Debt: The First 5000 Years - autonomous learning

AG E OF THE GREAT CAPITALIST EMPIRES 319
producing steady, mathematical, inexorable growth of income, lies at
the very heart of what we now call "capitalism."
As a result, our current economic system has always been marked
by a peculiar dual character. Scholars have long been fascinated by
Spanish debates that ensued, in Spanish universities like Santander,
about the humanity of the Indians (Did they have souls Could they
have legal rights Was it legitimate to forcibly enslave them), just as
they have argued about the real attitudes of the conquistadors (was it
contempt, revulsion, or even grudging admiration for their adversaries)21
The real point is that at the key moments of decision, none of
this mattered. Those making the decisions did not feel they were in
control anyway; those who were did not particularly care to know the
details. To take a telling example: after the earliest years of the gold
and silver mines described by Motolinia, where millions of Indians
were simply rounded up and marched off to their deaths, colonists
settled on a policy of debt peonage: the usual trick of demanding
heavy taxes, lending money at interest to those who could not pay,
and then demanding that the loans be repaid with work. Royal agents
regularly attempted to forbid such practices, arguing that the Indians
were now Christian and that this violated their rights as loyal subjects
of the Spanish crown. But as with almost all such royal efforts to act
as protector of the Indians, the result was the same. Financial exigencies
ended up taking precedence. Charles V himself was deeply in debt
to banking firms in Florence, Genoa, and Naples, and gold and silver
from the Americas made up perhaps one-fifth of his total revenue. In
the end, despite a lot of initial noise and the (usually quite sincere)
moral outrage on the part of the king's emissaries, such decrees were
either ignored or, at best, enforced for a year or two before being allowed
to slip into abeyance.22
I I I I I
All of this helps explain why the Church had been so uncompromising
in its attitude toward usury. It was not just a philosophical question;
it was a matter of moral rivalry. Money always has the potential to
become a moral imperative unto itself. Allow it to expand, and it can
quickly become a morality so imperative that all others seem frivolous
in comparison. For the debtor, the world is reduced to a collection of
potential dangers, potential tools, and potential merchandiseY Even
human relations become a matter of cost-benefit calculation. Clearly
this is the way the conquistadors viewed the worlds that they set out
to conquer.