We can consider, quite rightly, that this book, while being the collective work of more than 70 authors, is overall the posthumous work of Pedro Lains, who sadly passed away on 16 May 2021. Pedro always expressed concern about southern Europe not being sufficiently represented in the analyses of the continent’s economic past. Therefore, he believed that the countries of the Iberian Peninsula shared sufficient common features so as to deserve a monograph, published in English, to address their trajectory and facilitate their integration in European economic history.

His efforts with this book were titanic. He designed the structure of a text that had to span from the Early Middle Ages to the present day. The perspective that he sought was not to analyse the Iberian territories separately but to integrate them in a common vision.

Economic historians have placed commercialization at the centre of Europe’s early modern capitalism, emphasizing the importance of domestic and international trade, shipbuilding and concomitant manufactures, the financial sector, and urbanization. As the Iberian polities extended geographically to Africa, Asia and the Americas during the early modern period, trade, whether domestic, international or colonial, had a critical effect upon economic development. However, the economic impact of colonial expansion was uneven across Iberia. Iberia commercial exchange associated with the overseas empires produced surprisingly few backward and forward linkages in the European national economies. The question this chapter seeks to address is thus to what extent and how Iberian trade, especially colonial trade, supported or hindered economic development in the early modern period.

This chapter discusses the paths of Spanish and Lusophone America from the late colonial period through independence for most of Latin America to 1870. Relative continuity from colony to independent empire in Brazil contrasts sharply with regime change from colonial to republican systems in mainland Spanish America. Late colonial economies expanded significantly. Trading systems were transformed in the later eighteenth century; mining and slavery-based staple exports expanded fast, as did market integration within Latin America. Indicators of living standards show great diversity but paint a relatively positive picture until at least the last quarter of the eighteenth century. War and independence in the early nineteenth century knocked mainland Spanish America off its path of preindustrial expansion, while Brazil continued to expand. Rather than a ‘reversal of fortune’ new Spanish American republics faced the costs of a transition from a corporate political economy to an incipient republican one. It destroyed the fiscal basis of the state, led to increased concentration of landholdings, and dislocated goods and financial markets. Also, weak states failed to replace corporate structures of protections of the weaker social strata with individual access to legal protections. Regime change created opportunities for growth in the long run, but its immediate result was more inequality and falling living standards for significant parts of the population.

The commercial revolution that arose from the opportunities of long-distance trade created in the two centuries before 1700 penetrated local markets throughout continental Europe over the next 170 years. In the process, the dominant form of employment in the services sector switched from local and household services required by largely self-sufficient households and villages, engaged primarily in agriculture and handicraft manufacturing, to specialized commercial, financial, and transportation services organized between specialized centers of production and commerce. Increased specialization led to continued advances in productivity, in services as well as in agriculture and industry. Services may, in fact, have been the most dynamic sector in the European economy throughout this period. While the Industrial Revolution occurred in Great Britain, industrialization did not dominate the economies in the rest of Europe until after 1870. In contrast, the earlier British innovations in providing services in finance, shipping, and wholesale distribution were more readily adopted in the rest of Europe and their diffusion led to continued dynamic growth of the services sector throughout Europe.

The importance of productivity advances in services for growth in the general economy was not recognized as clearly in the eighteenth century as it is now. Only in recent decades, after stunning improvements in information and communications technology, have economists begun to identify the importance of advances in finance for overall economic growth, as well as for continued trade in goods and services among diverse regions.

History as a discipline is as liable to fall for fashions and fads as any other. An occasional critical appraisal of new strands of history, such as the one undertaken in this volume, is therefore an important part of scholarly debate. In recent years, the two trends in history that are arguably most important from the point of view of maritime historians are Atlantic history and global history. This essay will not address the increasing historiography dealing with transatlantic connections predominantly – though not exclusively – in the Anglophone and African context. I would argue, however, that some of the discussion of how global history challenges maritime historians could also be applied to Atlantic history. This article will start by trying to define more clearly what global history is, how it has been analyzed and to what extent it can provide useful interpretative and methodological contributions to maritime history. It will then elaborate very briefly on a few examples from the field of Spanish maritime history to illustrate the kinds of challenges that I believe it contains.

The argument I wish to develop can be summarized as follows. First, global history is not about the spatial scale of enquiry. Instead, it implies a methodological and theoretical shift that can enrich historical enquiry at any geographical level. Second, this shift can be an important corrective to the way maritime historians have thus far conceptualized the process of globalization. I argue that a methodological and definitional bias in maritime history has led towards a prioritization of technology as a potential prime mover of maritime expansion. A re-definition of globalization as a historically contingent process of connections and interactions that are revealed mostly through a comparative approach shows the limitations of technology-focused maritime history. Third, it also requires us to rethink notions of when globalization began and how it proceeded. Eventually, though, this opens up a set of new avenues for maritime history that would be a shame to miss out on.

I

Quite a few maritime historians feel awkward about the rise of global history. This volume demonstrates at the same time the need to assess the potential usefulness of this new historiography for maritime history, as well as the fact that maritime historians are still not entirely sure what to do with it. In part this is because maritime history has always been global.