[1] Madrid has never possessed a creative culture ... it has learned from abroad a minimum of badly assimilated things. This acquired culture, ... this reservoir of culture, comes specifically to Madrid for its needs as a major city, to sustain the sober dignity of a capital. To think that it has ever been able to disseminate its spirit is idiocy. Six kilometers from Madrid the cultural influence of Madrid ends and, without transition or enlightened hinterland, total backwardness begins abruptly.

Much as Amsterdam and Venice were archetypical trading cities, Madrid was the model for the political city. From its rise at the end of the sixteenth century until the Napoleonic Wars, Madrid remained an imperial center much in the tradition of imperial Rome. Both cities have been described as economic parasites, consuming the wealth of their empires without directly contributing to the creation of that wealth. Like imperial Rome, Madrid organized and ran a worldwide political and administrative structure and used that political structure as a framework for controlling, taxing, and shaping a widespread system of commercial activity. Madrid was unique, however, since its location kept it from becoming the commercial as well as the political center of its empire. The Spanish political system had a single administrative structure, but it suffered from a pronounced economic dualism. The imperial trade at Seville and Cádiz and the coastal fringes of the Mediterranean and Basque regions were exposed to the maritime economy of Europe, while interior León and Old and New Castile were physically isolated from the sea.

Not surprisingly, economic and cultural dualism is deeply imbedded in Spanish historiography. It is derived partly from the contrast between the maritime provinces and the remote plains and mountains of the interior, partly from the Christian-Moslem struggle of the eighth to the seventeenth centuries, and from the more recent conflict between traditional and post-enlightenment world views. ⁽³⁾ At times the coastal areas were relatively dynamic, while in other periods the Castilian interior asserted authority over the coastal regions. ⁽⁴⁾ Responding to geographic separation and the differing endowments [5] of coast and interior, two parallel economies were present in Spain until well after the introduction of the railroads in the nineteenth century.

The isolation of the interior is best demonstrated by regional variations in market activity. In the sixteenth century, when the interior was relatively dynamic, year-to-year variations in the prices of basic commodities were more extreme in Old and New Castile than in Valencia on the coast. ⁽⁵⁾ This is indicative of a lack of integration between interior and coastal markets. The situation had not altered by the end of the eighteenth century; and in the unprecedented crisis of 1804, while wheat prices rose 100% (1799-1804) in the eastern and northern coastal towns, they climbed over 350% in Old Castile and Extremadura. ⁽⁶⁾ The isolation of interior markets continued far into the nineteenth century, and the sharp regional differences in price levels did not diminish until the 1880's. ⁽⁷⁾ Clearly it was extremely difficult to move goods around in the interior or to get them into and out of the region. ⁽⁸⁾

Consequently, the government in Madrid was perennially faced with accommodating two distinct patterns of economic life within a single political structure. The coastal districts could rely on the maritime trade network for food when domestic supplies failed. Thus they could accept the risk of specialization in export crops and manufacturing, with correspondingly more efficient use of resources. During the difficult seventeenth century these areas escaped demographic crisis, and many coastal zones experienced growing output, population, and commercial activity. On the other hand, the interior was hampered by a precarious climate, poor soil, and isolation from distant supplies when local crops failed. The only product that could bear the cost of transport to the sea and still be profitable was wool. Thus the interior could not risk economic specialization and had to commit its resources to basic food crops as insurance against bad harvests. Constantly threatened by food shortages, the interior was severely limited in its ability to find more efficient ways of organizing production. ⁽⁹⁾ 

[6] Economic dualism took its modern form in the seventeenth century as Madrid became a major metropolis. During the sixteenth century the interior dominated the peninsula because of its own demographic vitality and the slow recovery of the Mediterranean after the crises of the late middle ages and Turkish expansion. ⁽¹⁰⁾ By the eighteenth century the pattern had reversed and the peripheral regions were far more dynamic. ⁽¹¹⁾ The durability of the central bureaucracy in the seventeenth century, and the apparent successes of the Bourbon monarchy in rebuilding and unifying Spain in the eighteenth, only masked the tensions inherent in the situation. Coastal regions, while not integrated with each other, maintained their common access to the sea. In the sixteenth century the Atlantic fringes participated in the prosperity of the trans-Atlantic empire, but the Mediterranean littoral remained relatively depressed until the last quarter of the century. By the 1650's, however, the economic life of the entire periphery was adjusting to the market system developed by the Dutch and English during the century and a half preceding the Industrial Revolution.

The interior, with its low economic potential, was insulated from this trend. Early sixteenth-century population growth gave way in the later decades to a precarious equilibrium which was soon upset by a series of crises. By 1650 the regional population had fallen substantially, and most cities contained only a fraction of their earlier numbers. The commerce and crafts of the regional economy were reduced to the export of wool, subsistence agriculture, and inter-regional exchanges of basic commodities largely independent of urban services and markets. ⁽¹²⁾ 

The preceding paragraphs do not imply that interior/periphery and subsistence/market economies were parallel dichotomies. Many peripheral areas were lightly touched by maritime trade, while almost every interior hamlet had some tenuous contact with the larger world. ⁽¹³⁾ The peninsula is best seen as a large mosaic of self-sufficient local economies buttressed by short-range exchanges of basic commodities. This mosaic was crisscrossed by a web of economic connections. Its strands represented the meager inflow of manufactures [7] and amenities, the export of the few goods that could bear the cost of transport, and the movement of commodities controlled by the landed elites. Occasionally a few strands joined where a market, bishop, governor, or court dispensed services. Near the coasts, the web was denser as port towns provided the mercantile functions made possible by the sea. The striking feature of this overlay of long-distance economic contact as it reached inland was its orientation to Madrid. ⁽¹⁴⁾ The observation that Madrid dominated the economy of the interior is hardly novel, but the implications of the city's function as imperial capital while located in the interior have never been worked out. It is a factor that will go far to explain economics and politics in Spain and the increasing tension between the "two Spains."

The very existence of Madrid as a capital city was the consequence of a political decision. No other city in early modern Europe was as dependent upon administered economic life, and no major city was so poorly located to stimulate market-oriented exchanges. ⁽¹⁵⁾ Consequently, Madrid's growth involved a large-scale elaboration of Hecksher's primitive urban mercantilism. ⁽¹⁶⁾ While London, Paris, Amsterdam, and Lisbon could all depend on maritime and river shipping, Madrid was the largest city of pre-railroad Europe wholly dependent on primitive overland transportation. This is an important consideration, given the impact of eighteenth-and nineteenth-century canals on freight rates. ⁽¹⁷⁾ Spain's lack of transport and dispersed resources explain the rural orientation to subsistence agriculture and make it inconceivable that Madrid could have reached its eighteenth-century size without the conscious allocation of resources from interior, periphery, and empire. The first priority of any state is its own immediate needs, and in this  [8] case a major city was involved. As political center, Madrid rapidly became the social and financial center for the country's wealthy elites. The result was the addition of a large flow of private income to the resources provided by the state. A superstructure of market-based activity developed to meet urban demands, but the income supporting that market relied on the coercive powers of state and landed classes. By the end of the eighteenth century most nonessentials were supplied by market activity, but municipal and royal agencies continually regulated and bolstered grain, fuel, meat, and wine supplies.

As coordinator of political and social life, market for interior agriculture, and national center of conspicuous consumption, Madrid was a point of contact between the "two Spains." The economic life of the periphery was affected by policy made in Madrid, and a large part of its commerce consisted of relaying imports on to the capital. Once in the interior, however, commerce entered the domain of a privileged elite in a region where the contrast between rich and poor was extreme. There the landed elites acquiesced to commercial reform on the periphery, but only so long as their control of society in the interior was not endangered. Thus the capital created political and commercial contacts between interior and maritime Spain, but in the process created a framework within which disagreement could become confrontation. The political structure of the country was unifying as the economic worlds of Spain moved apart.

If the concept of dualism helps define Madrid's position in Spain, models for the two economies suggest why they were separating. One of these is a conception of economic change conditioned by the fact that before 1800 technology was rudimentary and improved slowly. ⁽¹⁸⁾ Pre-industrial economies operated within a limited context, with the principal constraint being the threat of Malthusian over-population. Within those limits, however, agrarian Europe was by no means static, experiencing long cycles of expansion and [9]contraction as well as periods of stability at both high and low population densities. The upper limits were set by the supply of land and a static technology As population grew, the productivity of additional labor declined un the society was reduced to relative poverty and the death rate matched ti birth rate. Technology was a limiting factor in two ways: the best agriculture techniques were extremely rudimentary, with little ability to increase the productivity of labor applied to land; and, although technology changed, changed much more slowly than the ratio of population to resources.

Under such conditions, a low population-to-land ratio encouraged population growth. This happened over much of Europe in the twelfth century and again in the fifteenth. As population increased, the demand for food grew, prices rose, and the rural economy was encouraged to exploit more and more land for basic foods. Since the newer farmlands tended to be less fertile diminishing returns set in, and output per laborer declined. As population pressure continued to increase, demand produced an acceleration in the rise of food prices. The general level of nutrition declined, and buying power shifted away from manufactures to foodstuffs. The initial prosperity of an expanding economy became increasingly uneven as demand for nonessential products stagnated. The population, both rural and urban, experienced in creasing underemployment and became progressively more susceptible to famine and disease.

As economic conditions deteriorated, political and economic structures underwent increasing stress and became vulnerable to shocks from crop failure, disease, and warfare. Any of these factors could disrupt supply and tax systems and trigger a downward demographic and economic trend. As population growth gave way to decline because of deteriorating conditions, a small drop in the total demand for basic foods produced a relatively rapid decline in food prices. At the same time, the population decline made labor relatively scarce, pushing up wages and rural production costs. These factors forced less fertile land out of food production and encouraged conversion of resources to livestock, labor-saving crops, or raw materials. Primarily used for manufactures, these products were better investments as population declined, since falling food prices allowed the surviving population to use an increasing share of its income for nonessential items. Eventually a new balance was achieved, characterized by lower population density and total production, but with higher productivity and per-capita income. ⁽¹⁹⁾

[10] Within Spain, crucial elements of this self-limiting cycle continued to operate well into the nineteenth century. Following the plagues of the fourteenth century, Castile's population began to grow, and the first half of the sixteenth century is depicted as a period of general prosperity. The cities of the plateau flourished, industry and commerce were stimulated by rising population and Atlantic expansion, and agriculture spread into marginal zones. After 1560 population growth slowed, rural poverty increased, and the two Castiles experienced a generation of precarious stability. Beginning in the 1590's, a series of subsistence crises and epidemics upset the balance, and by 1650 Castilian population had declined 25%. ⁽²⁰⁾ The demographic situation stabilized in the second half of the seventeenth century, and thereafter the population increased gradually until the 1790's. Castile thus experienced more than a century of relatively slow population growth, reflecting perhaps a more self-contained rural economy than that of the sixteenth century. ⁽²¹⁾ From about 1790 the interior experienced stagnation that probably continued until around 1840.
A second model, that of "the crisis of the seventeenth century," more clearly delineates the developments on the periphery. This "crisis" model has undergone frequent revision, becoming little more than a loose reference to all of the bad weather, wars, revolutions, and fiscal crises from 1560 to 1715--the antithesis of Braudel's "long sixteenth century." From the attendant discussion, however, there has emerged a clearer perception of the process whereby the maritime and waterborne trade of Europe was integrated into a continent-wide market system of unprecedented geographic scope, carrying capacity, and cheapness of transportation. By 1700 this commercial network was revolutionary in three ways: ⁽²²⁾ (1) It unified the trade of the Baltic, Atlantic, and Mediterranean regions to an unprecedented degree. (2) It increasingly dealt with bulky, everyday goods such as wheat, fish, and rough textiles, in addition to the more valuable goods that dominated earlier long-distance trade. (3) As it grew, the market system focused a growing share of Europe's trans-Atlantic and Asian commerce on England and the Netherlands. This trade in hides, cacao, sugar, coffee, tobacco, dye products, [11] and cotton involved new or once-rare goods with potential mass markets. The unification of the European market system allowed England and Holland to benefit from regional specialization in the rest of Europe on a scale never before possible. The neo-Malthusian cycle of agricultural society no longer applied to Europe as a whole, because the Netherlands and England had become centers for widespread productivity increases through regional specialization and investment in new technology and business techniques. Thus they could counter the negative pressures of population density inherited from the sixteenth century and even increase per-capita wealth by the eighteenth century. Ultimately the new commercial pattern laid the basis for the Industrial Revolution.

These changes altered Spain's position relative to the rest of the continent and increased the possibilities for market orientation in the maritime areas and in the empire. As a result, Vizcaya, Catalonia, Valencia, and the Seville/Cádiz complex began to experience a modest renewal of commercial life in the second half of the seventeenth century. The wool and iron trades of Bilbao expanded, and Fierre Vilar provides evidence that Barcelona and its hinterland experienced a renewal of economic initiative unmatched since the middle ages. ⁽²⁴⁾ As we shall see, by 1700 several other coastal regions were responding to external stimuli at a time when the stagnation of the Spanish interior was notorious.

These developments marked the sharpening of certain features that run through Spanish history. With the exception of Moorish Córdoba and medieval and eighteenth-century Catalonia, Spain has always been an underdeveloped part of Europe. Despite American silver and the development of Castilian industry in the sixteenth century, Spain's European commerce consisted largely of imported luxuries and the manufactures and export of raw materials, foodstuffs, and semi-finished goods. This commerce depended heavily upon Italian, Flemish, or German capital and upon foreign carrying capacity. Spain compensated for this dependence on the advanced parts of Europe by enforcing a similar dependence upon its American colonies and mines. As northern Europe increased its economic efficiency during the crises of the seventeenth century, Spain lost her capacity to function as an active [12] participant in Atlantic commerce, and her dependence on European and American capital, ships, and goods became more pronounced. ⁽²⁵⁾

As this dependence developed, it in turn increased the separation between the two peninsular economies. While the economic context of the interior remained unchanged, that of the periphery was being revolutionized. The separation was not sharply geographic. Elements of the maritime economy reached into the interior, as seaports, landed elites, and the capital city exchanged certain goods and services. Despite this link, however, the economies of coast and interior were responding to different situations and were being drawn apart.

Such a statement will not surprise historians familiar with Spain; but if we are to understand the unique role that Madrid played as the urban center where the two Spains came into contact, we have to define the obvious with some care. In the sixteenth century, when maritime trade had not entirely surpassed land transport in efficiency, Castile showed economic development in response to domestic and imperial demand. By the seventeenth century this growth had reached the limits of interior resources, and the balance was shifting to the periphery. Yet one should not underestimate the weight of the interior provinces in the Spanish system. They included a third of Spain's eighteenth-century population, produced almost a third of royal revenue, and produced 60% of the gross agricultural product of the Crown of Castile in 1750. Although the wealth and population of the region were dispersed and heavily committed to subsistence agriculture, they were not negligible. ⁽²⁶⁾

Madrid was an integral part of both economic worlds, but created little interaction between them. This was not because Madrid lacked commercial significance--in the 1750's the capital's commercial and industrial income exceeded that of Seville and Cádiz combined. ⁽²⁷⁾ The urban economy depended upon the government, which in turn depended upon revenue from the maritime system. Government resources were supplemented by the land rents collected by landowners resident in the city. At the same time, the city drew its basic supplies from the subsistence-oriented economy of the interior, and its luxuries from much farther away. Given the economic structure of the [13] capital, this had important implications for Spain. It produced the paradox of a growing metropolis which discouraged economic development in its surrounding region, a pattern that requires closer examination.

All cities are supported by the areas around them in return for services they provide, but there is great variety in the functions performed and the resources required. ⁽²⁸⁾ Thus a city can serve as a central place for several functions with several fields of influence that will vary in size with the nature of the function or commodity involved. A city may operate as a transport focus, a break-of-bulk point, or as source of a specialized service. The first two also imply the possibility of an entrepot function. ⁽²⁹⁾ Some urban functions can extend over longer distances than others, with the result that the landscape will have a hierarchy of central places, the smaller ones providing shorter-range functions for smaller hinterlands while depending upon a larger central place for other purposes. Improved transportation has the effect of strengthening and enlarging the urban fields of larger towns. This reduces the relative importance of subordinate centers, particularly those closest to the larger central place. ⁽³⁰⁾ 

The size of a field of influence depends on the cost of distributing the good or service in question, the preference of the consumer for substitutes, and the degree to which the consumer will forego the commodity as the price rises. In general, individual demand for basic foodstuffs is very inelastic as prices rise or fall, while the consumer's demand for luxuries will vary greatly as their prices change relative to real income and the cost of more essential goods. ⁽³¹⁾ At the same time, the capital cost of producing a good or service affects centrality. A facility requiring a large capital investment is not easily replicated, and therefore will provide that function over a wide geographic range. ⁽³²⁾ 

In a poor society with rudimentary transport, there is great disparity in the geographic scope of these functional fields of influence. Political and social services based on communication, and commerce involving valuable commodities, can reach a large area from a single center. Exchange of bulky, low-value goods has a smaller range and is carried out by smaller towns distributed across the region. Only improved transportation or subsidization of [14] the central market can widen the field of influence based on such a function. ⁽³³⁾ Thus a wealthy society using many services and commodities exhibits a developed urban hierarchy based on differing combinations of distribution and production costs. ⁽³⁴⁾ If, however, the society is poor and transport costly, the urban hierarchy will have only a few central places with fields of influence extending beyond local and regional exchanges, and the volume of activity in those fields will be slight. ⁽³⁵⁾ 

The significance of this model is apparent if we look at the economic processes that developed around London. The interactions between London and its English hinterland included urban-rural migration; urban demand for agricultural commodities and manufactures; the requirements of London's re-export markets; the fact that one-sixth of the surrounding area's countrymen had experienced the amenities of London life, and were drawn to produce for the market to obtain them; and the role of a landlord class acclimated to the market and disposed to reorganize their estates to meet urban demand. These factors were reinforced by river transport, coastal trade, and European and trans-Atlantic commerce. Prior to about 1640, the city grew by capturing wealth and urban functions from the rest of England. Thereafter its consumption, exchange, production, and administrative functions provided positive returns to the rest of the country, and by the end of the seventeenth century had been instrumental in ending rural economic isolation. ⁽³⁶⁾ 

As imperial capital and largest city in Spain, however, Madrid's most important functions were political rather than industrial or commercial, and the interactions between the capital and its hinterland were quite different from those between London and the rest of England. ⁽³⁷⁾ In the sixteenth century Madrid undermined the economic position and central-place functions of the manufacturing towns of the Spanish interior. In the seventeenth, Madrid encouraged the development of a rural society based on local power, low-order central places, and markets and land usage that left few incentives for the peasant to increase productivity. This reflected the rise of Madrid as center of imperial policy-making, aristocratic socialization, and conspicuous [15] consumption by elites. The capital city extracted resources from all over the interior, both by subsidizing its urban market and by administratively redirecting regional commodity flows. This undermined older commercial and industrial towns in ways that minimized incentives for rural specialization. ⁽³⁸⁾ 

When Madrid was expanding in the eighteenth century, urban supply provided the basis for a community of interests among the landed elements, who accumulated rents and primary products; the stewards who actually managed estates; wealthy peasants; and the middlemen of the capital, who collected taxes on government contract, extended credit to the Crown, provided landlords with mortgage money, and contracted for delivery of supplies for capital, court, and military. Common to all these activities was the underlying reality that Madrid existed because it provided central political and social services. The transition to the nineteenth century modified the balance between these various elements. A Castilian agro-commercial oligarchy crystalized out of the ruins of Spanish society left by foreign and civil wars between 1808 and 1839, and imposed its will on all of Spain for the rest of the nineteenth century. At the same time, the structure of rural power was little changed except for the addition of new urban elements to the landlord class with the sale of Church properties. These "bourgeois" elements imposed a liberal, parliamentary, and centrist regime in Spain on the Anglo-French model.

This study takes the position that the emerging political class of the nineteenth century was in place by the end of the eighteenth century, overshadowed by the social and political structure based on the interlocking interests of Madrid, aristocracy, and Cádiz. Oriented to Madrid, the domestic agro-commercial group was the inadvertent heir of the ruins of the empire. To preserve their domestic base, these agro-commercial elements coalesced around what became the Moderado state. They adopted parliamentary liberalism as a new rationale for their control of the rural economy. They also accepted the absolutist heritage of centrism that they had once resisted, since it had become essential to the survival of the eighteenth-century commercial and market structures that they depended upon. In the process, interior elites developed a community of interests antagonistic to the modernization of Spain's political and economic life.

In brief, the rise of Madrid between 1560 and 1630 contributed to the decline of the Castilian economy of the sixteenth century. As the capital grew in the context of a stagnant regional economy, population and production fell. After 1610, commercialization of agricultural products in the interior depended on the Madrid market. The Thirty Years' War ruined Spain's European [16] empire, while her American empire experienced a prolonged depression. During this double crisis in the middle third of the seventeenth century, the capital lost 40% of its population, further depressing the agricultural markets of the region. Sale of jurisdictions and taxes by a desperate Crown expanded the nobility's control oí local power. Agriculture compensated for population decline by shifting to less intensive activities, and for market decline by orienting output to local needs. In the eighteenth century the Empire revived and Madrid began to expand, renewing its demand for supplies and expanding administrative and market institutions which drew on the surpluses that landowners extracted from the countryside. Historians have noted the improved prospects of the dominant classes for patronage and wealth in a reviving empire, but have ignored a parallel development in which the same groups were becoming dependent on the sale of agricultural products to the growing capital. This second process produced the characteristic traits of Spain's nineteenth-century agro-commercial oligarchy: close association among agriculture, rural power, dependence on commerce in agricultural products, and the need to shape a national policy in support of that commerce.

Explanations of nineteenth-century Spanish history often give central place to the appearance of a "new oligarchy" out of the chaos of 1808-1839. ⁽³⁹⁾ In fact, the socio-economic ties and habits underlying that "new oligarchy" were a legacy of empire generated by the development of Spain's capital city. Part One of the following study examines the development and structure of the urban economy at the center of this process; Part Two details the economic relationship between Madrid and Castilian agriculture; and Part Three traces the impact on the Castilian urban network and the connections with the peninsular periphery.
 

1. José Ortega y Gasset, La redención de las provincias (1967), p. 83. In a similar vein, see the description of travel between cities in 1800 given by Antonio Flores in Ayer, hoy y mañana, vol. 1, Ayer o la sociedad de la fe en 1800 (1892), p. 175. Flores describes desolation, wilderness, and a need for armed escorts.

2. Gideon Sjoberg, The Pre-industrial City (1960), pp. 67-77; Max Weber, The City (1958), pp. 65-75; Richard M. Morse, "A Prolegomenon to Latin American Urban History" (1972). See also Peter Clark, ed., The Early Modern Town: A Reader (1976), ch. 1.

3. Fierre Vilar, Spain, A Brief History (1967), pp. 1-3; Jaime Vicens Vives, Approaches to the History of Spain (1967), p. xxx; Juan Vila Valenti, La península ibérica (1968), esp. ch. 12, "Los contrastes regionales."

4. Vilar, Spain , pp. 16-18.

5. Earl J. Hamilton, American Treasure and the Price Revolution in Spain, 1501-1650 (1934), p. 198.

6. Gonzalo Anes, Las crises agrarias en la España moderna (1970), p. 495. The same process is noted in the less severe crisis of 1868 when over a period of 36 months wheat prices rose 50% to 87% in port cities and 150% to 205% in interior districts. See Nicolás Sánchez-Albornoz, España hace un siglo: Una economía dual (1968).

7. Nicolás Sánchez-Albornoz, Los precios agrícolas durante la segunda mitad del siglo XIX , vol. 1, Trigo y cebada (1975), pp.45-46.

8. David R. Ringrose, Transportation and Economic Stagnation in Spain, 1750-1850 (1970), esp. ch. 6.

9. Everything depended on the fall rains in Old Castile. If they came late, the planting was late and the grain did not ripen until summer heat had begun, producing stunted grain. See Angel García Sanz, Desarrollo y crisis del Antiguo Régimen en Castilla la Vieja: Economía y sociedad en tierras de Segovia de 1500 a 1814 (1977), p. 24. On the possible types of agrarian change, see Robert Brenner, "The Origins of Capitalist Development: A Critique of Neo-Smithian Marxism" (1977), pp. 38-45.

10. Antonio Domínguez Ortiz, The Golden Age of Spain (1971), pp. 4-9.

11. The Morisco rebellion of 1568-69 was the principal event between the Comuneros and Germanias of the 1520's and the Aragonese revolt of the 1590's. The overt expressions of the tension appear to begin with the revolt of Aragón in 1591-92 over political issues. By the 1630's the question of raising the contributions of the periphery to the Spanish war effort was clearly tied to attempts to reduce peripheral autonomy, an issue only partly settled by the Bourbon conquest of Catalonia in the War of Spanish Succession.

12. Ringrose, Transportation , pp. 20-24.

13. See James Casey's comments on the extreme subsistence orientation that persisted in parts of Valencia in the seventeenth century, and Jaime Garcia-Lombardero's comments on the stagnation of eighteenth-century Galicia: James Casey, The Kingdom of Valencia in the Seventeenth Century (1979); Jaime Garcia-Lombardero, La agricultura y el estancamiento económico de Galicia en la España del Antiguo Régimen (1973), ch. 5.

14. García-Lombardero, La agricultura de Galicia, maps 3-13 following p. 80.

15. It is important to avoid the assumption that economic change is best approached through the study of market activity--as do Douglass C. North and Robert Paul Thomas in "An Economic Theory of the Growth of the Western World" (1970)--or that Castile lacked markets. See Joseph Fontana Lázaro, La quiebra de la monarquía absoluta, 1814-1820 (1971), pp. 49-51. Fontana maintains that agriculture was blocked by the lack of market articulation, when the blockage was really due to the nature of the market which Madrid induced. Most of the interior economy was subsistence oriented, and commodity movements were only partly organized by market-defined supply and demand. Thus we must distinguish between market activity and "revenue economy." The latter involved seigneurial rents, tithes, and taxation and administrative allocation of surpluses outside of a market environment, as well as mercantilist political doctrines. See Sir John Hicks, A Theory of Economic History (1969), pp. 15-24, 81 -100; Max Weber, Law in Economy and Society (1954), pp. 33-40; Karl Polanyi, "The Economy as Instituted Process," in Primitive, Archaic, and Modern Economies (1968), pp. 139-174; E. W. Fox, History in Geographic Perspective (1971), pp. 23-71.

16. Eli Hecksher, Mercantilism (1935).

17. In England, on a paved road, a horse could haul about two tons of cargo. The same horse could pull a fifty ton cargo on a canal barge. And in Ohio, for example, the price received by the farmer for his wheat rose 300% in six years along the The Ohio Canal. See Phyllis Deane, The First Industrial Revolution (1965), p. 79; Harry N. Scheiber, The Ohio Canal Era: A Case Study of Government and the Economy, 1820-1861 (1969), p. 192.

18. B. H. Slicher van Bath, The Agrarian History of Western Europe , A.D. 500-1850 (1963); Emmanuel Le Roy Lzdum, Les paysans de Languedoc (1966), vol. 1, pp. 139-328 (in the abridged English edition, The Peasants of Languedoc (1976), pp. (111-131); Fernand Braudel, La Méditerranée et le monde méditerranéen á l'époque de Philippe II (1966), vol. 1. pp. 326-580 (in the English edition, The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II (1972), vol. 1, pp. 355-605). Slicher van Bath attempts to generalize the cycle for all of Europe; Le Roy Ladurie details it beautifully for fourteenth- to seventeenth-century Languedoc; Braudel uses it to organize the masses of information he has collected on the sixteenth-century Mediterranean.

The nature of the technological ceiling has been questioned, but it remains convincing with regard to Spain. The assumption of technological limits has been attacked by Ester Boserup, and more tentatively by E. A. Wrigley. Douglass North and Robert Thomas also insist on increasing productivity in the seventeenth and eighteenth century, but implicitly refer to northwestern Europe and England. See Ester Boserup, Conditions of Agricultural Growth (1965), p. 118; E. A. Wrigley, "Demographic Models and Geography," in Socio-Economic Models in Geography (1971), p. 197; North and Thomas, "An Economic Theory."

19. Obviously population change is the principal motor for the model, but as E. A. Wrigley Points out in Population and History (1969), pp. 77-78, family structure and attitudes toward children can influence demographic patterns so as to generate prolonged periods of stability which create apparent lags in the model. Wrigley cites fifteenth-century England as a case of population stability at low population density. Something similar (albeit for different reasons) may have occurred in the interior of Spain between 1650 and 1750.

20. José Gentil da Silva, En Espagne: Développement économique. subsistence, déclin (1965), pp. 104-120; Bartolomé Bennassar, Recherches sur les grandes épidémies dans le nord de l'Espagne á la fin du XVI' siécle (1969), pp. 60-82.

21. Anes, Las crises agrarias, pp. 141-142. García Sanz, in Desarrollo y crisis en Segovia, pp. 75 and 84, dates the later cycle in Segovia as 1600-1650, decline; 1650-1700, stagnation; 1700-1760, expansion; 1760-1814. stagnation.

22. North and Thomas a tribute the growth of the Netherlands and England primarily to market activity, but as in the case of Madrid, the market masks administrative decisions allocating resources to the wars in the north from 1567-1659. Their impact on Northern industry, commerce, and money supply helps explain the Dutch capture of European trade. See David R. Ringrose, "European Economic Growth: Comments on the North-Thomas Theory" (1972).

23. To comprehend the degree to which the markets of Europe had become integrated, one need only refer to the maps showing evolution of grain prices in Fernand Braudel and Frank Spooner, "Prices in Europe from 1450 to 1750," in Cambridge Economic History, vol. 6 (1967), pp. 472-473.

24. Fierre Vilar, Catalunya dins l'Espanya moderna (1968), vol. 2, pp. 187-188, 267-289, 373-412; John Lynch, Spain Under the Hapsburgs (1969), vol. 2, p. 154.

25. These structures of dependence are discussed relative to Spain in the eighteenth century by Barbara and Stanley Stein, The Colonial Heritage of Latin America (1970), pp. 15-26,86-106.

26. It is difficult to provide totals or comparisons which include the provinces of the Crown of Aragón, since they had a separate tax structure which yielded few economic surveys easily compared with those of Castile. See José Canga Arguelles, Diccionario de hacienda con aplicación a España (1834), articles on "Población de España"; Antonio Malilla Tascón, La única contribución y el catastro de Ensenada (1947); Fierre Vilar, "Estructures de la societal espanyola cap al 1750" (1970), pp. 15 and 28.

27. Vilar, "Estructures," p. 28.

28. For a recent theoretical discussion, see Brian J. L. Berry, Edgar C. Conkling, and D. Michael Ray, The Geography of Economic Systems (1976), ch. 12, "Local Trade and Urban Hierarchies," pp. 226-242.

29. Chauncy D. Harris and Edward L. Ullman, "The Nature of Cities" (1945), pp. 7-9 (reprinted in Paul K. Hatt and Albert J. Reiss, eds., Cities and Society (1957), pp. 237-247).

30. Edward L. Ullman, "A Theory of Location for Cities" (1941), esp. pp. 855-856 (reprinted in Hatt and Reiss, Cities and Society, pp. 227-236).

31. Walter Christaller, Central Places in Southern Germany (1966), pp. 51-53, 96.

32. Ibid., p. 96.

33. The crucial work on the topic is Walter Christaller's Central Places. The conceptual model is laid out in Part I, pp. 14-135. First published in Germany in 1933, the durability of this conceptual framework is documented by its basic role in textbooks of very recent date, e.g.. Berry et al.. Geography of Economic Systems, ch. 12.

34. Christaller, Central Places, pp. 101, 119-120, 121.

35. Ibid., p. 121.

36. E. A. Wrigley, "A Simple Model of London's Importance in Changing English Society and Economy, 1650-1750" (1967). A more perceptive geo-economic discussion of the problem is found in Peter Clark and Paul Slack, English Towns in Transition, 1500-1700 (1976), esp. chs. 1 and 5.

37. On London, see Wrigley, "A Simple Model."

38. Ibid., pp. 56-57; Wrigley stresses the importance of improving productivity as opposed to simply expanding output with traditional methods.

39. For versions of this theme, see Juan Beneyto Pérez, Historia social de España y de Hispanoamérica(1961), pp. 351-356, 368-393; Raymond Carr, Spain: 1808-1939( 1966),pp. 196-209, 281-286; José Luis Cornelias García-Llera, Los moderados en el poder, 1844-1854 (1970), pp. 60-80; Richard Herr, An Historical Essay on Modern Spain (1971), pp. 87-98; Antoni Jutglar, Ideologías y clases en la España contemporánea, vol. 1 (1968), pp. 15-20, 76-87, 101-124; Jaime Vicens Vives, Manual de historia económica de España (1967), pp. 553-557, 560-583.