Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Regina Grafe is associate professor of history at Northwestern University.

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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

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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

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Distant Tyranny

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS

Contents

Acknowledgments.......................................................................viiPreface...............................................................................ixChapter 1 markets and states..........................................................1Chapter 2 Tracing the market: The empirical challenge.................................38Chapter 3 Bacalao: A new consumer Good Takes on the Peninsula.........................52Chapter 4 The Tyranny of distance: Transport and markets in Spain.....................80Chapter 5 distant Tyranny: The historic Territories...................................116Chapter 6 distant Tyranny: The Power of Urban Republics...............................165Chapter 7 market Growth and Governance in Early Modern Spain..........................190Chapter 8 Center and Peripheries......................................................213Conclusions...........................................................................241A Note on the Sources.................................................................247Bibliography..........................................................................251Index.................................................................................281

Chapter One

Historians of early modern Europe have to explain at least two exceedingly far-reaching phenomena. The first one turned people who had thought about themselves as the citizens of a town or the subjects of an estate or village—be it seigneurial or royal—slowly but surely into subjects and eventually citizens of a nation-state. The second one, less often appreciated but equally important, was that Europeans' livelihoods became subject to changes in markets that were a long way out of their local or regional reach. By the eighteenth century almost all people in Europe, even in relatively remote areas, had become subject to the risks and opportunities of "national" markets, "international" competition, and intercontinental trade. These twin developments and the cultural and social transformations they embodied are the theme of national historiographies under such titles as "The Making of Modern Country X," be it France, England, or even the more controversial cases of Germany or Italy. It is a sign of the difficulties in accounting for these twin processes in Spain that there is no "The Making of Modern Spain" to the best of my knowledge.

The nation-state with a domestic, nationwide market has proven surprisingly long-lived even in today's global age. However, historiographical scholarship has reached a consensus that this national focus has its limitations and pitfalls; this book is written in that spirit. Any sense of the national complemented rather than substituted for local and regional allegiances, while at the same time it was shaped by new global interactions. The outlook on life of fishermen in a Basque village remained shaped by local factors, even if conflicts between the Spanish Crown and European competitors in far-flung Atlantic waters might threaten their livelihood. Language, rituals, religiosity, and traditions continued to be locally determined in most places. This is probably truer in Spain than elsewhere in western Europe. Yet there is a danger of getting lost in the marvelous idiosyncrasies of the local and losing sight of the fundamental changes that were taking place at the same time. By the early nineteenth century the European nation-state was a well-articulated bureaucratized apparatus that was more powerful than all of its predecessors. It was also governing over a territory that was considerably more economically integrated in the interior and often more integrated on the outside with neighboring countries, colonial offshoots, and faraway consumers and producers.

Economic development was largely "Smithian" in the premodern era: it depended on the process of market expansion and deepening so aptly described by Adam Smith in the late eighteenth century. This is not to downplay the importance of the contribution of intellectual developments, as well as science and technology. Yet even into the early phases of the Industrial Revolution economic growth derived predominantly from the benefits of increased division of labor made feasible through specialization and exchange. Exchange fostered specialization; specialization improved skills; skills underpinned innovation. Innovation led to new and cheaper consumer goods; new and cheaper consumer goods were an incentive to increase income; increased income raised demand; demand fostered further exchange. The process is almost trivial and could be declined up and down in slightly altered sequences. Nonetheless, it was remarkably powerful. Integrated markets were no guarantee for economic growth. But without them, technological change, human capital improvements, and other potential sources of productivity gains were less likely to occur, and where they did happen, their impact on economic growth was seriously circumscribed.

Without integrated markets the fiscal base of the state was hard to establish and expand, too. Thus the relationship between emerging states and integrating markets worked both ways. For its survival and military protection the modernizing state depended increasingly on its subjects' economic well-being and its own ability to tax. The rise of the nation-state and the rise of nationally integrated markets was a dual but simultaneous process. It has attracted a lot of attention from various quarters including historical economics, sociology, and the study of nationalism, identity, language, and social habitus.

This chapter, however, concentrates on the dominant political economy models that try to explain the relation between markets and states in Europe's early modern economies. Placed into the context of Spanish history, some of the main assumptions of the model turn out to be highly problematic and in urgent need of revision. A lopsided focus on the state as predator has distracted economists and economic historians from trying to understand better how states became jurisdictionally and economically integrated units in the first place. The void has been filled by a number of poorly historicized references to concepts borrowed from historians and historical sociologists such as "absolutism" and "patrimonialism." These concepts were supposed to delineate the development of European states from fragmented sovereignty to unified nation-states. Thus a particular kind of modernization theory was applied that could conveniently latch onto the idea of the "early modern period" as an era in which political and economic institution-building passed through a number of transformations that paved the way from a "premodern" to a "modern" world. Polities that failed to take the prescribed route hence became "failed" states. These terms, whether premodern or modern or failed, are all highly suggestive, but they are also per se perfectly empty of meaning.

Political Economy: What Sort of State Is Needed for Growth?

Historical political economy approaches the relationship between states and markets from a normative perspective by asking what kind of state and governance was conducive to the growth of private markets. Since the 1970s, institutional economics (often referred to as "new institutional economics," or NIE) has integrated the...