The Castilian Crisis of the Seventeenth Century: New Perspectives on the Economic and Social History of Seventeenth-Century Spai

Description

This is a collection of 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, approached 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 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.

"I.A.A. Thompson and Bartolome Yun Casalilla have produced a coherent and stimulating collection of well-translated articles through careful selection and integration of the works included, and they capably reach their five goals." Sixteenth Century Journal "...a clearly written and well-translated volume that will introduce to a wider reading public some of the debates taking place within an increasingly lively and cosmopolitan historiographic tradition." James S. Amelang, Journal of Interdisciplinary History "...historians working on other countries and other aspects of the early modern period, especially those interested in the problems of industrialization and development, will profit from the research and conclusions presented here." the Journal of Modern History "The essays provide important knowledge and raise important questions." Akira Motomura, The Journal of Economic History