Race Mixing and Decline

A website has blamed miscegenation for Spain's decline as a great power in the 1600s. Opposite this bogus and unsubstantiated claim is a mountain of description connecting Spain's decline with economics and social matters that have nothing to do with race. The CIA Factbook is not a perfect source, but it offers one description of Spain's decline that includes nothing about race:

Spain's powerful world empire of the 16th and 17th centuries ultimately yielded command of the seas to England. Subsequent failure to embrace the mercantile and industrial revolutions caused the country to fall behind Britain, France, and Germany in economic and political power.

Those claiming that Spain declined because of race are, of course, suggesting that Spain rose in power because of race - the pure race whose pollution created the decline. Geography rather than race is one factor in Spain's rise as a maritime power. Its economic power was a product of its contact across the Atlantic to the Americas. Spain did not develop a merchant class with values of frugality and investment to the extent of the Dutch, British and French. In Spain the values of the aristocracy prevailed. Wealth was squandered on luxuries for the sake of prestige. And Spain's Hapsburg rulers squandered wealth fighting wars, for both prestige and the preservation of the Catholic faith. Spain hurt itself by driving away skilled Jews and Arabs, leaving itself unable to maintain the intricate irrigation systems and other features of what had been a highly productive Moorish agriculture. Spain's agriculture came under the control not of business-minded peasants but of huge estates owned by the aristocracy and the Church. These were absentee landlords, who were more interested in prestige than agricultural production. Their intermediaries lent the land in small parcels to sharecroppers or tenants on short leases, leaving those who worked the soil without incentive to advance production.

Spain lost most of its empire in the early 1800s, not long after Britain lost much of its empire in the Americas, when transporting troops across the Atlantic was still slow. And it lost its empire in Latin America largely to a mixed race - contrary to the claim that mixed race meant reduced power.

If Spain weakened itself by race-mixing, that race-mixing should still be handicapping Spain today. But Spain has been growing economically as fast as the Danes and the Dutch.

address of this article: http://www.fsmitha.com/com/spain.htm

Race-mixing and Decline