The Castilian Crisis of the Seventeenth Century

This is a collection of recent revisionist essays on the economic and social history of seventeenth-century Castile by Spanish historians. Since the 1970s an explosion of historical scholarship in Spain, employing new techniques, approaches and sources, has transformed our knowledge of the Castilian past. Hardly any of this research has been absorbed into non-specialist scholarship outside Spain, thereby diminishing the value of any analysis of European economic development that fails to take account of it. The major areas of current historiographical interest and debate are covered: demography, agriculture, pastoralism, the Indies trade, industrial decline, de-urbanisation, taxation and the fiscal system, re-seigniorialisation, and the politics of redistribution. Development in Castile are related to the issue of the general crisis of the European economy in the seventeenth century, a crisis which is itself not properly intelligible without an understanding of the Castilian experience. The essays are important in showing the apparently monolithic seventeenth-century depression in Castile to have been far from uniform in intensity, chronology or space, and in their emphasis on responses to the crisis and on explanations for failure to recover from crisis which was decisive for Spain's divergence from other Western European developments.