A citation Jim Blaut would have appreciated

In the nineteenth century, as is true today, Seville was a 
magnificent array of fountains and walled gardens, of red-tile roofs 
and white-stucco walls and windows covered by wrought-iron grillwork, 
of orange and lemon and palm trees. Threading through the Spanish 
city were narrow cobblestone streets filled with visitors come to 
look at one of the largest Gothic cathedrals in Europe.

When the twenty-seven-year-old Leopold [future tyrant over the Congo 
Free State] arrived in Seville, in March 1862, his purpose was not to 
see the cathedral or the famous mosaics and courtyards of the 
brightly tiled Alcazar palace. Instead, he spent a full month in the 
Casa Lonja, or Old Exchange Building, a massive, square structure 
opposite the cathedral.

For two centuries Seville was the port through which colonial gold, 
silver, and other riches had flowed back to Spain; some eighty years 
before Leopold's visit, King Carlos III had ordered that there be 
gathered in this building, from throughout the country, all decrees, 
government and court records, correspondence, maps and architectural 
drawings, having to do with the Spanish conquest of the Americas. 
Collected under one roof, these eighty-six million handwritten pages, 
among them the supply manifest for one of Columbus's ships, have made 
the General Archive of the Indies one of the great repositories of 
the world. Indifferent to his schoolwork as a boy, with no interest 
whatever in art, music, or literature, Leopold was nonetheless a 
dedicated scholar when it came to one subject, profits. During the 
month he spent in Seville, he wrote home to a friend, "I am very busy 
here going through the Indies archives and calculating the profit 
which Spain made then and makes now out of her colonies." The man 
whose future empire would be intertwined with the twentieth-century 
multinational corporation began by studying the records of the 
conquistadors.

-- 
Louis Proyect, lnp3@panix.com on 09/27/2001

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