Historians of Spain and its empire have long engaged questions about the nature of Spanish imperialism and how the crown extracted wealth from its territories in the peninsula and the Americas through levying taxes. Anglophone historians of the mid-twentieth century portrayed the Spanish empire as absolutist, with nonnegotiable taxation. In the past three decades, however, historians of the Iberian world have shown that, far from an absolutist and centralized empire, the Spanish monarchy would be better understood as composite or polycentric, reliant on negotiation to secure the loyalty of subjects and corporate bodies throughout the empire to maintain its dominions. Thus, the Spanish monarchy created a more complex and nuanced system for governance and financing the imperial machine than previously thought.
Central to these debates have been the fiscal structure and tools developed to collect revenue from the monarchy's territories. One of the fiscal instruments most often associated with the...
