Book suggestions, anyone?

[redbird]

In response to something james_nicoll wrote, I said

If you need imports, you need access to something that will buy those imports. Wheat or tin or oil or good woven cloth or machine parts. A Heinlein character observed that the problem with wheat as the basis for a monetary standard isn't lack of value--it's that it's too perishable. But tin or oil are reasonably good in that regard, and in the end, you can't eat the gold.

I am now wondering--and realizing this is a gap in my education--whether pre-Conquest Spain had a strong economy, or whether the convenient "the gold led to centuries of inflation and the decline of the local economy" is closer to "they tried to build a strong economy on conquest, and it didn't work, though some people got rich in the short term."

Can anyone recommend a reasonable English-language history of Spain (or of Europe but covering Spain) for, say, 1400 or so through the Thirty Years' War that covers economics, rather than just kings and wars and adventurers? "Spain" in this case meaning the territory that we now think of as Spain--Iberia minus Portugal. Fine if it also includes Portugal, and discussions of Latin America for that period are a plus.

Comments

[grahamsleight.livejournal.com]

It's not terribly recent, and my use of it is now 15 years in the past, but I can thoroughly recommend J H Elliott, Imperial Spain, 1469-1716 (http://www.amazon.com/Imperial-Spain-1469-1716-J-Elliott/dp/0141007036). My memory is that it was particularly good at tracing the inflationary impact that New World gold had on Spain's economy, and therefore on its fatal military overreach.

[frandowdsofa.livejournal.com]

I had to go and double-check, but that's the one I was going to recommend as well, it was my A-level text in the mid-70s. I remember reading it in conjunction with Scarisbrick's Henry VIII and suddenly understanding a lot more about the interconnectedness of all things.

[redbird]

Thanks. I have requested this from the library.

[fjm.livejournal.com]

I can tell you that the problem was silver, not gold.

My memory is dusty, but the problem was less the huge imports of silver, as that they were mainly spent on trying to keep control of the Netherlands and also centralising the goverment (ie pulling nobles away from their estates). Getting rid of the most entrepreneurial groups as heretics didn't help much.

[ashnistrike.livejournal.com]

My Spanish-Medievalist friend says she'll look into references for you, but her gut feeling is closer to your second hypothesis. (With as dash of fjm's "and kicking out the people who knew how to do trade the best didn't help, either.")

She says the thing to remember is that Spain didn't exist as a unit - economically or otherwise - until the marriage of Ferdinand and Isabella in the late 1400's. They were trying to build a nation and an economy out of a set of disjointed, not-terribly-well-off city-states, and it didn't quite work out the way they'd planned.

If she finds any good books to recommend on the subject, I'll comment again and let you know - she says it's a great question.

-Nameseeker

[redbird]

Thanks. I am not surprised that "Reconquista" was a convenient political fiction--that yes, the Moors had conquered the whole area, but that it hadn't been one thing, politically or culturally. Even now, Catalunya and the Basque areas aren't resigned to being simply "Spanish."

[voidampersand.livejournal.com]

Fernand Braudel, The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean world in the age of Philip II. It's translated from the French and abridged down to one volume, but that one volume is thick with fascinating insights.

[martin-wisse.livejournal.com]

Actually, it's available in two volumes, corresponding to the three volumes of the original as well (My review of the first volume (http://www.cloggie.org/books/mediterranean-volume-1.html) and my review of the Elliott book (http://www.cloggie.org/books/imperial-spain.html).