Suchergebnisse

Markets and states -- Tracing the market : the empirical challenge -- Bacalao : a new consumer good takes on the peninsula -- The tyranny of distance : transport and markets in Spain -- Distant tyranny : the historic territories -- Distant tyranny : the power of urban republics -- Market growth and governance in early modern Spain -- Center and peripheries.

Abstract
This article investigates the institutionalization and the practices of charity that sustained imperial rule in the early modern Spanish Empire. The article proposes that the polycentric Spanish Empire of the 16th to 18th centuries faced a fundamental challenge in terms of justifying the extension of power beyond its original territory of legitimization through custom and (invented) history. This challenge was dealt with through recourse to an ideology of good governance in corporate society. It institutionalized differences across race/caste, urban/rural, professional, gender and other categories in collectives that held part of a layered and fragmented sovereignty. But unlike its modern successor empires and nation states, it did not have to rely systematically on the essentialization of difference. Thus, good governance could legitimize the extension of hegemony beyond the original territory of political legitimization and charity played a central role in this. A material caritative complex sui generis linked the moral economy of charity, which legitimized local elites, with their own financing needs and those of the imperial polity via the financial acumen of religious and charitable institutions.

Published Online: 2018-06-27 ; This article investigates the institutionalization and the practices of charity that sustained imperial rule in the early modern Spanish Empire. The article proposes that the polycentric Spanish Empire of the 16th to 18th centuries faced a fundamental challenge in terms of justifying the extension of power beyond its original territory of legitimization through custom and (invented) history. This challenge was dealt with through recourse to an ideology of good governance in corporate society. It institutionalized differences across race/caste, urban/rural, professional, gender and other categories in collectives that held part of a layered and fragmented sovereignty. But unlike its modern successor empires and nation states, it did not have to rely systematically on the essentialization of difference. Thus, good governance could legitimize the extension of hegemony beyond the original territory of political legitimization and charity played a central role in this. A material caritative complex sui generis linked the moral economy of charity, which legitimized local elites, with their own financing needs and those of the imperial polity via the financial acumen of religious and charitable institutions.

Studies of commercial, cultural and political networks in the Atlantic tend to juxtapose the soft ties of networks to the hard rules of imperial law and trade regulation. The implicit or explicit assumption has been that networks in the Spanish Atlantic served primarily as an antidote to the organisation of the empire and broke out of its spatial boundaries. Networks stood for fluidity, as opposed to the static structures of state and church. This article argues in contrast that networks not only were institutions, but that the empire's institutions were (mostly) networks. It uses the case of the English Atlantic networks operating in northern Spain in the first half of the seventeenth century to show how our interpretation of the interactions between merchant networks and political institutions is transformed when we break up the supposed dichotomy between the two. ; Los estudios de las redes comerciales, culturales y políticas en el Atlántico suelen contrastar los lazos débiles de las redes con las reglas firmes de las leyes y regulaciones de comercio imperiales. Se presume implícita o explícitamente que en el ámbito del Atlántico español las redes funcionaron fundamentalmente como antídoto de la organización del imperio trascendiendo sus limitaciones espaciales. Las redes se asocian con fluidez, opuestas a las estructuras estáticas del estado y de la iglesia. En este artículo sugerimos que las redes no solamente eran instituciones, sino también que las instituciones imperiales se deberían considerar como redes. Con el objetivo de demostrar cómo nuestras interpretaciones de las interacciones entre redes mercantiles e instituciones cambian si rompemos con la idea de una dicotomía entre las dos se analiza el caso de las redes atlánticas inglesas que se establecieron en el norte de España en la primera mitad del siglo XVII.

This article revises the traditional view of Spain as a predatory colonial state that extracted revenue from natural resources and populations in the Americas while offering little in return. Using eighteenth‐century Spanish American treasury accounts, we show that local elites exerted important control not only over revenue collection, as previously argued by the authors, but also over expenditure allocation. The Spanish colonial state developed into a stakeholder model, in which local interests were deeply invested in the survival and expansion of empire. The means of co‐optation were intra‐colonial transfers, as well as credit relations between the state and colonial individuals and corporations, which guaranteed that much of colonial revenue was immediately fed back into the local economy, while minimizing enforcements costs. By allowing stakeholder control of both revenue and expenditure, Spain managed to avoid the problems faced by France, where royal control of expenditure clashed with partial elite control of revenue‐raising.

"This is a comprehensive long-run history of economic and political change in the Iberian Peninsula. Written by a team of leading historians and including extensive new data, this will be an essential work of reference for scholars of Portugal and Spain and also of comparative European economic development"--