Praise then darkness, and creation unfinished

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.