The Castilian Mesta and the Inefficiencies of Political Weakness
Spain had an urban sector that was double if not quadruple that of England, as we have seen. It also had a thriving wool trade in the medieval period, similarly tightly interdependent with the European marÂket.
Yet by the early modern period, it was considered neither wealthy nor constitutional. The most common explanations, at least in non-specialist literature, have focused on problems of political authority. NeoÂinstitutionalists in particular had focused on the mercantilist policies of the absolutist Spanish crown, claiming it used the wool trade to establish a monopoly that undermined economic growth.[1024]Spain therefore might support the hypothesis that where rulers were too strong, they could intervene in the economy and distort the outcomes anticipated by commercial activity. If urban groups did not succeed in shaping parliaments, as they did in the Low Countries or Italy, it was because powerful kings thwarted them. Acemoglu and Robinson, for instance, discussed Spain’s mercantilism as a function of a “much stronger” crown and Ekelund and Tollison castigated Spain’s oppressive taxation.[1025]
Much scholarship has indeed treated the Mesta as the baneful instituÂtion exemplifying the mercantilist, monopolist tendencies of the Spanish crown.[1026] This view has been jettisoned by Castilian historians, however.[1027] They have noted that the Castilian Mesta was not a monopoly or a cartel,[1028] but an export industry competing on the international market. It was a collective body in which “all owners of transhumant flocks were automatically members.”[1029] It became “national” under Alfonso X. Large wool producers did not receive monÂopoly rights; instead, royal policy aimed to reduce the high transaction
Endogeneity of Trade: English Wool Trade and Castilian Mesta 203 costs of securing pasture lands, due to local conflict and grazing rights fees (montazgos).[1030] In short, royal “intervention” aimed to secure conditions which were already operating in the English economy due to the unchalÂlenged authority of the English kings.
English towns were not subject to tolls because they were under royal jurisdiction, as were counties, thus effectively creating “free-trade” areas that accelerated commercial activity.[1031]In the Spanish context, pasture has been viewed as an inefficient choice compared to agriculture, serving monarchical rentierism. Yet in England pasture was fundamental to economic growth.[1032] Communally owned lands were gradually partitioned to allow for grazing through the Enclosures, starting in the fifteenth century.[1033] That “sheep ate men” was the necessary step in modernizing the English economy, for some scholars at least, despite its profound social dislocations.[1034] In a pattern observed elsewhere in this book, similar developments across the two countries (here in the economic realm) are interpreted in contrasting light, when the difference lay in state capacity to respond to them. In fact, pasture is now seen as an efficient Spanish response to the interÂnational market.[1035] As seen in Chapter 5, however, Spanish kings had much weaker infrastructural control over territories and populations than their English counterparts.64 Commercial activity did not translate into political institutions as in England because of the political framework already in place and the power deficit of ruling authorities. This also limited the role of trade in the economy, though data seem lacking for the earlier period. In the first half of the sixteenth century, most ordinary crown revenues came from the 10 percent sales tax, the alcabala. Even when this amounted to about 30 percent of total revenue, wool revenue did not exceed 3 percent.65
*
In this chapter, I questioned assumptions of the literature claiming to link economic growth, especially trade, with political institutions. Such arguÂments can only be demonstrated through the mechanisms translating changes in the economy to changes in the institutional structure.
Case studies are therefore appropriate means of testing them, especially since they allow the careful tracing of temporal precedence. The English caseshowed how the greater state capacity established in previous chapters was also critical for the effects of the wool trade. Process-tracing estabÂlishes the precedence of Parliament and the crown’s role in constituting mercantile groups as a political bargaining force - an early instance of the structuring role of institutions in political economy. Merchants acquired a political profile because the crown interacted with an assembly for that purpose. Their early interests were not only not constitutional in nature, they were often contrary to public welfare and, consequently, bargains with political authority aimed at sectoral privilege, not the common good. Where state capacity was weak, as in Spain, similar economic activities were not harnessed by central institutions and did not enhance instituÂtional outcomes. These conclusions suggest that instead of assuming that the European model of political centralization, partly based on trade, fails to explain other regions, such as Africa,[1036] we should reconsider the model’s origins.