In The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1904), Max Weber famously argued that the inner rationality of capitalist accumulation first emerged during the Protestant Reformation in the form of the Puritan concept of the “calling” and an associated sensibility of worldly asceticism. For Weber, Catholicism was too affiliated with spiritual transcendence to give rise to a capitalist subject, fully dedicated to the mundane labors of everyday life. Immediately controversial yet powerful even today, this thesis has long impacted scholarship and debate about the history of capitalism. But it has tended to relegate Spain and its empire to capitalism’s temporal “pre-history” or spatial “outside,” chalking the activities of the colonizers up to little more than the self-evidently non-modern auri sacra fames (greed for gold) that Columbus so clearly displayed in his writings.

Taking Weber’s work and legacy as a point of departure, this one-day, interdisciplinary workshop aims to explore the intersections of Capitalism, Catholicism, and Colonialism in the early modern Iberian world. Topics could include, but are not limited to, scholasticism and value; commerce, communication, and conversion; austerity and asceticism; spiritual capital; evangelization and accounting; religion, blood, and race; violent vs. peaceful evangelization and primitive accumulation; secularism and the Jesuits; fetishism of relics and commodities; the labor theory of value and the School of Salamanca; and usury and finance.