In 1960, Felipe Fernández-Armesto and Manuel Lucena Giraldo tell us, Lucian Freud went to the Goya Museum in Castres in search of a particular painting. He wanted to create portraits that were character studies and ‘not mere likenesses’, and Goya’s collective portrait ‘La Real Compañía de Filipinas’,a study in human nullity that represented ‘absolutely nothing’, was just what he was looking for. Fernández-Armesto explains:

The work belongs in the tradition of what might be called Spanish ‘anti-portraiture’, from Velázquez’s ‘Las Meninas’ to Goya’s own devastatingly candid royal family group, ‘Familia de Carlos IV’, moral as well as physical delineations of regal vacuity. King Ferdinand VII appears amid the company’s directors, who, enveloped in shadow, seem to ignore him while they talk among themselves, apparently clueless as to why they are there or whether it matters.

How did a monarchy ruled by such a pitiful inbred as Charles II control an empire that straddled the world?

It came as something of a relief – justification, even – to arrive at this perfect vignette, because for the previous 283 pages the one question that would not go away was how on earth did the vacuous halfwits of Goya and Velázquez’s portraits ever manage to do anything? How did a monarchy – Habsburg or Bourbon – ruled by such a poor, pitiful inbred as Charles II control an empire that straddled the world? How did a navy that the English had always thought there for the taking dominate its Atlantic and Pacific trade? How did engineers who for 300 years dodged the challenge of a Panama canal leave such a rich physical inheritance? How did a martyr-intoxicated clergy (shades of the English College, Rome, in the Elizabethan age), whose chief instrument of moral correction was the lash, leave behind them such a profoundly Catholic legacy? And how, unkindly, did people who looked like Goya’s lot manage to cash in so often on that most bizarre of cultural phenomena, the ‘stranger-effect’? 

If I’m still not quite sure of the answers, it is not for want of being told. It takes a brave man to say anything good about any empire these days, but in a brilliant and battling introduction, full of elegantly turned argument, of seemingly counter-intuitive asides that make one think one had thought those things all one’s life, Fernández-Armesto takes on the very Anglo-Saxon, almost ‘Python-esque’, legend of ‘moral inferiority’, genocidal greed and religious fanaticism. In its place, he conjures up a history of unrivalled durability, success and unexpected compromise achieved in the face of almost insuperable problems of distance, climate and topography.

The book is both literally and metaphorically about how this empire – the preferred description was ‘monarchy’ – was built. In the first chapter proper the authors ask what follows after the ‘heroes’ of all imperial foundation myths have come and gone, and their answer is ‘a moment of technology’ and the arrival of the ‘engineer’. This is interpreted in the widest possible sense to cover pretty well everything from mining, ship-building and the construction of bridges, roads, forts and naval docks to civic planning, public health, botany, cultural hybridity and missionaries.

The book would be almost worth buying for these opening salvoes alone, which is just as well – because what follows reads more like the quarry for a book than the finished article. There are passages throughout of real style and lucidity; but in chapter after chapter one can find oneself lost in a morass of detail from which – however evocative or impeccable the scholarship – there seems no escape. A paragraph taken entirely at random, but one that could be replicated 100 times over reads:

Elsewhere in New Spain, at Querétaro, Juan Antonio de Urrutia, Marqués de Villar del Águila, solved the city’s problems in 1738, contributing 60 per cent of the 124,791 pesos it cost to do so from his own pocket. From springs known as Los Ojos del Capulin, from the name of the wild cherry trees around it, an aqueduct 1 kilometre long brought the water required over 74 impressive arches, 23 metres (75 ft) high at the utmost point… The aqueduct El Sitio, in Xalpa, which would attain a length of 50 kilometres (31 mi.), was designed to carry water from the rivulet know as El Oro to the Jesuits’ hacienda over tiers of arches – four of them over a single depression 50 metres (164 ft) deep – and broad cuttings. The work was unfinished when the Jesuits were expelled in 1767, but completed in 1854.  At Arizpe in Sonora circa 1782, Manuel Agustin Mascaró raised a canal on rounded pillars to link with the aqueduct he designed.

The difficulty is exacerbated by the absence of decent maps – anyone but the Mesoamerican specialist had better have a good atlas to hand. But the real problem lies with the book’s structure, which seems unfortunate in a work that is largely about building. The chapters are arranged by theme rather than chronology, and while it is hard to think how else they could have accomplished what they hoped to do, it means that there is no forward drive or linear development. Instead a ‘unities’-busting narrative takes us – from chapter to chapter, often from paragraph to paragraph – repeatedly back and forth in space and time.

As Dr Johnson said of Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra, anyone who can believe they are in Rome in one scene should have no trouble believing they are in Egypt in the next; but there must surely be limits to the mental gymnastics demanded of a reader. A paragraph might open in Cartagena in the 16th century and end in Lima in the 17th; might kick off in 16th-century Veracruz and, within 15 lines, move by way of Nombre de Dios, Havana and a 17th-century Carmelite on his month-long journey to Jalapa to end in the middle of the 18th century with a Capuchin friar called Francisco de Ajofrin in Mexico to collect alms for a mission in Tibet.

Dig a canal, and watch it silt over. Build Havana’s dockyards, and wait for the Royal Navy to sack them

The other side of all this, though – and it is a formidable achievement – is the vivid picture we get of the appalling difficulties that faced the Spanish monarchy. It might be the fate of all empires to end in disappointment, but has any ever had more excuse for failure, more hostile terrains, more crushing setbacks to overcome or – always supposing that you survived the nightmare Atlantic crossing – a greater gap between projectors’ dreams of ‘chimerical perfectionism’ and actual, on-the -spot realities than Spain’s?  Dig a canal, and watch it silt over. Search for a place over the Apurimac for a stone bridge, and abandon ideas of progress for good old Inca rope. Fortify Mexico City against the floods of 1553, 1580, 1604 and 1607, and bury the 30,000 drowned in 1629. Build Havana’s dockyards, and wait for the Royal Navy to sack them. Bring the native populations to Christ, and watch them slide back to their old ways.

And yet the cities and the churches got built; civic life and social hierarchies evolved; roads were made; stone bridges were erected; buildings were beautified; fashions were aped; and bullrings were constructed to announce the arrival of civilisation in the New World. And if none of that is going to appease the enemies of empire or erase an alternative history of disease, slavery and oppression, Spain’s record in the Americas was no worse than Britain’s or America’s. That, though, is a very low bar. But if the Christian mission that was the solitary moral justification for the whole imperial project no longer cuts much ice, it is hard, at the end of their 400-year history of extraordinary and dogged resilience, to ignore the authors’ measured, Johnsonian judgment: ‘The missions should, perhaps, be commended not for working well, but rather (like the empire of which they formed part) for working at all.’