How Spain conquered the world with its military and missionaries, combining faith, force, and money to achieve world domination.
The film explores how the Spanish Empire built its global dominance through a blend of military conquest, religious conversion, and imperial wealth.
Central to Spain’s expansion was the close collaboration between king, church, and conquistadors. Military campaigns were inseparable from missionary work, as conversion to Christianity became both a means of imperial legitimation and control. Faith and force advanced together to reshape society across the Americas.
This documentary shows how Spanish power was established through violence, alliances, and religious authority through the conquest of the Aztec and Inca empires. The missionary system spread across the Americas and reorganized the lives of indigenous peoples around the church, labor system, and colonial administration. Conversion promised salvation but brought forced obedience and cultural destruction.
The film also examines the economic basis of Spanish imperial power. Alongside the exploitation of indigenous peoples and slave labor, vast amounts of gold and silver were extracted from the Americas. These resources stimulated the European economy, funded global trade, and helped integrate the Americas into an emerging world system built on extraction and inequality.
By tracing how faith, conquest, and wealth worked together, this documentary reveals how Spanish colonialism shaped global capitalism, religious power, and imperial rule. It shows how legacies of conquest, forced conversion, and resource extraction continue to influence the social inequalities, cultural identities, and economic structures of the modern world, and how current global powers like the United States and China have adopted this model to their own advantage. It also draws parallels between the erasure of cultural artifacts back then and today’s “algorithmic colonization.”
Published January 4, 2026
