Growing in the Shadow of an Empire. How Spanish Colonialism Affected Economic Development in Europe and in the World (XVIth-XVIIIth cc.)

Including contributions by authors from six different countries and profoundly interdisciplinary in nature, this conference collection seeks to answer a very basic question: did the countries under Spanish dominion experience a particular developmental course that may have led them to a common, yet distinct, type of modernization? In order to answer this question, the authors examine the interplay between institutional and social frameworks on the one hand, and economic patterns on the other. Employing both quantitative and qualitative methods, they analyse issues such as commercial networks, production, and fiscal and monetary policies in order to identify the factors that allowed long-term economic growth and modernization.