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Genoa also had the earliest examples of double-entry accounting and maritime insurance

They were interested in stealing what they could get their hands on, including people.

They had a different idea of what constituted colonisation than others, you should google colonisation in Goa, they had a go of nearly all the colonial powers and the worst behaved by far were the Spaniards. And when you consider that the british turned up, that's saying something.

The Philippines were never a colony of the Spanish Empire, nor was the Spanish a empire. All territories and citizens under the Spanish Catholic Monarchy were provinces of the same country ("españoles de ambos hemisferios"), with the same rights and duties, liberties and freedoms of Spanish-born Spaniards. The Philippines had the same status and was as much a colony as Granada, Castille, or Andalucia. Of all that direct extraction of resources (to put things into perspective, Peru extracted as much silver last year as the Spanish in 400 years), only 1/5 (the quinto real) would go to the Spanish Crown back in Spain (minus whatever sunk in the way), while 80% of anything stayed in the overseas provinces.

If you want to talk about trade, at the end of the 18th century, the UK sold their textiles in Mexico at 20x the price in England, and it was this cash that bank-rolled the industrial revolution. The industrial revolution would have never happened without the British trade with the Spanish provinces of the New World. Contraband (undeclared goods) made up to 90% of the trade.

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>I would argue with Manila the Spanish actually kind of did both.

Sure.

>Now I wonder if this low priority on trade has not had adverse consequences for the modern Philippines after independence from Spain

The Dutch profited immensely from intra-Indonesian trade conducted by native Indonesians. Perhaps the Spanish were less opportunistic and more restrictive and controlling.

But it is always difficult if not impossible to draw proper causal inferences from such observations.

In any case, internal trade is likely to have had a more lasting impact than the regular but sporadic galleon trade.

> Christianity as an independent religion took several hundred years to evolve from a Messianic cult of Judaism.

I think this split clearly took place with Paul much sooner than you suggest.

>One interesting part of Spanish history that isn't as widely known as it should be is the Reconquista

I thought it was one of the better known parts? It's kind of what laid the template for the conservative, royal-absolutist and very Catholic Spain that followed, mostly little changed until the 1800s upheavals.

> Spain spent hundreds of years recovering her land from the Muslim invaders until they were completely expelled from the country

They must have been surprised or shocked to find more Muslims on the other side of the world, in the early Philippines, in Manila and Mindanao. The Spanish conquest there then really does seem to just be a Reconquista continuation if so.

>if the goal was mainly trade the Spanish could have made use of Manila similar to how the Portuguese and Dutch used Malacca and Batavia during the 17th century: as trade hubs and chokepoints to control, dominate, or divert existing trade routes - without caring too much about conquering the hinterland and converting the native population

I would argue with Manila the Spanish actually kind of did both. I suppose the "conquering and converting" was the bigger and more lasting impact of course, but I thought that in some small way the galleon trade did sort of "control, dominate, or divert existing trade routes" that existed before the Spanish period.

For example, pre-Spain the Philippine kingdoms used to trade a lot more with the Malay and other Southeast Asian regions, even as far as India (and Arab regions) I guess—in addition to the existing China trade; but after Spain came in, the South/Southeast Asian trade mostly disappeared or at least is not heard of as much, compared to the new connection with Mexico/the Americas and the expanding Chinese connection, partly due to Chinese who wanted Mexican silver.

But for sure conquering and converting was always somehow much bigger for the Spanish. Somehow I feel it might be why the Filipinos got so much more culturally changed than their neighbours in SEA—but not so much physically, as few Spaniards actually went all the way there to settle, except for friars, and barring those cases that raped or otherwise knocked up native women, they wouldn't generally be able to have offspring.

Now that you mention it, the Spaniards did seem to be more focused on gold and silver, less on trade and building businesses.

Look at what Venice and Genoa were doing first. This became the template that the Dutch and English followed. It's corporations working in concert with the state. Venice and Genoa basically invented modern incorporated business and international trade.

And this is why Britain, when made to choose between India and America, chose India.

Now I wonder if this low priority on trade has not had adverse consequences for the modern Philippines after independence from Spain, though the American colonial period after 1898 is another complicating factor.

Wonder if it could ever be said with any certainty that the under-focus on trade by the Spanish colonisers has in any way (direct or not) resulted in why even recently, the Philippine economy has historically had trouble growing fast or sustaining growth anytime it does grow fast, unlike more successful East Asian (and even some Southeast Asian) economies.

Looking for a book covering the history of France from a grand narrative perspective. I.e. I care less about dates of reign and conquest and more about the civilizational zeitgeist (having trouble explaining that, but for example consider a history of England that focused on the Celtic to Roman to Saxon to Norman cultural changes, how they affected the rights of peasants and nobility, etc)

I am not saying that trade wasn't important, but on the whole Spanish rule in the Philippines was not profitable and depended on substantial annual subsidies.

Also, if the goal was mainly trade the Spanish could have made use of Manila similar to how the Portuguese and Dutch used Malacca and Batavia during the 17th century: as trade hubs and chokepoints to control, dominate, or divert existing trade routes - without caring too much about conquering the hinterland and converting the native population.

Other examples of this approach are Ormuz, Goa, and Macao (Portugal) and Bombay and Calcutta (England).

I think the Spanish approach was quite different from the start and that it is fair to say that trade was not their main priority even in the Philippines.

One interesting part of Spanish history that isn't as widely known as it should be is the Reconquista.

Christian Spain had been reduced to the small kingdom of Asturias in the North West of the country by the invading Muslims from North Africa.

This small Kingdom eventually expanded and Spain spent hundreds of years recovering her land from the Muslim invaders until they were completely expelled from the country.

This caused Spain to be religiously fervorous which resulted in the mistreatment of people's from other religions.

This is large part of why Spain had a strong focus on converting people to Christianity.

Also, the conquest of the Americas, Mexico in particular resulted in such an influx of gold and silver to Spain that the economy crashed due to the devaluation of the currency.

Silver, too. I wonder how much they ultimately took out of their American colonies over the 300 years or so they were there.

In many ways the economic profile of Spanish rule, at least in the Americas, does seem to revolve much more on direct extraction than trading with local populations.

>based on my very limited knowledge of the Spanish conquest of the Philippines, I would suspect that this fits better with the “American” pattern than the “Indian” or “Indonesian.”

Well, the strange thing is that the Spanish conquest of the Philippines also doesn't quite fit the "standard American" pattern either, apart from the major goal of Christianising the natives. But economically it seems at least more trade oriented than the mostly extraction-based (Latin) American economy, largely also because the Spanish found little to extract directly in the Philippines themselves: less spices than nearby Indonesia (under Portuguese then Dutch control) and less gold or silver than in Mexico or South America. (Which is not to say they didn't extract what they could here. Filipino natives wore and traded a lot of gold and maybe also silver, it wasn't a lot, but a lot of it was in danger of being melted down for reuse as Church relics and things, for example. And they extracted labour, if that counts; most of it was technically not slavery, but the working conditions were still bad and pay was often unreliable or low.) On the other hand, demographically the Philippines as the Spanish found them does seem to fit more like the average American profile, outside at least of the big empires like the Incans or Aztecs, like what you said here:

>Population levels were lower (although this was not the case everywhere) and native societies enjoyed a lower level of economic and technical development

I actually think Philippine populations in the 1600s or so, from what we can tell, might even have declined because of Spanish colonial labour extraction taking its toll, rather than the genocidal effect of the early American conquests. Some scholars have looked into this, like Linda Newson.

But going back to the trade thing, I don't know if this is reaching to say, but, if we disregard the religious and general military/territorial part of the conquest, the economic part of the Spanish conquest, in the Philippines specifically, did seem to be based more around trading than most people know or think: using Manila as a galleon port and a base for trading with China was the main one. And yet even with this, if this is a major difference between their Asian/Philippine economic approach as compared to the American one, overall the perception is still that Spain in general is not seen as prioritising trade to the degree other European empires did. I guess while the other empires were aggressive at economic expansion throughout Asia, the Spanish were content to stop with the galleons for the most part.

>Spanish colonial trade was generally subject to stricter and more limited monopolies, and did not create wealthy merchant elites to the same extent as in England and the Dutch Republic.

One thing I did notice is the Spanish were very late to create what was basically a "Spanish East India Company", the Royal Company of the Philippines established in the 1780s, nearly 200 years after the English and Dutch created their better known East India Companies. And even then it didn't last very long and was rarely profitable. By the 1830s it was gone again.

Also someone said in another repost of this thread that some merchants in Spain itself, to the extent they were ever influential, actually opposed competition coming in from Asia and from the Philippines generally, maybe they got all they could need more locally or closer to home?

Let us not forget that Christianity united religion and philosophy. A lot of ancient pagan philosopher keep their religious beliefs totally separate from their doctrines. And because the ancient religion was mostly focused on rites, it lacked the dimension of belief and "lifestyle". Christianity did for the masses what Stoicism and Pitagoreanism meant for the chosen elite.

I mean, I can only shed the light on Christianity as this is the only topic of religion that I am fairly familiar with and I will mostly rely on two works: How our world became Christian by Paul Veyne & Rise of Western Christendom by Peter Brown. Firstly, we need to understand something that was a fundamental difference between ancient roman religions and Christianity, ancient roman religion was manly described by the term "religionis", which mostly means observance of rites & customs. According to Veyne the Romans often had slightly "diplomatic" approach towards religion. They performed the rites and sacrifices and on this basis demanded favours from Gods. Besides that, it was also common that religion, myth and though became quite separated, which created a problem of belief. Christianity on the other hand used term "credo", which means believe, as the very basis of religion. Being a Christian demanded some actual faith in the gospels, one couldn't be a Christian without believing in the gospels. Late Roman pagan on the other was more of a neoplatonist than anything else.

That focus on belief, a story of Jesus & quick use of the ancient philosophy for apologetics created Christianity quite particular and that's why Paul Veyne (who is a disciple of Foucault & Nietzsche btw) described Christianity as the "masterpiece of religious imagination", and we must be aware that the Christianity was a hot topic of debate in the educated Roman circles, also due to works of people like Tertullian. Besides that many thing that were addressed by Christianity were already a common point of antique philosophers and in a way we can say that Christianity is a philosophical sect for the masses. However, we must also be aware that Christianity weren't eschatological destiny (it was also replace by Islam quite easily) and that its victory wasn't really sure and we can surely imagine other turn of events in the case of Julian's victory. However we must also be aware of the advantages that Christianity hold over ancient paganism.

As for early Roman period we must be aware of one thing; the rupture between late roman empire and early medieval Europe was stronger on the economic terms than on cultural terms. Barbarian tribes were already under Roman influence to some extent and Christianity was in a way also a path to the inclusion in the imperial legacy. We can also ascribe similar factors as before which gave Christianity some kind of advantage over the ancient paganism, tho.

A lot of history is generalized - especially when it comes to broader claims.  

As to your question "Did the Spanish empire focus less on trade than the English and Dutch," the very short answer is "yes." The longer answer is "It depends on place and time." 

Let me explain. 

In general histories, the English empire is (more or less) India, the Dutch empire is Indonesia, and the Spanish empire is Central and South America. (Which also means that the Philippines hardly feature in the more general treatments of Spanish colonialism.)

Generally speaking, imperialism in Asia was initially aimed at trade with wealthy and productive native societies. Large-scale conquest was at first impossible and only occurred at a later stage. 

In the Americas, the situation was different. Population levels were lower (although this was not the case everywhere) and native societies enjoyed a lower level of economic and technical development. As a result, imperialism in the Americas was more aimed at conquest, the establishment of European settlements, and resource extraction. Native societies in the Americas did not by themselves produce much that European buyers wanted.

As and added factor, Spanish colonial trade was generally subject to stricter and more limited monopolies, and did not create wealthy merchant elites to the same extent as in England and the Dutch Republic.  

But please note that there will always be exceptions. English colonial settlements in New England also do not fit the trade-first pattern. European settlements in the Caribbean were all about trade (sugar), but not with native societies.  Etc., etc.  

Finally, based on my very limited knowledge of the Spanish conquest of the Philippines, I would suspect that this fits better with the “American” pattern than the “Indian” or “Indonesian.” 

Hope this helps.

What are some good books on former more obscure presidents? I read one on Grant recently and really enjoyed it

I think it was because they didn't need to? It was basically slaves in -> gold out.

Anything on the age of city states in Italy? I'm aware that's pretty broad, but I'd like to get a good general idea of role the region played in the Renaissance etc. Preferable not to dry.