Growing in the shadow of an empire : how Spanish colonialism affected economic development in Europe and in the world (16.-18. cc.)

Including contributions by authors from six different countries and profoundly interdisciplinary in nature, this conference collection seeks to answer a very basic question: did the countries under Spanish dominion experience a particular developmental course that may have led them to a common, yet distinct, type of modernization? In order to answer this question, the authors ex-amine the interplay between institutional and social frameworks on the one hand, and economic patterns on the other. Employing both quantitative and qualitative methods, they analyse issues such as commercial networks, production, and fiscal and monetary policies in order to identify the factors that allowed long-term economic growth and modernization. The findings they reach are extremely suggestive and are relevant not only to early mod-ern historians but also to economic historians who reject the New Institutional Economics’ nar-rative, which maintains that Spanish institutions were extremely inefficient when compared to the Anglo-American ones. The conclusions shed a completely new light on developments not only in Spain, Portugal, Italy, and the Americas, but also in other areas that failed to experience them. Not only do they question (and indeed reverse) existing assumptions, they also make some very important methodological points. They demonstrate that areas, which currently are considered marginal to economic development, economic theory, and economic modernization, may be central to our understanding of the past. They remind us that comparisons must be respectful of what was meaningful to contemporaries