Peter Cozzens reviews Peter Stark's "The Lost Cities of El Norte: Coronado, the American Southwest, and the Spanish Empire That Might Have Been" (Mariner, 432 pp). Less a book review than a counter-history exercise: what if Coronado's 1540 expedition had not turned back?
The story
Francisco Vázquez de Coronado set out in 1540 with 350 Spaniards, 1,500 indigenous allies and five friars in search of the Seven Cities of Gold. They didn't find them. They did become the first Europeans to explore the Grand Canyon, the Rockies, and the Great Plains. They reached as far as Quivira, in present-day Kansas. A traumatic head injury after a fall from his horse pushed Coronado into a deep depression; he turned back.
Stark argues, plausibly, that had Coronado pressed on, he could have built a Spanish encomienda empire with the Mississippi River as its spine, fundamentally altering the future map of North America. The American West, Stark writes, "might have evolved into something very different from the largely Anglo-American culture we know today."
Cozzens's objection
The counter-history is fascinating but belied by the structural weakness of Spanish colonial governance, which eventually proved unable even to hold Mexico. Stark closes with the parent in a Mexico City avenue, decades later, pointing out the broken aristocrat: "He was a great conquistador once. He went off to the unknown lands with a great parade of people and animals. And he came back alone, with nothing."
Why a 16th-century history book matters now
Stark's thesis — that great-power expansion runs into the limits of governance capacity, not exploration capacity — is highly relevant to the U.A.E.-OPEC fracture and the U.S.-China tech competition. Reagan's Cold War buildup worked because of acquisition reform and grand strategy, not just dollars (see Lehman/Toprani op-ed on the same page). The investment lesson is structural: economic durability comes from institutional discipline, not from headline spending. We hold our discipline-aligned positions: top-tier balance sheets (JPM, GS), program-of-record defense (LMT, GD, RTX), and energy majors with fortress balance sheets (XOM, CVX) — structurally resilient even when geopolitical waters get rough.
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