Distant Tyranny: Markets, Power, and Backwardness in Spain, 1650-1800

by Regina Grafe

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781400840533
Publisher:	Princeton University Press
Publication date:	12/19/2011
Series:	The Princeton Economic History of the Western World , #38
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	320
File size:	2 MB

About the Author

Regina Grafe is associate professor of history at Northwestern University.

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

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

Distant Tyranny provides an illuminating discussion of the territorial division of political authority in Spain and market integration there, with an innovative focus on the market in cod. This book is a wonderful contribution to European political and economic history and to the emerging field of global history."—Avner Greif, Stanford University

"Regina Grafe has written a challenging, courageous, and provocative book, one that reflects an extraordinary capacity to deal with an extremely wide literature not only on Spain but also the history of Europe. The dialogue between historical facts and economic theory is just outstanding."—Bartolomé Yun Casalilla, coeditor of The Castilian Crisis of the Seventeenth Century

Editorial Reviews

"An economic historian of early modern Spain and its empire, Grafe examines Spain from 1650 to 1800 through a multidisciplinary lens to explore the limited extent to which it was emerging as a nation-state with integrated domestic markets. . . . Distant Tyranny is a revisionist work that will become mandatory reading for historians of early modern Spain. . . . [A] stimulating, thoughtful book."

Choice

Winner of the 2013 Gyorgy Ranki Biennial Prize, Economic History Association

From the Publisher

There is little to quibble with in Grafe's work. The early chapters build a solid foundation, based on detailed archival research and a meticulous tracing of market behavior. . . . [O]ne cannot help but admire the combination of a detailed, erudite analysis with a coherent macro-historical logic. . . . In a rare feat for an economic history book, Distant Tyranny may yet shed as much light on current events as it does on the past.

EH.net - Mauricio Drelichman

There is little to quibble with in Grafe's work. The early chapters build a solid foundation, based on detailed archival research and a meticulous tracing of market behavior. . . . [O]ne cannot help but admire the combination of a detailed, erudite analysis with a coherent macro-historical logic. . . . In a rare feat for an economic history book, Distant Tyranny may yet shed as much light on current events as it does on the past.
— Mauricio Drelichman

EH.net