The expedition of the famous Great Armada was a military failure that Philip turned into a financial success. Taking advantage of the upsurge in patriotic sentiment, he was able to o obtain a subsidy of 8 million from the Cortes (much more than the cost of the Armada). This was the only instance during his reign when the Cortes granted him a higher tax while his issuance of juros was not constrained by the ordinary revenues.

In each of the three fiscal and financial crises, the cause was the same: the payment of the long-term debts, the juros, completely consumed the ordinary revenues. Among their characteristics, which originated in the financing of the Reconquista, the most important was the attachment of each juro to a specific source of revenue (e.g., sales taxes in Toledo). This reduced their risk but created a fragmented financial market.

Asientos were the famous financial contracts between the crown and the merchant bankers, most of them from Genoa. This chapter provides an introduction that emphasizes that they were much more than loan contracts. All asientos served to deliver money to specific places and times, but the crisis of 1575-77 marked a separation in the nature of the contracts. Before 1575, asientos included juros as guarantees (juros de resguardo), a system that was abused by bankers who could use the crown as a source of funds and was abolished after 1577. The types of asientos in the second half of the reign are described in chapters 24 and 25.

In addition to asking Rome for more money to defend the Mediterranean, Philip also pressed for higher taxes from the people of the Low Countries to pay for their own defense. Castile could no longer send more money there. It had already done so intensively between 1556 and 1559 to defeat France. The Castilian elites were unwilling to continue paying for wars they did not consider their own. Their Flemish subjects, however, were reluctant to accept this tax increase, especially in a context of religious repression. Various political and institutional problems prevented Philip from achieving the tax reform he intended. What began as a revolt ended up as a costly and endless war that demanded an even greater financial effort from Castile and determined the rest of the reign.

Chapter 3 reviews Swift’s rapid emergence as England’s chief foreign policy propagandist and analyzes his ethical, religious, political, geopolitical, and economic reasons for opposing the War of Spanish Succession. He became a Tory partisan after two recessions and adopted the ideology of the old propertied elite against the new capitalist elite. He revealed a nativist strain and opposed foreign influences, including national debt and continental military involvement. But he did not abandon basic Whiggish political principles like rule by consent or the right to resist tyranny. He defended emergency executive action not as a pretext for absolute power but as a limited constitutional device for resolving an immediate and objective crisis, notably abroad. Unilateral powers can easily be abused but Swift shows himself concerned about that risk in a way that is not characteristic of authoritarians. His opposition to Dutch national debt went along with opposition to French power politics, revealing middle ground.

This concluding chapter puts land at the heart of the “China model,” linking legal, fiscal, financial, and political features of the system to explain the roots of China’s contemporary economic challenges, including the real estate crisis, land-backed debt, and abortive property tax initiative. It also extends the theory beyond the Chinese case in three ways. First, it revisits the paradigmatic case of post–Glorious Revolution England in light of China’s experience, suggesting that, in the context of technological change, property rights over land were less secure and governance less democratic in the early eighteenth century than presented in some of the development literature. Second, it examines the relationship between the ease or difficulty of using law to reassign land rights and promotion of transformative economic growth in the case of contemporary India. These comparisons point to the significance of regime type—authoritarian vs. democratic. Regime type shapes the ease with which the state can reassign land rights and how the state manages the conflict that results from the redefinition of property rights. Third, the chapter examines the redefinition of property rights over personal data as a driver of growth in the new information economy as well as a new source of conflict.

This chapter addresses the topic of legacy and its relevance in the work of Pablo Neruda. Thus, starting from the rescue of 2,000 refugees from the Spanish Civil War on the steamship Winnipeg, it explores the relationship of the Spanish language with death in poems from Residencia en la tierra, and its re-emergence in Canto general, exemplified in “Alturas de Macchu Picchu.” The essay argues that the writing of this poem implies the reconciliation of the Spanish language, which is marked by the violence of its imposition in the Americas, with its speakers. It also looks at the relationship between Nerudian poetry and César Vallejo, who, in España, aparte de mí este cáliz, saw in each letter of the imposed language the origin of punishment, thus making reconciliation impossible. Returning to the Winnipeg, the essay concludes that the legacy of Pablo Neruda’s work is immeasurable because it is a debt, that which our time has with his poetry.

Governments command tax revenue to provide services. The US government’s revenue is lower than that in Western European nations. The latter provide services such as universal healthcare, paid parental leave, and free education. A large portion of the US government’s revenue supports the military, which comprises almost half of the world’s total military expenditures. The richest 400 American families pay the lowest tax rate today, in sharp contrast to their paying the highest share in the 1950s. The federal government borrows to pay for services rather than resort to taxing the rich. Americans seem more accepting of not redistributing wealth than Western Europeans. Policies not supported by the elite are unlikely to become law. Poorer people are less likely to vote in the US. Since the 1950s, US states with the most liberal policies have had better mortality trends than conservative states. Americans prefer medical care spending over public health and social spending. Neoliberalism has increased economic inequality and produced a rightward political shift. Reparations can improve racial inequalities

Machiavelli assigns a complicated role in his political theory to the concept of the beneficium (or benefizio in Machiavelli’s Italian) in order to describe the benefits that the power of the state can bring; and this chapter focuses on one philosophical language which is used throughout the Italian Renaissance to discuss this idea and which comes to shape Machiavelli’s own thinking decisively. That language is classical in origin; and it is intimately associated with one text in particular: Seneca’s On Benefits. In the first section of the chapter, Seneca’s thinking about generosity and gratitude is explicated within the wider context of his social philosophy to show how it forms part of a theory of moral obligation, informed by a firmly Stoic notion of natural human sociability. The second section shows how Seneca’s contentions are subsequently retrieved and put to work in pre-humanist and humanist political thought to discuss the moral relationships between members of civil associations and to underline the perils of the vice of ingratitude in political society. Once the place of Seneca’s theory in Renaissance discourse is elucidated, it becomes easier to see how Machiavelli manipulates its contentions into a theory of political obligation within his account of the state.

Chapter 2 takes up Goethe’s distinction between a higher and a lower layer of world literature (discussed in the previous chapter) and argues that in complementing the transnational distribution of cultural mediocrity through markets, Goethe envisioned a more elevated sphere organized along a decidedly non-market form of exchange, that is, gifting. I examine Goethe’s correspondence with his translator Thomas Carlyle as a circuitry of world-literary gifting marked by the to-and-fro movement of tangible (books, journals, manuscripts, jewelry, drawings, interior decoration, etc.) and intangible gifts (tribute, reward, cooperation, guidance). Their nexus, I argue, was emblematic of the transition from the ethos of generous sharing in the republic of letters to world literature as a forum interconnecting outstanding representatives of various national literatures. Contributing to the material diffusion of texts and channelling symbolic economies of prestige, their acts of gift-giving prefigured Carlyle’s conception of hero-worship, and the “significant geography” circumscribed by the movement of gifts between Weimar and Scotland morphed into an imperialistic vision of a Teutonic (British-German) world literature.

Wetland projects were a leading example of improvement in action in early modern England, offering a counterpoint to many unrealised schemes and dreams that litter the archives. But such ventures were fraught with paradoxes: property rights were transgressed to make more certain ones, while drainage created new floods. Centring the engineers, investors, landowners, settlers, and labourers who propelled improvement on the ground, this chapter examines how their ambitions were altered and restricted by the polarised environmental politics that emerged in Hatfield Level. Improvement was a risky endeavour and the costs of conflict were high. Asking how contemporaries evaluated its ambiguous results in Hatfield Level, this chapter charts the revival of wetland improvement by the network of reformers that coalesced around the ‘intelligencer’ Samuel Hartlib in the mid seventeenth century. The experience of conflict surfaced in debate about, and experiments with, technologies of improvement, which promised to marginalise social negotiation and environmental contingencies.

This chapter focuses on the change in the law known as the equity of redemption, which took form in the late seventeenth century, and made the title to mortgaged land more secure through the provision that rents could be sequestered to pay off a loan after the due date, to avoid the title to the property reverting to the lender. This legal change led to a rapid expansion of mortgaging and associated conveyancing. It also demonstrates how interest-bearing loans, based on the security of property, became a source of both income and, more importantly, stable abstract value that could be used to increase the money supply by underpinning the creation of local notes and bills. Mortgage income could also smooth credit flows by providing capital when outgoings were greater than incomings. In the past this would have triggered the need to litigate to increase income, but now money could be borrowed. This chapter will also examine savings held in the form of bonds.

“Political economy,” in the late eighteenth century, signified the statesman’s practice of managing the resources of a political “household.” In 1776, thirteen self-declared American states took control of their political economies. Under the Articles of Confederation, these states, in carefully delimited ways, acted as a composite body with a political economy of its own, and in 1787, the revised federal Constitution became a blueprint for a unified project of economic, political, and social ordering. Thus the history of US political economy can be seen as the story of an emerging One. During the 1790s, two opposing political economies emerged, envisioned and promoted by Alexander Hamilton and Thomas Jefferson. Recent scholarship, however, has moved beyond visions of early American political economy either as a constitutionally defined One or as a partisan Two. It envisions, instead, a postconstitutional landscape composed of many political economies – competing, overlapping, and evolving.