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.

The political independence of the Latin American nations did not usher in modern capitalism since economic stagnation and the repressed nature of financial markets were evident from the 1820s and 1830s in most countries. This chapter focuses on the role of credit and finance during the first half of the nineteenth century in the new states. Liberal constitutions and laws were put in place but did not produce the desired economic results since fiscal reforms did not prove successful. Attention is directed to the experience of the earliest banking entities. We begin with Brazil, where a first bank in Latin America began to operate in 1808, followed by a brief summary of history of the first commercial bank in Argentina and of an early investment bank in Mexico. Nonetheless, the collapse of imperial rule, the wars of independence and extensive civil conflicts created persistent fiscal and monetary difficulties. So much uncertainty affected decision-making by both economic and political actors, reducing the availability of credit, making it more expensive and risky. Political stability and institutional transparency were required to spur early capitalism but economic and political instability created many obstacles in postcolonial Latin America during the first half of the century.

Debtors’ prisons played a vital – albeit seemingly paradoxical – role in early modern society. In many cases, those incarcerated could not or would not pay their debts. Instead, they languished in prison and racked up new debts to their gaolers. Chapter 2 addresses this seemingly self-contradictory system by showing that, even when it prevented the repayment of debts, imprisonment helped to protect wider social and economic interests, balancing those of landed wealth and emergent capital. It analyses the social, economic, legal and ideological shifts that underwrote this convoluted system, excavating emergent carceral ideologies. In turn, it considers the array of measures taken to alleviate the pressure that growing numbers of insolvent debtors placed on England’s prisons, mitigating the worst effects of the structural weakness of debt incarceration. These attempts to relieve an overburdened system – which ultimately stabilised the debtors’ prison into the eighteenth century – were essential because prisons had developed disciplinary purposes that proved vital to early modern social relations, even when its coercive functions failed.

Between 1560 and 1700, England became an increasingly carceral society; that is, a society in which the prison became a dominant tool of order, permeated by a disciplinary logic that began to shape social relations well beyond the prison walls. Imprisonment posed an ever greater threat to men and women across the social spectrum thanks to the quickening activity of the criminal justice system, growing political and religious conflict and a precipitous rise in civil litigation. This Introduction outlines the significance of these developments, before explaining their significance to wider historiographies of credit and debt, legal practice, state formation and political conflict in early modern England. It suggests that a focus on growing levels of debt imprisonment (which served particular class interests) helps explain how rapid socioeconomic change and social stratification forced many people into often involuntary and negative participation in state institutions and the law. In turn, this conditioned an emergent politics of prison abolition that became increasingly important to the radical politics of the English Revolution, helping to explain interactions of social change and political conflict. Finally, this Introduction outlines the source base for this study and summarises the chapters that follow.

Mainstream monetary theory today ascribes the origins of money to the spontaneous creation of a more efficient means of conducting private market exchange beyond barter. But a heterodox view, which I embrace, instead envisions money as a creation of the state stemming from debts owed to political authorities. Thus the invention of money long preceded coinage. This chapter examines the origins of debt in pre-imperial China and the central importance of debts owed to the state in the political economy of the first empires and the emergence of a monetary standard based on bronze coin. It also analyzes the role of contracts as the means of negotiating private debts and the enforcement mechanisms, both public and private, devised to ensure the validity of contracts. The ubiquity of private contracts and trust in paper documents by the time of the Song dynasty facilitated the adoption of paper money.

This chapter describes the way capitalism, while posing as simply an economic process, captures the political will, commandeering the state and colonizing the subject to its regime of accumulation so as to eliminate politics and secure its dystopic order.

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.