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

(Hardback)

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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.

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 "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 "Grafe's book, with its comparative approach and thorough documentation on Spain's economic and political fluctuations between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries constitutes a major contribution to this reinterpretation of early modern Europe and Spain's role in its economic history."--Jesus Cruz, Human Figurations

Author Bio

Regina Grafe is associate professor of history at Northwestern University.