The Doctrine of Discovery

Today I learned about the Doctrine of Discovery, which is how the Spanish claimed authority and ownership of The New World. (Yes, this is STILL, tangentially, about pirates.)

When we are small children, we are told "Columbus discovered America, or at least the West Indies." This is kind of weird because when he GOT HERE there were already PEOPLE HERE, but maybe I guess he "discovered" it for Spain, who previously didn't know about it.

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How much did Spain Loot from the New World?

It turns out that I am not the only person who wants to know how much Spain looted from the New World. However, unlike me, Earl Hamilton WENT TO SPAIN (to be clear, I ALSO went to Spain but it was for tourism and not research) and looked at the Archivo General de Indias for the hard documents -- shipping manifests and import duties and reports and so forth. He correlated sources as best he could and Did The Math and then WROTE A PAPER, which he published in May 1929 in The Quarterly Journal of Economics. (Have I mentioned that I fucking love the internet? Because I do.)

Would you LIKE TO KNOW how much Spain took back to the colonies as New World Loot? (We're just talking precious metals, here. A sum representing Spain's grand theft of human happiness, its cultural genocide, its ACTUAL genocide, etc. as pertains to its behavior in the New World colonies is incalculable. But the precious metals stolen and shipped back to Spain? We can get a number for that.)

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