-heavy society dominated by the nobility and the Spanish Crown most of all. Spain and Portugal didn't really have that tenuous period of centralization of a powerful monarchy that lasted centuries as it did elsewhere in Europe: both the Spanish and Portuguese Crowns were at the head of intensely-centralized states that controlled nearly every level of their societies, a stunning development in light of how weak state systems generally were at the time, particularly in Western Europe.

The lands that eventually came to comprise Spanish Empire were explored and eventually conquered in this period in Spanish history. So it saved Spain from being a relatively secondary part of Europe and instead raised it to become one of the wealthiest empires in world history. Yet this prosperity was very crude and not rooted in true economic strength: the basis of the Spanish colonial economy was rooted in the extraction of raw materials such as gold and silver and later the cultivation of cash crops for export. Spain's empire pretty much made it a power in Europe, losing it (as in everything from the Americas to the Philippines) ended Spain's status as a great power.
 
The colonization of the Americas and the Philippines had propelled Spain to hegemonic status for two centuries and uplifting its cultural and linguistic prestige throughout Europe. The fault however was the expulsion of merchant and intellectual Jewish and Muslim classes from Spain, to purify itself from "heretics" while spreading Catholicism in New World colonies and stumping down Protestants in Central Europe using funds obtained from gold and silver extraction in Mexico and Potosi.

Spain should have stayed out from Central Europe and focused on New World and Philippine colonies, to extend the lifespan of the Spanish Empire while at the same time, forging stable economic and political institutions throughout the empire where separation by its colonies from the metropole would have been smoother like white British dominions vis-a-vis Britain proper. Their colonization in New World and the Philippines should have been not just a pure exploitation of natural resources alone, but also replicating the metropole wholesale like family-based immigration, small-scale land ownership, and decentralized self-government economic and political systems.
 
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