New Institutional Economics treats early modern Spain as an example of a state whose political and contracting institutions hindered economic growth. However, the assumption that Spanish political institutions were predatory in this respect has been called into question. This paper challenges the idea that Spain was unable to develop sufficiently good contracting institutions, of which we know relatively little. Using data from Malaga's notarial credit market, I show that legal institutions facilitated contractual compliance in private financial transactions. Specifically, public mortgage registries, which had improved the registration of properties used as collateral since their creation in 1768, favoured the subscription of larger contracts. Furthermore, results suggest that registries could have contributed to the development of a more impersonal credit market.

This paper deals with the evolution of wages in the construction offices of Segovia, one of the most important Castilian and Spanish manufacturing towns, between 1571 and 1807. Part two deals with the nominal wages earned by the building officials and labourers of the city and part three presents the Segovian prices index between 1571 and 1807. Finally, part four analyses the evolution of the real wages earned in the construction offices of the town. Segovian real wages evolved in line with the local economy; after peaking in the first quarter of the 17th century, they experienced a continuous decline, so in 1807 the real wages of Segovian building officials and labourers were 50 per cent of those of the first quarter of the 17th century.

Recently, new research has challenged the traditional narrative; Spain did not suffer from a ruler that threatened his subjects’ property with excessive taxes and forced loans. Instead, Spanish economic development was held back by decentralised and non-predatory governance, unable to solve the coordination problems blocking the way to more integrated markets. Through the analysis of the governance and loan portfolios of an ecclesiastical order, this paper examines the extent to which mortgage credit markets were fragmented in early modern Spain. This order not only collected resources that it subsequently lent but also pooled them. Indeed, it developed into a nationally integrated organisation able to offer everything from small loans to farmers to substantial amounts to the king and the Madrid elite.

This article examines a genre of literary texts in early modern Spain written to be readable in both Latin and Spanish. These texts provide explicit evidence of a phenomenon called “strategic bivalency.” They exemplify both the ideological erasure of language boundaries by experts and the purposeful mobilization of bivalent elements that belong simultaneously to two languages in contact. It is argued that by using such bivalency strategically, speakers and writers in contact zones create the effect of using two languages at once, and that this can be a political act. The texts examined here were composed to demonstrate the superiority of the Spanish language and thus to support Spanish political preeminence. The article addresses the import of the Latin-Spanish bivalent genre for language ideology and considers its implications for understanding of modern bivalent practices and of languages as discrete systems.An earlier version of this article was presented in March 2005 at the International Symposium on Bilingualism 5, in Barcelona. Woolard is grateful to the Ministerio de Educación y Ciencia of Spain and to Joan Argenter, principal investigator, for partial support (grant #BFF2003-02954) of that presentation, as part of a project on “Codeswitching and culture in historical communities: Studies in historical linguistic ethnography.” Some of this material was also presented at the Joint XX Conference on Spanish in the U.S. and V Conference on Spanish in Contact with Other Languages, in Chicago, March 2005. Woolard thanks the organizers of these events for the opportunity to discuss these ideas. Archival and library research was supported in part by the New Del Amo Foundation through the University of California and the Universidad Complutense de Madrid, which we gratefully acknowledge. Vincent Barletta and Monica Seefeldt assisted with bibliographic work. We are especially indebted to Roger Wright for helpful comments and sources. Thanks also to José del Valle, Narcís Figueras, Ricardo Otheguy, Barbara Johnstone, two anonymous reviewers, and a number of other scholars who kindly responded to queries. We are responsible for any errors and misconceptions that persist despite all this generous assistance.