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The Spanish Empire
The first global empire, spanning the Americas, the Philippines and outposts in Africa
Spain's empire was the first described, in its own time, as one on which the sun never set. Beginning with Columbus's first voyage in 1492, it grew into a network of viceroyalties that ran from California and Florida to the far south of South America, with the Philippines across the Pacific and outposts in Africa. Silver from Potosí and Zacatecas, carried by treasure fleets and the Manila galleons, helped create the first truly global trade. The empire's legacy is visible in the roughly 500 million native speakers of Spanish, in Catholicism across Latin America and the Philippines, and in grid-plan colonial cities from Mexico to Chile. It also rested on conquest, the forced labor of Indigenous peoples and the enslavement of Africans.
Most of the empire lay in the Americas. The Viceroyalty of New Spain, governed from Mexico City, covered Mexico, Central America, Cuba, Puerto Rico and Santo Domingo, and much of the present-day western and southern United States, and it administered the Philippines across the Pacific. The Viceroyalty of Peru, later divided to create New Granada and the Río de la Plata, held nearly all of Spanish South America, from the Caribbean coasts of Colombia and Venezuela through the Andes to the Pampas. At its peak around 1810 the empire covered about 13.7 million square kilometers. Its former lands now lie in 18 Spanish-speaking countries of the Americas, Puerto Rico, the United States from Florida to California, the Philippines, Guam and the Northern Mariana Islands, Equatorial Guinea and Western Sahara, whose status is disputed.
Castile and Aragon, joined by the marriage of Isabella and Ferdinand, sponsored Columbus's 1492 voyage, and within half a century conquistadors had overthrown the Mexica in 1521 and the Inca in 1532 and 1533. Under its Habsburg kings Spain also ruled parts of Italy and the Low Countries. Colonial rule relied on Indigenous labor through the encomienda and the mining mita, and epidemics of European diseases, compounded by war and forced labor, caused a population collapse among Indigenous peoples. Spanish colonies also imported enslaved Africans, largely through licensed contracts called asientos. Wars of independence from 1810 to 1826 ended Spanish rule on the American mainland. Defeat by the United States in 1898 cost Spain Cuba, Puerto Rico, Guam and the Philippines, and it left Equatorial Guinea in 1968 and Western Sahara in 1976.