I.

Introduction

Spanish Empire, overseas territories in Africa, the Americas, and Asia historically subject to the sovereignty of Spain.

Spain's imperial expansion is popularly associated with the establishment and consolidation of its vast empire in the Americas, a process that began, slowly at first, with Christopher Columbus and his first voyage to the Caribbean sea in 1492, and reached its climax in the second half of the 18th century, when new settlements were established in areas that now form part of the United States (California, Arizona, New Mexico, Texas) and, at the other end of the continent, in regions such as southern Chile and Patagonia, which hitherto had been subject to only notional Spanish sovereignty. This vast Spanish-American edifice began to crumble in 1810, with the onset of revolutions in Argentina and Venezuela and had collapsed on the mainland by 1824-1825, but on Cuba and Puerto Rico Spanish sovereignty survived until 1898.

Alongside this massive American enterprise, Spain also began in 1565 to establish an equally impressive, although less notorious, presence in Asia with the arrival in the Philippines—named after King Philip II of Spain—of a major naval-military expedition led by Miguel López de Legazpi. Although there, as in America, large areas, particularly in the south, remained effectively free from close Spanish control until some 250 years after the initial conquest, Spanish sovereignty over the major islands remained secure until 1898, when Filipino nationalists seized power before the archipelago as a whole fell under the control of the United States in 1899, as a side-effect of the Spanish-American War. The third major dimension to Spanish imperialism—territorial expansion in Africa—had its antecedents in the 15th century, when the fortified outpost at Melilla was established on the coast of Morocco, but this was primarily a 19th to 20th century phenomenon in terms of formal colonization.