The year is 1492. You are the Catholic Monarchs - both of them. Isabel and Fernando, tanto monta, monta tanto. You have just finished kicking all of the Muslim powers out of Iberia, and youâre feeling so pleased with yourselves that you expel the Jews about it. You have a problem, though - thereâs this annoying Genoese moron named Christopher Columbus who keeps waving some bad math at you, insisting that the world is actually smaller than everyone thinks it is and he could totally sail to India by going west. He gets on your nerves so much that you just give him a couple of ships and send him off. He definitely wonât make it to India, but maybe heâll find some little island and give all of your newly-unemployed hidalgos something to keep them busy. Heâll probably just starve to death in the middle of the ocean, and then heâs no longer your problem.
The year is 1519, and you are HernĂĄn CortĂŠs. You and all of your compatriots are stuck in the most effective way to make someone a bad person: put them in a situation where they must become incredibly wealthy and powerful incredibly fast or else they will die horribly. Transatlantic voyages are absurdly expensive. Anyone in the âNew Worldâ who isnât rich enough to afford their own army is deeply in debt, with no collateral but their own sword-arm. It is an environment that does not reward half-measures. It does not even reward full measures. It only rewards putting a brick on the gas pedal and crossing your fingers - if you kill one person then youâre a murderer, but if you kill hundreds of thousands of people then you're a paragon of glory and the Spanish crown will make statues of you.
The year is still 1519 and you are Moctezuma II, HuÄyi TlahtoÄni (great ruler) of the âAztec Empire,â also known as the Triple Alliance, or the Mexica. You know a thing or two about half-measures not being rewarded, because you are in a process of rapidly expanding and consolidating a nascent Mesoamerican empire. You are quite good at your job - even before you ascended to the throne, you cultivated a reputation as a skilled warrior, a dedicated student, and a devout worshiper. Your name means something like âlord who frowns in anger.â Itâs a fitting name, because the process of âimperial expansion and consolidationâ generally involves killing lots of people. To make matters worse, some weird hairy white guys showed up out of nowhere and they keep demanding an audience with you. You try every trick in the diplomatic handbook - deferment, threats, flattery, bribes - but everything you do just seems to make them more single-mindedly focused on your destruction. Later, after you are dead, they will claim that you thought they were gods.
The year is 1545, and this whole âcolonialismâ thing is starting to peter out. Trans-Atlantic voyages are still ruinously expensive, and the pickings are getting slimmer every day - itâs not like you can go loot Tenochtitlan a second time. Youâre starting to wonder if itâs time for everyone to pack up, go home, and forget about⌠holy shit is that a mountain of silver? Is that an honest-to-god mountain with more silver in it than every other existing silver mine on the face of the earth combined? Yes. Some call it PotosĂ. Many will call it âthe mountain that eats men.â In a single moment, colonialism goes from a plundering campaign for recently-unemployed soldiers to a permanent institution. The alchemists back in Prague and Vienna never learned how to turn lead into gold, but the mercenaries and taskmasters in PotosĂ found a much simpler equation to turn blood into silver.
The year is 1571, and the economy of the Ming dynasty doesnât feel so good. Their experiment with paper money was a failure, to put it gently. It turns out when you try to have paper currency but you donât have sophisticated counterfeit protections and thereâs also a booming cottage industry of people making paper in their actual cottages, well, you can guess how that ends. So youâre trying to shift to a silver economy. But then you run into an even bigger problem: you donât have enough silver. So if you start demanding taxes in silver, the price of silver will skyrocket, which means taxes will skyrocket when the economy is already ailing from the whole âpaper moneyâ thing. Some hapless scholar-official in Guangdong is nervously watching a peasant sharpen his pitchfork when he gets word from a messenger: some gweilo just showed up at the port with literal shipfuls of silver and they want to buy silk, tea, spices, and porcelain at outrageous markups.
Within living memory, the world was still âmedievalâ in many ways - slow, parochial, zero-sum, carefully arbitrated by tradition and precedent. Legible. And now Spanish sailors take Bolivian silver on ships guarded by West African mercenaries and Japanese ronin, sailing to their colony in the Philippines to rub shoulders with Chinese officials, Indian sultans, and Malay merchants. All because some dipshit from Genoa got his math wrong and wouldnât shut up about it.
The moral of this story is that Iâm going insane.
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