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which_chickIt 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.)
Now, as you can probably guess because I sorta backhandedly cited it above, I have read Mr. Hamilton's paper and it is a delight. He talks about methods and shit, which all scholarly papers do, mostly so that you can read about their methods and either (a) Call Bullshit or (b) mutter seems legit and move forward. Also, if you are gonna go head-to-head and try to replicate or disprove their shit, you probably oughta aim for the soft, white underbelly of the METHODS. Anyway, I am not here to call bullshit or to refute. I don't want to try to find another paper that I can snafle freely off the internets (I did not pay jstor $39 dollars to read this paper. I googled it by title and downloaded it elsewhere, because we are ABOUT PIRATES over here and it seemed both apropos and a whole lot cheaper to just take what I wanted because I wanted it.) so we're gonna act like Hamilton is THE DEFINING WORD on how much gold and silver the Spanish stole from the New World. *mutter* Seems legit. *mutter* #honestresearchmethods
The meat of the paper, once you wade through the methods and the charmingly amusing (this is not sarcasm) footnotes, boils down to TWO TABLES, which I have reproduced for you here:
and also
I do not know how much a peso (defined by footnote as "652.635 grains of silver up to December 1642, when it was devalued to 522.09 grains) from then would be worth in today's dollars. What is a grain, anyway? *googles* It's a small amount of silver, about fifteen grains to the gram. *googles* A "peso" at the 652.635 grain size is worth $32.06 in today's US dollars. At the smaller size, it's $25.65. Thanks, google!
Right, then. Let's do the math. I'm gonna ROUND SOME NUMBERS HERE from Table A because no way I'm typing seven digits correctly time and again.
I totaled the "up to 1640" amount for 764,848,000 @ 32.06 is 24,521,026,880
And I totaled the "1640 to 1660" amount at 72,380,000 @ 25.65 is 1,856,547,000
That gives us just about 26,377,573,880 in (modern) US dollars. There's some slush because the table gives "annual average for the period" (I used 8 years instead of 10 when multiplying out the first table entry, btw, because it wasn't 10 years, it was eight.) and the period is 10 and so you have to multiply by 10 to get the income-over-the-period. This is hamfisted and introduces errors and shit but we're pressing onward. Call it 26 billion and let's move on.
Looking at Table B, or anyway, the sentence directly under the table we see the Total Precious Metals Loot according to Earl Hamilton:
Silver was 16,632,648.20 kg @ current spot price per kg of $769.03 gives us...
$12,791,005,445.25 in current US dollars
(We're using bullion price because there is no historic, cultural, or artistic value in the gold/silver shipped to Spain as NWL (New World Loot, I'm getting tired of typing it). They melted damn near everything down before it ever left the Americas. They did NOT (mostly) ship back, like, Fancy Aztec Culturally Significant Item Displaying Amazing Craftsmanship. They mostly shipped back lumps of metal.)
Gold was 181,234.95 kg @ current spot price per kg of $63,032.40 gives us...
$11,423,673,862.38 in current US dollars
Therefore, by this metric, the total value of precious metals NWL (that are "on the records" as having been shipped back to Spain), in today's US dollars:
24,214,679,307.63 or 24 billion dollars.
Given that we're working with centuries-old bureaucratic records in an era when weights and measures were... less than great, an error of 2 billion on a 24 or 26 billion number is pretty decent. For discussion purposes, I'm going with "24 Billion".
You know, that's A LOT of money, but it's not Jeff Bezos or Elon Musk amounts. Hell, according to the 2022 Forbes list, there are like 26 people in the world RIGHT NOW ALIVE who are PERSONALLY worth more money than the current value of the NWL that Spain took from the New World between 1500 and 1660, an interval of time which encompasses what we can think of as the Peak Plunder Period. Three of those people mentioned are Waltons.
Wow.
I did not expect this discussion to go there. I am NOT HERE to discuss late-stage capitalism. I was TRYING to have a fun chat about Spain and extractive colonial exploitation (some part of that is redundant, prolly) and now it's all ashes in my mouth.
Well, shit.
I'll try again another time.
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.)
Now, as you can probably guess because I sorta backhandedly cited it above, I have read Mr. Hamilton's paper and it is a delight. He talks about methods and shit, which all scholarly papers do, mostly so that you can read about their methods and either (a) Call Bullshit or (b) mutter seems legit and move forward. Also, if you are gonna go head-to-head and try to replicate or disprove their shit, you probably oughta aim for the soft, white underbelly of the METHODS. Anyway, I am not here to call bullshit or to refute. I don't want to try to find another paper that I can snafle freely off the internets (I did not pay jstor $39 dollars to read this paper. I googled it by title and downloaded it elsewhere, because we are ABOUT PIRATES over here and it seemed both apropos and a whole lot cheaper to just take what I wanted because I wanted it.) so we're gonna act like Hamilton is THE DEFINING WORD on how much gold and silver the Spanish stole from the New World. *mutter* Seems legit. *mutter* #honestresearchmethods
The meat of the paper, once you wade through the methods and the charmingly amusing (this is not sarcasm) footnotes, boils down to TWO TABLES, which I have reproduced for you here:
and also
I do not know how much a peso (defined by footnote as "652.635 grains of silver up to December 1642, when it was devalued to 522.09 grains) from then would be worth in today's dollars. What is a grain, anyway? *googles* It's a small amount of silver, about fifteen grains to the gram. *googles* A "peso" at the 652.635 grain size is worth $32.06 in today's US dollars. At the smaller size, it's $25.65. Thanks, google!
Right, then. Let's do the math. I'm gonna ROUND SOME NUMBERS HERE from Table A because no way I'm typing seven digits correctly time and again.
I totaled the "up to 1640" amount for 764,848,000 @ 32.06 is 24,521,026,880
And I totaled the "1640 to 1660" amount at 72,380,000 @ 25.65 is 1,856,547,000
That gives us just about 26,377,573,880 in (modern) US dollars. There's some slush because the table gives "annual average for the period" (I used 8 years instead of 10 when multiplying out the first table entry, btw, because it wasn't 10 years, it was eight.) and the period is 10 and so you have to multiply by 10 to get the income-over-the-period. This is hamfisted and introduces errors and shit but we're pressing onward. Call it 26 billion and let's move on.
Looking at Table B, or anyway, the sentence directly under the table we see the Total Precious Metals Loot according to Earl Hamilton:
Silver was 16,632,648.20 kg @ current spot price per kg of $769.03 gives us...
$12,791,005,445.25 in current US dollars
(We're using bullion price because there is no historic, cultural, or artistic value in the gold/silver shipped to Spain as NWL (New World Loot, I'm getting tired of typing it). They melted damn near everything down before it ever left the Americas. They did NOT (mostly) ship back, like, Fancy Aztec Culturally Significant Item Displaying Amazing Craftsmanship. They mostly shipped back lumps of metal.)
Gold was 181,234.95 kg @ current spot price per kg of $63,032.40 gives us...
$11,423,673,862.38 in current US dollars
Therefore, by this metric, the total value of precious metals NWL (that are "on the records" as having been shipped back to Spain), in today's US dollars:
24,214,679,307.63 or 24 billion dollars.
Given that we're working with centuries-old bureaucratic records in an era when weights and measures were... less than great, an error of 2 billion on a 24 or 26 billion number is pretty decent. For discussion purposes, I'm going with "24 Billion".
You know, that's A LOT of money, but it's not Jeff Bezos or Elon Musk amounts. Hell, according to the 2022 Forbes list, there are like 26 people in the world RIGHT NOW ALIVE who are PERSONALLY worth more money than the current value of the NWL that Spain took from the New World between 1500 and 1660, an interval of time which encompasses what we can think of as the Peak Plunder Period. Three of those people mentioned are Waltons.
Wow.
I did not expect this discussion to go there. I am NOT HERE to discuss late-stage capitalism. I was TRYING to have a fun chat about Spain and extractive colonial exploitation (some part of that is redundant, prolly) and now it's all ashes in my mouth.
Well, shit.
I'll try again another time.
