Date: 2012
Type: Book
Distant tyranny : markets, power, and backwardness in Spain, 1650-1800
Princeton : Princeton University Press, 2012
GRAFE, Regina, Distant tyranny : markets, power, and backwardness in Spain, 1650-1800, Princeton : Princeton University Press, 2012
- https://hdl.handle.net/1814/28697
Retrieved from Cadmus, EUI Research Repository
Spain's development from a premodern society into a modern unified nation-state with an integrated economy was painfully slow and varied widely by region. Economic historians have long argued that high internal transportation costs limited domestic market integration, while at the same time the Castilian capital city of Madrid drew resources from surrounding Spanish regions as it pursued its quest for centralization. According to this view, powerful Madrid thwarted trade over large geographic distances by destroying an integrated network of manufacturing towns in the Spanish interior. Challenging this long-held view, Regina Grafe argues that decentralization, not a strong and powerful Madrid, is to blame for Spain's slow march to modernity. Through a groundbreaking analysis of the market for bacalao--dried and salted codfish that was a transatlantic commodity and staple food during this period--Grafe shows how peripheral historic territories and powerful interior towns obstructed Spain's economic development through jurisdictional obstacles to trade, which exacerbated already high transport costs. She reveals how the early phases of globalization made these regions much more externally focused, and how coastal elites that were engaged in trade outside Spain sought to sustain their positions of power in relation to Madrid. Distant Tyranny offers a needed reassessment of the haphazard and regionally diverse process of state formation and market integration in early modern Spain, showing how local and regional agency paradoxically led to legitimate governance but economic backwardness.
Table of Contents:
-- Acknowledgments vii
-- Preface ix
-- Chapter 1: M arkets and States 1
-- Chapter 2: Tracing the Market: The Empirical Challenge 38
-- Chapter 3: Bacalao: A New Consumer Good Takes on the Peninsula 52
-- Chapter 4: The Tyranny of Distance: Transport and Markets in Spain 80
-- Chapter 5: D istant Tyranny: The Historic Territories 116
-- Chapter 6: D istant Tyranny: The Power of Urban Republics 165
-- Chapter 7: M arket Growth and Governance in Early Modern Spain 190
-- Chapter 8: C enter and Peripheries 213
-- Conclusions 241
-- A Note on the Sources 247
-- Bibliography 251
-- Index 281
Additional information:
Winner of the 2013 Gyorgy Ranki Biennial Prize, Economic History Association.
Cadmus permanent link: https://hdl.handle.net/1814/28697
ISBN: 9780691144849
Publisher: Princeton University Press