Atlantic trade and regional specialisation in nothern Spain 1550-1650: an integrated trade theory-institutional organisation approach

Based on an in-depth study of the northern Spanish economy in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, this paper argues that commercial expansion was a major source of the diverging performance of European regions. It develops an approach that integrates insights from more recent trade theory with those from new institutional economics. New trade theory informs the analysis of changes at a macro-level - defined as traded quantities, the structure of (inter-) regional integration and specialisation, and the larger institutional framework. New institutional economics are the basis for the interpretation of developments at a micro-level defined as the strategies of merchant organisations and individual firms within that larger framework. The paper shows how macro-level changes impacted upon - and interacted with - micro-level structures and processes of adaptation. The integration of quantitative and qualitative analysis demonstrates that the Commercial Revolution transformed the European economy more through structural change than through increased availability of goods

ATLANTIC TRADE AND REGIONAL SPECIALISATION IN NOTHERN SPAIN 1550-1650: AN INTEGRATED TRADE THEORY-INSTITUTIONAL ORGANISATION APPROACH

Based on an in-depth study of the northern Spanish economy in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, this paper argues that commercial expansion was a major source of the diverging performance of European regions. It develops an approach that integrates insights from more recent trade theory with those from new institutional economics. New trade theory informs the analysis of changes at a macro-level - defined as traded quantities, the structure of (inter-) regional integration and specialisation, and the larger institutional framework. New institutional economics are the basis for the interpretation of developments at a micro-level defined as the strategies of merchant organisations and individual firms within that larger framework. The paper shows how macro-level changes impacted upon - and interacted with - micro-level structures and processes of adaptation. The integration of quantitative and qualitative analysis demonstrates that the Commercial Revolution transformed the European economy more through structural change than through increased availability of goods.

On the spatial nature of institutions and the institutional nature of personal networks in the Spanish Atlantic

Studies of commercial, cultural and political networks in the Atlantic tend to juxtapose the soft ties of networks to the hard rules of imperial law and trade regulation. The implicit or explicit assumption has been that networks in the Spanish Atlantic served primarily as an antidote to the organisation of the empire and broke out of its spatial boundaries. Networks stood for fluidity, as opposed to the static structures of state and church. This article argues in contrast that networks not only were institutions, but that the empire's institutions were (mostly) networks. It uses the case of the English Atlantic networks operating in northern Spain in the first half of the seventeenth century to show how our interpretation of the interactions between merchant networks and political institutions is transformed when we break up the supposed dichotomy between the two. Sobre la naturaleza espacial de las instituciones y la naturaleza institucional de las redes personales en el Atlántico Español.- Los estudios de las redes comerciales, culturales y políticas en el Atlántico suelen contrastar los lazos débiles de las redes con las reglas firmes de las leyes y regulaciones de comercio imperiales. Se presume implícita o explícitamente que en el ámbito del Atlántico español las redes funcionaron fundamentalmente como antídoto de la organización del imperio trascendiendo sus limitaciones espaciales. Las redes se asocian con fluidez, opuestas a las estructuras estáticas del estado y de la iglesia. En este artículo sugerimos que las redes no solamente eran instituciones, sino también que las instituciones imperiales se deberían considerar como redes. Con el objetivo de demostrar cómo nuestras interpretaciones de las interacciones entre redes mercantiles e instituciones cambian si rompemos con la idea de una dicotomía entre las dos se analiza el caso de las redes atlánticas inglesas que se establecieron en el norte de España en la primera mitad del siglo XVII

All that happened below 5 percent : religious endowments, credit, and interest rate discrimination in colonial Spanish America

Historians of European capitalism have generally assumed that lending at interest during medieval and early modern times pitted religious understandings of usury against mercantile and banking interests. The latter developed new financial instruments that sought to circumvent traditionally set usury rates, an interest rate ceiling in existence across Christian polities and often associated with the “5% contract”. Arguably those intellectual history debates have rarely looked at how decisions about lending at interest were made from the bottom up. This paper uses the lending practices of a colonial religious institution, the Colegio de San Pablo of Lima, to investigate how creditors and borrowers thought about what was right and what was wrong when writing credit contracts. I argue that the institution was typical for the largest lending institutions at the time, which were all religious endowments. But crucially it operated in a credit market in which the market interest rate had fallen well below the usury rate. That meant that the interest rate was de facto not fixed. I show that in this situation a careful reading of the contracts reveals some of the strategies used to justify a discrimination in access to credit and diverging rates of interest

La lección de las monjas : el sector crediticio colonial, la historia de género y una revolución historiográfica inacabada

This paper offers a critical review of the way, in which financial history specialists and gender historians have studied the role of women’s convents within the credit sector in colonial Spanish America. The outsized role of religious institutions in the provision of credit in viceregal Spanish America was initially mostly studied by scholars interested in gender history (Lavrín 1966, Burns 1999). Their prime interest meant that nuns’ contribution to the creation of a financial system sui generis in the Spanish colonial world was left mostly unexplored. At the same time, their very valuable insights into the role of women’s convents as credit institutions were marginalised by financial historians who within a euro-centric frame of a fixed developmental paths towards “modern” credit markets described these lending activities as “archaic” practices. I argue that a two-fold invisibility has hampered our understanding of the role of women in colonial Spanish American finance: that of a financial sector in the studies of gender historians and that of female religious actors in financial history

Digitalisierung in der Erwachsenenbildung

Aus dem Inhalt: Digitalisierung in der Erwachsenenbildung - zur Einleitung in den Themenschwerpunkt; Erwachsenenbildung in der digitalen Welt: Handlungsebenen der digitalen Transformation; Digitalisierung und Mediatisierung in der Erwachsenenbildung/Weiterbildung; Digitale Lernumwelten in produzierenden Betrieben; Zur Modellierung einer Kultur der Digitalität; Bildungsberatung in Beschäftigung und Weiterbildung im Kontext der Digitalisierung; Best-practice-Beispiele für digitale Weiterbildungsangebote

Bounded Leviathan: or why North and Weingast are only right on the right half

The great merit of North’s and Weingast’s insight into the importance of a ruler’s credible commitment to protecting property rights is that it is both parsimonious and it lends itself beautifully to generalizations. It has e.g. inspired the economic literature on the importance of legal origins” (LaPorta et al., 1998, 2008), which seemed to vindicate the notion that post-Glorious Revolution English institutions were particularly conducive to economic growth. More recently economists have acknowledged that growth in fact depends on state capacity. This encompasses not only investor protection (legal capacity) but also the ability of the state to finance itself, fiscal capacity. (Besley and Persson, 2009, 2010) show that the protection of private property rights and that of public property rights to taxation are linked and most likely co-evolutionary. However, the precise relation between the two is anything but clear. This paper argues that North’s and Weingast’s models one-sided focus on state coercion that threatened subject’ property rights has obscured the relation between coercion used in revenue collection and total revenue role of fiscal capacity. We suggest a very simple model to show that this relationship between state fiscal capacity and legal capacity is not linear, especially in the phase of nation state building. Before 1800 states faced one of two very different central challenges. 1) States that already exhibited high levels of coercion had to try to keep in check the ruler’s potential for predation as North and Weingast argued. 2) States that used very low levels of coercion faced a coordination problem instead of a predation issue. The case of Spain provides empirical evidence for the existence of states where an increase in coercion would have improved fiscal capacity, but high levels of legal capacity paradoxically prevented the ruler from adopting this path. Finally, we use financial market developments to show the serious welfare implications that resulted from such a lack of coordination and integration

The globalisation of codfish and wool: Spanish-English-North American triangular trade in the early modern period

This paper analyses the transformation of two of the staple trades of the pre-modern international economy –those in wool and dried codfish– during the transition from the late medieval to the early-modern period. The development of early modern long-distance trade was subject to three major constraints: transport, balance of payments problems leading to bilateralism and the lack of credit markets. Economic history has concentrated in particular on the first of these. By contrast this paper provides new data for the wool and fish trades that create the basis for an in depth analysis of how balance of payments problems and credit restrictions could be minimised. We show that the integration of these two very different commodity trades was a clear strategy to overcome these constraints. Their integration in turn led to a de-monopolisation of pre-existing commercial networks and transformed both the supply and distribution networks of both goods. Finally, the paper analyses resulting alterations of the economic geography of these trades

The Spanish Empire and its legacy: fiscal re-distribution and political conflict in colonial and post-colonial Spanish America

The comparative history of the Americas has been used to identify factors determining longterm economic growth. One approach, new institutional economics (NIE), claims that the colonial origins of respective institutional structures explain North American success and Spanish American failure. Another argues that differences in resources encountered by Europeans fostered divergent levels of equality impacting on institutions and growth. This paper challenges the theoretical premises and historical evidence of both views offering a historicized, statistically and economically validated explanation for the institutional and economic development of Spanish America. First, it revises the structure of the fiscal system challenging the characterization of Spain as an absolutist ruler. Secondly, an analysis of fiscal data at regional levels assesses the performance of the Imperial state. It shows the existence of massive revenue redistribution within the colonies, disputing the notion of a predatory extractive empire based on endowments as the source of original inequality. Finally, we discuss how a contingent event, the imprisonment of the Spanish king in 1808, contributed to the disintegration of a 300-year-old empire. The crisis of legitimacy in the empire turned fiscal interdependence between regions into beggar-thy-neighbour strategies and internecine conflict. We conclude by arguing for a reversal of the causality from weak institutions causing economic failure to fiscal (and economic) failure leading to political instability