Distant Tyranny blends economic theory, market data on a well-chosen commodity (bacalao or dried codfish), and analysis of the dispersed political sovereignty of modern Spain. Historians of Spain often compare Spain's path to modernity to those of other European states, emphasizing French parallels. Regina Grafe argues that this has produced a misguided emphasis on a supposed centralization of the Spanish state in the eighteenth century. Rejecting the historical model in which European states progressively centralized jurisdiction and curtailed provincial autonomy, Grafe proposes a model based on negotiation between Crown and provincial elites—the same elites that colonized royal institutions while keeping their ties to their home towns. This fits with the growing perception that, compared with some countries, the early modern Spanish state was relatively weak. Grafe then asks: What is the interaction between the dispersal of political authority and market integration in Spain?

The first part of an answer is to find a better indicator of market integration. Grafe points out that food grains, while often used to study prices, are a poor gauge of Spanish market integration. Unlike other commodities, wheat was exempt from taxation and subject to royal regulation and subsidy. Grafe then proposes bacalao as a better indicator, one that became a major source of protein in seventeenth-century Spain. Not only was it traded within the fiscal and transport environment of other commodities, it also documents the integration of Spain into the Atlantic economy. This in turn allows Grafe to challenge the stereotype of Spanish decline in the later sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, showing that Spain was participating in a larger-scale reorganization of Atlantic markets. Her analysis of the bacalao trade is accompanied by a discussion of the history of Spanish transport, showing that while its static nature has been overstated, transport remained slow and inefficient.

The book then places Spain's weak market integration into the context of a weak Crown and strong urban and regional government. This prompts a review of the contractual relations between higher and lower authorities. In a litigious society, where the political structure had a strong contractual component, the Crown was subject to the law and had to accept an environment of negotiated agreements. The eighteenth-century Bourbon kings are credited with reducing regional autonomy, but Grafe finds that, aside from stabilization of the Castilian monetary system in 1685, these reforms simply rearranged parts of the system without effective centralization.

All through the eighteenth century, the Crown was conservative about borrowing (compared to France) and made small investments in roads and the army. The impact of reform on market integration was modest, the greatest improvement taking place between Castile and Aragon. The problem was that the Crown had little control over the personnel of local government, yet depended on local governments to carry out royal policy. Meanwhile, royal neglect of infrastructure left the building of roads, bridges, and marketplaces to the towns. The towns in turn built up huge debts that crippled their ability to maintain that infrastructure, thus limiting market integration. Provincial variations in bacalao prices, along with the prices of beef and mutton, show the effect of distance, road conditions, and excise taxes upon market integration.

In her last chapter, Grafe shifts from “the causes of slow market integration to the actors” (p. 234). The actors—center and periphery—are not, however, the stereotypical conservative core and progressive periphery of Spanish historiography. Both were part of a system of contractual government and dispersed authority. Spain did not develop in part because geographic and political realities produced poor roads, held back market integration, and left resources underutilized. Grafe's illustration is the interaction between the Basque Provinces and the Crown in the 1770s, when the Crown denied the Basque Provinces access to the reformed imperial trade. The aftermath exacerbated internal trade barriers. This documents the impact of fragmented authority as well as Spain's uneven urbanization, in which peripheral cities grew while interior towns stagnated.

Early modern Spain clearly differed from the European model in which monarchs increasingly asserted control over the provinces, became more effective at collecting taxes, and supported large armies. The Spanish state never achieved much autonomy from urban and regional governments because regional societies had institutionalized forms of resistance. They also collected the Crown's tax revenue via negotiated contracts. Domestic transport was inefficient, taxes varied between provinces, and lack of integration led to inefficient use of resources. Together, these factors explain the lack of market integration illustrated by the bacalao trade.

In Spain, the Crown was not so much ruler as coordinator of a country composed of entrenched, autonomous urban and regional societies. Grafe's findings agree well with my own and has enhanced my view that Spain has followed a distinctive path toward modernity. She does not follow the story into the nineteenth century, but the pattern reappeared after the Napoleonic Wars and persists to this day.