Iberian World Empires and the Globalization of Europe 1415–1668

Abstract

This expansive history of the relationship between early modern globalization and Iberian empire began life as a translation and expansion of the author's 2004 study, Marte contra Minerva: El precio del imperio español, c. 1450–1600. Between then and now, it has blossomed into a new synthesis of the political economy of the Iberian world during its centuries of rapid expansion, geopolitical vigor, and eventual crisis that breaks out of traditional national and regional boundaries to place the histories of Spain, Portugal, and Europe in global context. Published in an exciting new series edited by two notable European scholars based in East Asia (Manuel Pérez García and Lúcio de Sousa), the book aims to take an approach to European history that is simultaneously internalist and externalist and to interrogate the relationship between war and society in the nascent Iberian world system. In so doing, the book seeks to underline the economic and social dynamism of the Iberian world, even in the face of measurable relative decline in the seventeenth century. Entirely absent are laments about unproductive family networks and dowdy ecclesiastical institutions that would be easily overtaken by efficient northern European competitors. Instead, the “paradoxical” conclusion arises that “it is obvious that the final effect of these (supposedly) inefficient institutions (inefficient, i.e. from the perspective of the new institutional economics) could very well be economic growth of a notable scale within the parameters of pre-industrial societies. . . . And this may be true not only for territories in Europe but also for the colonies” (p. xxv). While American silver encouraged credit in specie in Spain that allowed the nobility to mobilize for war in the sixteenth century, this fell short of the financial revolution that happened in Britain and the Netherlands in the seventeenth century (p. 187).Arranged chronologically and rich in maps and charts, the book continually draws links between economics, politics, and law. Rather than seeing state building and imperialism as discrete processes, the book explores the centralizing and unifying impact of royal courts and the continuities in local and indigenous laws and traditions in Iberia's monarchical corporate and composite states that crisscrossed the early modern world. For the author, such global state building was made possible by a pact between elites and central power within the context of war. This was in turn bolstered by arrangements of various sorts with other states both within and outside Europe, as the case of Hormuz demonstrates, which was given to the Portuguese by agreement with Safawid Persia to counter the Ottomans. Digging down through the layers of negotiated relationships, the book collapses the separation between public and private as well as secular and religious while frequently returning to the importance of family and friendships. While this multilayer system was dynamic, there were also continuities between reconquista and conquista and between Iberian state finances and Islamic patterns of taxation in this age of “state capitalism” (p. 90). Furthermore, the Iberian world system itself was far from sealed off from the rest of Europe and the world, with northern European cities benefiting directly and indirectly from Iberian expansion.While following in the footsteps of Charles Ralph Boxer, Sanjay Subrahmanyam, and Tamar Herzog, this book is unusual for a number of reasons. The range of historiography it engages is vast. It is hard to name a book that brings together so neatly such divergent traditions as the New Conquest History, new institutional economics, environmental history, and polycentric Iberian imperial history. In the case of the last of these, the author admits that Iberia's world empires were indeed “polycentric” (or, as he puts it, “multinuclear” or “nodal”), while noting that the Iberian empire was not particularly exceptional in this respect (p. 345). He does not, however, expand too much on which other examples he has in mind. Unusual among works of political economy, the book also interacts seriously with the historical work of notable twentieth-century economists, including John Maynard Keynes and the Nobel Prize–winning economist Douglass North. This said, from the perspective of those more rooted in the historiography of colonial Latin America, there are some puzzling remarks, such as when he seemingly rejects the idea that the indigenous population of the Americas might have also been consumers of goods imported from Europe (p. 293). Given the focus on economics, it is also odd that so little space is devoted to the history of Iberian slavery, which recent work has shown was hardly limited to the Atlantic world.Overall, however, the book provides an excellent graduate-level survey. While there is occasional repetition, as is unavoidable in a book of this length and scope, each chapter offers numerous important insights on a part of the Iberian world. Graduate students and scholars rewriting their lecture courses will profit from perusing this ambitious volume.