Don Quixote, herald of patriotic essences, has been devotedly read and reinvented generation after generation. Likewise, Cervantes and his time have been studied until exhaustion by all kinds of scholars prepared to snatch a key from the grave of the nobleman from La Mancha, which could explain the destiny of Spain. In the following pages, the text will not be interpreted from the point of view of economics. Since the works of Piernas Hurtado to this very year of the celebration of the centenary, a fair amount of essays have been produced from that perspective. An alternative analysis is proposed here which, starting with the School of Salamanca and going through Arbitrismo, Enlightenment and the liberal economic historiography, ends at «the time of Pierre Vilar». At the end of the journey one shouldn't be disappointed at verifying that «all depends on the colour of the glass you look through at this matter». The advances in optics have adjusted the distortions caused by faulty lenses and have hence brought different points of view closer together. Today there is considerable agreement amongst scholars.

This article makes a plea for a joint study of intellectual and economic history. Mental perceptions affect economic decisions and variables, while economic realities influence the evolution of ideas. We use the case of Castilian noblemen and their management of landed property to illustrate these interrelations. This was driven to a large extent by the «moral economy» of the group, which provided a moral justification of its privileged place in society. However, during the early modern age new ideas and economic difficulties eroded these concepts and attitudes, and led to an increasing interest of nobility towards an efficient management of their properties. The delicate equilibrium between gains and prestige –intended as an indirect means to acquire wealth– as well as the intermingling of religious worries make it difficult to get a balanced view of the real situation and its evolution, which is none the less necessary.

In early modern Castile the Crown authority was played within the political arena having as a mirror the so-called economica (the art of the good government of the household). The king, a prudent father of his subjects, should punish and sometimes pardon the criminals in order to keep the political body balanced. The criminal punishment or pardon should be the end of every lawsuit. Seville in the times of Cervantes offered lots of occasions to develop judicial practices. This article explains how justice was developed within this framework and gives a picture of Ancient Régime justice quite different to the repressive justice depicted by Foucault in his Surveiller et punir.

The life and work of Miguel de Cervantes coincide with the first cycle of globalization. One of the main engines of the world economy was the silver trade between the Americas and the Asian markets. The new world economy was developing at the same time as the «military revolution» in Eurasia. The Spanish, Ottoman, Safavid, Mughal and Russian empires and other political entities used the new military «hardware» and «software» to expand their borders and to maintain their position employing the larger part of their financial resources. These new economic and political realities propelled ecological exchanges that would irrevocably change the history of the world. That was the time of Don Quixote.

In the last decades of the sixteenth and the beginning of seventeenth century -that is, at the time Don Quixote was written and published-, an important change began in Spanish-muslim commercial relations. Removal of products, based on raids and plunders, thanks to north-African kings vassalage and subjection of tribes living on the coast, turned into mercantile interchanges completely normalized with those countries, impossible to be dominate. The importance and vitality of this trade is testified by the arrival of ships from Muslim countries, wheat imports from these and, last of all, American silver shipped to the quoted destinations.

During Miguel de Cervantes' lifetime, the Mediterranean World was suffering a transformation in the internal distribution of power, both political and economic. Although the Ottoman fleet was defeated, which established the limits of dominance between the two empires, this did not prevent the entry in this space of the new commercial powers from northern Europe, which changed the trade in the Mediterranean. This article tries to provide a synthesis of this process, of which Cervantes was a direct witness both in his personal life and through the works which have survived to our time.

This paper analyses how the progressive autonomy of the capital used to arrange the treasure fleets from Seville to America derived in a real chartered company, a precedent of today's joint-stock company, when the Crown finally privatised it through the asientos de avería. The parallelism among the asientos and the companies were so noticeable that the public officers appointed by the Count-Duke of Olivares to study the foreign companies couldn't detect any difference between both institutions.

The constant state of war which dominated the reign of Philip II and part of Philip III'S exerted a growing fiscal demand both on Castile and the American Colonies. The American treasure which opened the doors to credit to finance these campaigns increased substantially over the 17th century. Never the less, the merchants, which controlled the extraction of precious metals and their shipments to the metropolis, established a highly lucrative trade with the Peru and the Philippines which created a constant drain of silver to the Far East. Based on the complaints filed by the Consulado de Sevilla about the competition of Chinese goods and the loss of American silver, the Monarch imposed heavy restrictions on the triangular trade in the Pacific. These restrictions created conflicts with the American viceroys who were interested in this trade and resulted in the generalization of smuggling.

This paper is divided into three parts. In the first one we identify the project that led the Spaniards to settle in the Far East in the last third of the sixteenth century. In the second, we analyse the resources that the Spanish Crown counted on in order to support the project. And, finally, the incentives that the latter generated to stimulate the installation in the islands of settlers that assured their continuity, at least until the last third of the eighteenth century, are also studied. The sources used are basically the accounts of the Philippine Treasury of the late sixteenth century and first half of the seventeenth century, the primitive ‘relaciones’ of the conquest (1575–1590) and the ‘crónicas’ of the early sixteenth century.

This article studies in a single conceptual framework the complex game performed by the different historical dynamics in the Taiwan insular area between 1624 –the time of the Dutch conquest of southwest Taiwan– and 1686 –the date of Taiwan's absorption into the Manchu Qing Empire, as a Fujian prefecture. It pays specific attention to the mercantile conflicts between Chinese Diaspora communities in concurrence with the Dutch and Iberians.

The aim of this contribution is the presentation of the political conflicts between the Archbishop of Lima, Toribio Alfonso de Mogrovejo (1538–1606), together with his faithful collaborator the parish priest Alonso de Huerta, and the cathedral chapter. Though the chapter was a sort of senate or permanent council of the diocese clergy, it by no means acted as an institution involved in the missionary commitments of Archbishop Mogrovejo. On the contrary, its members rallied around against what they considered to be a violation of their economic privileges, and on several instances they denounced the Archbishop, as well as the parish priest Alonso de Huerta, arguing that they intruded in the internal rules of the chapter.

The financial struggles that Castilla underwent during the second half of the 16th century forced the Crown to look for new ways of funding. The monetary changes encompassed the use of copper coins known as piezas de vellón. . Throughout the 17th century, there were 25 laws decreed altering in one way or the other the monetary value of the coins. These adjustments did not go unnoticed, having a direct impact on the monetary system creating instability and dramatic price fluctuations, on top of countless protests and rejections. The Government, conscious of the severity of the situatíon, made several attempts to resolve the imbalances, which only triumphed once the underlying fiscal problems disappeared. We see in this century co-ordination between monetary and fiscal policy in which monetary policy had to finance the deficit incurred by the fiscal authorities.

This article tries to establish the chronology and dynamics of the 17th century economic depression in the region of Evora, in Southern Portugal. By examining a set of key variables –vital statistics, prices of foodstuffs and farm rents– the onset of the depression is located in the last decade of 16th century, and its continuation up to 1660 is attested. A number of attempts to recovery are detected, but all of them were checked by poor harvests, sometimes joined by plague and war. On the whole, high prices of foodstuffs appear to be associated with signals of depression in the behaviour of other variables. This seems to indicate that these price increases were supply-driven, rather than demand-driven, weighting heavily on the incomes of most families, whereas small farmers were unable to take advantage of these seemingly favourable conjunctures.

Silver coins were an excellent instrument of payment in the seventeenth century, but given its high weight and value, its use and transport involved high risks and costs. Is it possible to estimate those costs? So far, we know how much the Spanish Crown paid to its bankers for money transport, but how much did the bankers themselves pay? And how much did other economic agents pay? What was cheaper: the use of bills of exchange or that of coins? How did the export of precious metals work in Spain?

Miguel de Cervantes placed some passages of his masterpiece in Catalonia. Nevertheless, the features he uses to approach the Catalan reality -halfwaybetween 16th and 17th centuries- are obviously influenced by Don Quixote's personality. At that time, the Catalan economy was making its way in every sphere of activity which could operate at a profit. Far away from that magnificent Middle Ages, agriculture had to be rearranged and it was necessary to promote the most competitive products and to try to find markets for them. New generations devoted themselves to this purpose, people who were equally distant from the old patrician oligarchies and from the fickleness of the marginal nobility. They were laying, perhaps without knowing it, the path to modernity.