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This chapter sets the bases for an understanding of Iberian institutions and political and economic history. It describes such institutions within a European framework and makes comparisons in order to explain Iberian overseas expansion. That process, it is argued, was rooted in the internal tensions of the elite’s families and in the jurisdictional competition among the Crown, the aristocracy, the cities, and the Church. Being a privileged crossroad of technological global advances and expansionist stimuli, the area soon became a vital centre for globalization, which, first in Portugal and then in Castile, contributed to the political system’s consolidation and stability.

The outcome was, however, a diversity of political and institutional schemes, whose economic development was also affected by international trade and the emergence of a poly-nuclear pattern of economic growth in Europe. A comparison with political and institutional developments in England and France helps underline different models of composite monarchies and to argue against any sense of Iberian exceptionalism.

This chapter investigates Portuguese and Castilian overseas expansion by introducing some comparisons between the two. Contrary to traditional stereotypes, Iberian societies were technically and administratively as well-endowed as any others in Europe for the expansion and the conquest of new territories. Such enterprises were, however, a consequence not only of formal institutions (the royal tribunals, municipalities or the viceroyalties, notaries, consulates, etc.), as is always said, but also of informal institutions and social networks in which family relations, kinship, clienteles, and reciprocity were crucial. Thanks to the latter, the sovereigns of Portugal and Castile could externalize the costs of building up the most far-flung empires known in history until then.

Environmental conditions, geography, and local political situations were very different and inevitably led to two different imperial models. Yet they both were based on the importance of negotiation with local elites and their high degree of autonomy. This process did not break the poly-nuclear character of European or world economic growth but did contribute to increasing market integration within Europe.

This chapter explains sixteenth-century growth in Iberia. It argues against the idea of technological and economic backwardness and shows the notable dynamism of both the agrarian sector and the cities of the interior. Also against those common places, this chapter argues that interregional connectivity, old property rights only apparently inefficient (by the standards of the new institutional economics), led to increasing productivity and even economic development. Moderate fiscal and seigniorial pressure—in part thanks to the advantages offered by the empires—also facilitated expansion. Though there was not an integrated interregional market or an evolution towards capitalism, this economy does not fit the backward and primitive image often depicted by historians.

This chapter sheds new light on the way the two empires accentuated social tensions in Iberia and stresses—with new details and reasoning—the way they contributed to the persistence of social structures, institutions, and property rights as well as to reshaping a conflictive pact between the king and the elites, and, among the latter, in different territories of the composite monarchy, particularly in Portugal and Castile. In Castile, such a pact alleviated the aristocracy’s problems as well as tensions within the elites. It also facilitated an increasing interpenetration between the king and country, manifested in the involvement of the latter in international wars, but did not eliminate tensions, frustrated the possibilities of a financial revolution, and maintained the aristocracy’s and cities’ autonomy for the mobilization of military resources. In Portugal, the outcome was a sort of rentier state living from the king’s imperial resources. This chapter shows the incongruence of studying composite monarchies’ fiscal systems only from the central treasury’s perspective or separated from the mobilization of local and non-monetary resources. Both aspects are crucial to understand state building in early modern Europe, Iberia being one more case.

This chapter takes a comparative perspective to criticize some common stereotypes in the history of Iberia. It analyses the formal institutions that were important for the allocation of resources and accents the way informal institutions such as the family and the lineage affected economic performance. The chapter shows to what extent the concept of efficient or inefficient institutions, as the new institutional economics defines them, is insufficient to explain economic behaviour and evolution. Rather, it is argued, the historical context, including environmental circumstances and availability of resources, would condition relative economic development and competition with other European regions. It also stresses that the dominant coalition emerging from the conflictive pact created obstacles for the continuation of a competitive economy in the centre of the peninsula, until then the most dynamic area.

This chapter studies Western European political systems and institutional development in comparative perspective to show the impact of religious ruptures on economic evolution. It explains how American silver and the Habsburg wars—from 1581 involving also the Portuguese empire—acted in a series of positive institutional contexts to make some economies of the north of Europe comparatively more efficient and flexible in the long run. A new advance of globalization even beyond the limits of the Iberian world is considered responsible for a slow but relevant polarization of the economic development towards the north of Europe. Though it argues the idea that one cannot speak of economic decadence for the first decades of the seventeenth century in Iberia, it does see how the decreasing competitiveness of the Iberian products in gradually more expansive international and colonial markets created the conditions for the breakdown of the old peninsular pattern of development based on the dynamism of the interior regions.

Breaking with a tradition of studying the Spanish and the Portuguese empires separately, this chapter adopts a global perspective to analyse imperial networks and the way family and personal relations and informal institutions articulated them. The asymmetries in information and agency at a local level also elucidate the terms of negotiations between the metropolis and the colonies, the difficulties in controlling the different imperial nodes and the problems of regulation and arbitration from Madrid and Lisbon.

Though these empires had been agents of globalization, this chapter argues that globalization became their main enemy. It enhanced the negotiational power of local elites and created new routes of trade escaping the metropolis’ control and weakening the states. The study of the European wars (1621–1648/59) from a global perspective shows that tensions in the periphery of the empires were at the base of the Hapsburgs’ difficulties and in the increasing conflict between Lisbon and Madrid, thus viewed from a new perspective. Contrary to the traditional image, the chapter demonstrates the relevant contribution to warfare by non-Castilian territories and that the mobilization of military and financial resources kept working as a decentralized apparatus, thus enhancing the power of local elites, particularly in the case of America, which kept an increasing proportion of its fiscal output.

This chapter analyses how war effort, in part because of empires’ needs, challenged the conflictive pact in the different centres of the composite monarchy. It does so by selecting four areas: Castile, Catalonia, Portugal, and America. The comparison between Catalonia and Portugal stresses the importance of being a global empire for the latter’s independence. The resolution of the Castilian crisis, based on a reshaping of the agreement between the Crown and the elites—consisting in part in a new model of absolutism based on direct negotiation between Madrid and the different local agents—led to the reproduction of unfavourable economic conditions for the kingdom’s interior. In America, conflicts also paved the way for a renewal of the pact with home-grown elites, which was based on new forms of colonial extraction of resources and a high autonomy for local agents, for whom corruption and rent-seeking behaviour were crucial.

The outcome was the rupture of the composite empire as well as a new balance between the different local powers, a change in the peninsular economic model with the centre’s recession, and the slow recovery of the coastal zones, which with some variants reproduces a European model. In America the abundance of resources and the implantation of a new ecological equilibrium allowed for economic expansion within the framework of, in theory, very inefficient institutions.