In recent years few historians have paid serious attention to seventeenth-century Spain. Notwithstanding the limited state of research, John Lynch, in this companion volume to his earlier Spain under the Habsburgs, 1516-1598 (Oxford, 1964), has produced a well-documented, thoughtful, and often original synthesis of this period that should stand as the best of its kind. Considering the obstacles, the depth and breadth of coverage are quite remarkable. Demographic, economic, social, and political trends all receive solid and equal treatment, and the long-neglected reign of Charles II has finally been surveyed in some detail. Those interested in the “crisis of the seventeenth century” will find especially useful the section on the Portuguese “revolt” of 1640, which skillfully weaves “peninsular” causes with those arising from Luso-Spanish conflicts in the New World. Only to be regretted is the author’s acknowledged omission of cultural developments within Spanish society.
While I am not a specialist in the field of Colonial Hispanic America, I am somewhat troubled at the author’s thesis regarding changes in the “Hispanic World” set forth in a long chapter devoted to Mexico and Peru. Apparently starting from the hypothesis that Spain’s loss was America’s gain, Lynch postulates that the diminishing silver returns to Spain were produced not so much by depression as by a shift in the colonial economies towards increased self-sufficiency. Funds once returned to the metropolis were invested in colonial administration, defense, and economic enterprise. Supposedly this development led to partial political independence from a Spain weakened by European war and by her own internal troubles, a situation amounting to what he terms “the first emancipation of Spanish America,” as well as a “new balance of power” within the empire which favored the New World.
Several matters are at issue here. If the new and tentative silver remittance figures of M. Morineau are correct (see Annales, E.S.C., January-February 1968, p. 196), then the Americas may not have been retaining as large a share of their revenues as Lynch suggests, but returned them to Europe in a matter not reflected by the official receipts of the Spanish Crown. Secondly, Lynch’s “balance of power” thesis tends to associate income directly with political power. Whereas the colonies may have grown increasingly self-sufficient with regard to their economies, it does not follow that they became any less dependent upon or responsible to Madrid than a century before. Key administrative and military appointments still came from the court while the political plums of America continued to be awarded to leading peninsulares. Moreover, if the colonies did become partially “emancipated,” why did they not take advantage of Spain’s political weakness during the War of the Spanish Succession? Spain, inefficient and impoverished, managed to keep her empire intact and used it to help finance her own economic revival in the eighteenth century. To me such signs indicate that, at least during the seventeenth century, Spain remained the only metropolis within the Hispanic World.
Aside from this colonial problem, the author’s careful labors have left little open to question. He has a tendency to lump the Spanish aristocracy into a single group with common interests. Acceptable in legalistic terms, this interpretation ignores the real tensions arising between the older military elite and the new and increasingly wealthy and influential robe nobility. Also the author’s description of the royal administration falls rather short. He states that “Castile . . .lacked bureaucratic centralization” (p. 20). Perhaps correct in terms of finance, this view ignores the importance of the corregidores, jueces de visita and residencia, and the audiencias, all directly subject to the Council of Castile. And later he writes: “Spain had too many officials” (p. 267). We never learn how many, what strain they placed on the country, or whether Spain with her large officialdom was out of line with other European monarchies.
Minor flaws, however, do not impair the overall quality of this work. We now hope for fresh research into those areas where Lynch, despite his thoroughness, has not been able to reach.
