Segmented Political Hierarchies and Self-Organizing Commercial Networks: The World of the Merchant-Smuggler in the Global Hispanic Monarchy

I feel especially honored to have been invited to present a paper at a research conference in honor of David Ringrose. It seems to me that I have literally followed him throughout my scholarly career. When I showed up at the University of Wisconsin in 1966 to do graduate work in history, David was already in Spain, but I heard a good bit about him. Of course, by that time, we had the same graduate adviser, Domencio Sella. Unless his wife did so, I may be the only person outside of his Master's committee who has read his M.A. thesis. It was at a meeting David hosted while at Rutgers that I was introduced into the Society for Spanish and Portuguese Historical Studies, an organization which has been a fundamental support for much of my professional life. More importantly, I have learned so much from David's work on Spanish history, especially over the past twenty years or so. A few years ago, when he saw a recommendation I had written for him, he told me that I made it sound as though he walked on water. I didn't think the letter was that good, and I have on occasion pointed out problems in what he has published. However, he has consistently reminded me of important concepts, which continue to inform my own work. For example, the project I describe in this paper makes use to some extent of central place theory, about which I learned while doing my Ph.D. minor in East Asian history but which I had not employed in my own work. For the annual meeting of the American Historical Association in 1999, I organized a session to examine critically Andre Gunder Frank's recent book ReORIENT, and David presented a brilliant paper on networks, which anticipated some of the exciting research now being done in several social sciences and which is the foundation of my current work. In this paper, I want to talk about an aspect of my work that appears to relate closely both to what I have learned from David over the years and to the theme of this research conference. The project I will discuss has grown out of my research on smuggling, for which I received consecutive fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. Thanks to this support, I am completing a book, now tentatively entitled The World of the Merchant-Smuggler in the First Global Age. It focuses on the Castilian activities of a geographically-extensive, sixteenth-century smuggling organization, which moved contraband over a variety of routes along the rugged border between Castile and Valencia, under the direction of Iberian and Italian merchants based in Cuenca, Genoa, Milan, Seville, Toledo, and Valencia. In this work, I expose this “shadow empire” (to use George Winius's phrase) on the basis of a special investigator’s reports from 1565, surviving trial records, and related documents from Spanish national, provincial, and municipal archives. Throughout my research for this project, I have been struck by how different the Castilian entrepreneurs were from the stereotypic view of them one often finds in general works about the economic history of the first global age, from the fifteenth to the early nineteenth century. I suppose that these views ultimately owe something to the so-called "Black Legend" about "Spain", which is really about the Crown of Castile, and to the use of elements of this Protestant propaganda by Spanish reformers in the late eighteenth century and during the Liberal constitutionalist era of the nineteenth. According to this group of perspectives, Castile's "culture" shaped the outlook of