On Imperial Spain

This is a decent introduction to the Spain of Fernando and Isabel & the Habsburgs, but I have a lot of questions.

The benefit of this book is that Elliott takes the approach of an interpretive narrative, offering chapters on the Crown, statebuilding, the economy, religion (and race!), crises, quasi-federalism, etc. While taking his subject step-by-step topically, he also moves along chronologically, which helps the flow of the narrative. Unlike many other books I’ve read, he does not fall back on “textbook speak” and instead treats the reader as a mature adult.

And yet, there’s a lot that’s missing here. First of all, where are the Americas? I know that this is a book on imperial Spain, but the Americas seem pretty crucial here. The New World appears from time to time when discussing economics, silver, trade, etc. but there’s no real study of the region. This is strange because Elliott, like Jaime E. Rodríguez O. (see The Independence of Spanish America) seems to treat Spain as “not-an-empire.” Instead, he recognizes it as a series of possessions under the Crown. “Spain” and “America” and “the Spanish Netherlands” belonged to the Spanish Crown in the same way that “the Netherlands,” “Aruba,” and “Curaçao” are realms of the Dutch Crown. This brings me to another question about how the “quinto real” worked—did it go straight to the Crown for the monarch to spend however he/she wanted, or did it go more to Spain as a constituent country?

Secondly, Elliott races through the seventeenth century (covering it in two chapters), although his treatment of the first half of the century is really good. It becomes clear that the Habsburg dynasty was essentially collapsing in on itself in the 1640s. His treatment of the second half of the century is much worse—although it’s clear that the Habsburgs were effectively done by 1680, he says that “so little is known about Spanish social and economic history in the second half of the seventeenth century that all assertions about movements of the Spanish economy must remain extremely tentative” (365). This seems so bonkers to me—how can so much be known about the 16th and 18th centuries but so little about the 17th?

In spite of these flaws, I really appreciate Elliott’s discussions of the late 15th and 16th centuries, those were fabulously strong. Moreover, I thought it valuable that Elliott did not simply give us the “view from Toledo” (or Madrid), so to speak, but rather examined Spain’s constituent parts both together and separately. Although there is little here on the Spanish Netherlands or on southern Italy, there’s plenty on Catalonia and Andalusia, as well as other parts of Aragon and Castile. It’s remarkable how fragile the Spanish state was during the early modern period—at any point, it seems that Spain could have collapsed into half a dozen parts, yet it never did.

It’s been really hard to find texts on early modern Spain, so (although dated) this seems to be one of the best ones on the market. Nevertheless, it is flawed and must be supplemented with readings from elsewhere.