The Castilian Crisis of the Seventeenth Century

This is a collection of recent revisionist essays on the economic and social history of seventeenth-century Castile written by Spanish historians. All major areas of current historiographical interest and debate are covered: demography, agriculture, pastoralism, the Indies trade, industrial decline, de-urbanisation, taxation and the fiscal system, resegineurialisation, and the politics of redistribution. Developments in Castile are also related to the issue of the general crisis of the European economy in the seventeenth century. The essays are important in showing the apparently monolithic seventeenth-century depression in Castile to have been far from uniform in intensity or chronology and in their emphasis on responses to the crisis. They offer explanations for the failure to recover from the crisis, a failure which proved a decisive factor in Spain’s divergence from other Western European developments.