Vientos de guerra: Apogeo y crisis de la Real Armada, 1750–1823

This three-volume collective work under the direction of Juan Marchena Fernández and Justo Cuño Bonito represents a major contribution to the study of the Spanish naval system during the long eighteenth century, a subject central for understanding not only the imperial Bourbon state's development and crisis but also the emergence of independent Latin American nations. In effect, the birth and collapse of the Spanish Bourbon navy has become a field of study in which the most recent methodologies linking military history, economic history, and state formation (methodologies that have produced explanatory concepts ranging from the military revolution to the fiscal-naval state and, more recently, the contractor state) have been put to the test, aiming to explain the different political and economic outcomes of the military and naval competition between the three great Atlantic powers (Great Britain, France, and Spain). These volumes gather the work of some of the leading exponents...