>>Not being a lawyer, I am willing to ask a question to which I do not know the answer.<<
That's a misconception, actually. The place to ask the questions to which you don't know the answer is out of court. Interviews, depositions, interrogatories, requests for production of documents, requests for admission. Many many questions, until every possible answer to every possible question is nailed down in advance - at least, one hopes so.
The real lesson about asking the question to which you don't know the answer is that you never let a hostile witness emphasize a damaging answer IN COURT by letting them elaborate. You only ask a hostile witness questions which you know will help you - and if you have none of those, you sit down, and hope the jury wasn't paying attention. By no means do you titillate the jury by prolonging a cross-examination that is going against you.;^)
As for the Spanish colonies - this isn't something I am just speculating about, my undergraduate degree was in history and political science, and I studied quite a bit about the various American colonies. There is no doubt that European countries got rich from their colonies, but Spain's history is problematic. There's really never been a satisfactory explanation, to my satisfaction, anyway, why Spain and the formerly Spanish colonies never really profited from the wealth and let it slip through their fingers, but Northern European countries and their colonies did.
I don't have handy an economist's work on the matter, but I am in the process of reading Carlos Fuentes' "A Distant Mirror": "In the sixteenth century, American mines multiplied Europe's silver reserves by seven. . . . Yet even at the height of production, the mines of Mexico and Peru produced only one quarter of the wealth provided by agriculture and cattle ranching. . . . Bullion had to pay for Spain's costly wars in Europe, its ostentatious monuments, a luxurious aristocracy, the fight against the Protestant Reformation, the administration of Empire, and the importation of manufactured goods. . . . From Italy, Germany and the Netherlands, where Spain had possessions, gold and silver quickly spread all over Europe, provoking the sixteenth-century 'price revolution', which although common to all the continent, affected Spain first and worst. Prices rose more and more rapidly in the country containing the ports of entry. During the reigns of Charles V and Philip II, northern Europe began its spectacular stage of capital accumulation. Spain, a mere intermediary, was deprived of modern capital and modern capitalists, and was forced to buy manufactures from abroad at high prices and to sell raw materials cheap; consequently, it entered a prolonged phase of economic decline. A simple statistic tells the tale. In 1629, according to a Spanish economist of that time, Alonso de Carranza, 75 percent of the gold and silver from the American mines had ended up in only four European cities: London, Rouen, Antwerp, and Amsterdam. Imperial Spain abounded in ironies. The staunchly Catholic monarchy ended by unwittingly financing its Protestant enemies. Spain capitalized Europe while decapitalizing itself. Louis XIV of France put it most succinctly: ‘Let us now sell manufactured goods to the Spaniards and receive from them gold and silver.' Spain was poor because Spain was rich."
On the other hand, in Volume 3 of The Perspectives of the World, Fernand Braudel, who was an economist, calculated - very roughly, of course - the amount of money Spain was sending to its colonies, and the amount of money the colonies were sending back, and calculated that in 1785 the least amount that Spain was receiving as surplus was in the range of £6 million per year (copyright date 1979) - four or five times as much as Britain got from India, making it "the greatest treasure-store in the world." |
