Debt: The First 5000 Years - autonomous learning

314 DEBT
institutions operate, to describe the political battles that led to the
creation of those very institutions
This is not just a conceptual problem. There are moral dangers
here. To take what might seem an "objective," macro-economic approach
to the origins of the world economy would be to treat the
behavior of early European explorers, merchants, and conquerors as if
they were simply rational responses to opportunities-as if this were
just what anyone would have done in the same situation. This is what
the use of equations so often does: make it seem perfectly natural to
assume that, if the price of silver in China is twice what it is in Seville,
and inhabitants of Seville are capable of getting their hands on large
quantities of silver and transporting it to China, then clearly they will,
even if doing so requires the destruction of entire civilizations. Or if
there is a demand for sugar in England, and enslaving millions is the
easiest way to acquire labor to produce it, then it is inevitable that
some will enslave them. In fact, history makes it quite clear that this is
not the case. Any number of civilizations have probably been in a position
to wreak havoc on the scale that the European powers did in the
sixteenth and seventeenth centuries (Ming China itself was an obvious
candidate}, but almost none actually did so.12
Consider, for instance, how the gold and silver from the American
mines were extracted. Mining operations began almost immediately
upon the fall of the Aztec capital of Tenochtithin in 1521. While we
are used to assuming that the Mexican population was devastated simply
as an effect of newly introduced European diseases, contemporary
observers felt that the dragooning of the newly conquered natives to
work in the mines was at least equally responsible.U In The Conquest
of America, Tzvetan T odorov offers a compendium of some of the
most chilling reports, mostly from Spanish priests and friars who, even
when committed in principle to the belief that the extermination of
the Indians was the judgment of God, could not disguise their horror
at scenes of Spanish soldiers testing the blades of their weapons by
eviscerating random passers-by, and tearing babies off their mother's
backs to be eaten by dogs. Such acts might perhaps be written off as
what one would expect when a collection of heavily armed men-many
of violent criminal background-are given absolute impunity; but the
reports from the mines imply something far more systematic. When
Fray Toribio de Motolinia wrote of the ten plagues that he believed
God had visited on the inhabitants of Mexico, he listed smallpox, war,
famine, labor exactions, taxes (which caused many to sell their children
to moneylenders, others to be tortured to death in cruel prisons), and