Elvira Vilches. New World Gold: Cultural Anxiety and Monetary Disorder in Early Modern Spain. Elvira Vilches. New World Gold: Cultural Anxiety and Monetary Disorder in Early Modern Spain. New World Gold: Cultural Anxiety and Monetary Disorder in Early Modern Spain by Elvira Vilches Review by: J. H. Elliott The American Historical Review, Vol. 116, No. 4 (October 2011), p. 1200 Published by: The University of Chicago Press on behalf of the American Historical Association Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/ahr.116.4.1200 . Accessed: 19/11/2011 17:11 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at . http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org. The University of Chicago Press and American Historical Association are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to The American Historical Review. http://www.jstor.org http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=ucpress http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=aha http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/ahr.116.4.1200?origin=JSTOR-pdf http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp ELVIRA VILCHES. New World Gold: Cultural Anxiety and Monetary Disorder in Early Modern Spain. Chicago: Uni- versity of Chicago Press. 2010. Pp. xi, 361. $45.00. Elvira Vilches’s study of early modern Spanish eco- nomic theory and practice could hardly have been pub- lished at a more opportune moment. At a time when markets are in turmoil, and when the astronomical profits and bonuses enjoyed by bankers have aroused widespread suspicion, it is salutary to look back to a by no means incomparable situation in sixteenth and sev- enteenth-century Spain. This book explores with acu- men the responses of a society gripped by anxiety over the machinations of financiers. Vilches’s study is essentially of a society—primarily that of Castile—that was still imbued, like other Eu- ropean societies of the fifteenth and sixteenth centu- ries, with medieval ideals of a moral economy based on notions of a just price, but that found itself having to come to terms with the growing sophistication of bank- ing and the development of complex credit instruments like letters of exchange. The first trickle of American gold into Europe came with Christopher Columbus and was followed by a massive influx of both gold and silver that destabilized prices and helped provoke an inflation that contemporaries struggled to explain. Vilches be- gins by examining Columbus’s attitude toward gold and what she calls his “economy of the marvellous.” Then she goes on to explore “the new world of money” and the question of debt by means of a close reading of con- temporary texts, some of them the expressions of the neo-scholastic thought of the famous School of Sala- manca, and others by writers with practical experience of the money markets. Finally, moving into the seven- teenth century, she explores the links made both in imaginative literature and in the writings of the eco- nomic projectors, the so-called arbitristas, between Spanish decline and the gold and silver of the Indies. The story is by no means a new one. Spanish eco- nomic historians have done an enormous amount over the past few decades to illuminate not only the causes and consequences of the sixteenth-century price rise but also the workings of crown finance and the oper- ation of the fairs of exchange, like that of Medina del Campo. Many of the texts discussed by Vilches have been previously explored by Marjorie Grice-Hutchin- son (1952), but Vilches examines them in greater detail and goes beyond Grice-Hutchinson in discussing the work of writers with a close knowledge of contemporary business practice, notably Cristóbal de Villalón. The ar- bitristas, too, have received a great deal of attention in recent years, as has the equation made by contempo- raries between the influx of precious metals from Amer- ica and the decline of Spain. Vilches, however, retells the story well, and her book will be particularly welcomed by those readers who want a reliable and up-to-date account of early modern Spanish economic theory and practice but are unable to consult literature available in Spanish. It is perhaps un- fortunate that she places so much emphasis on gold at the expense of silver, not only in the title of her book but also in the body of the text. While it is true that gold remained the supreme metal and index of wealth, read- ers may not fully appreciate that from the middle years of the sixteenth century onward the influx of silver into Seville far outpaced that of gold, both in volume and in value. More unfortunate is the misdating of one of the authors she discusses. Francisco Martı́nez de la Mata wrote between 1650 and 1660 and does not belong to the group of early seventeenth-century writers among whom she places him. This is an ambitious book, in that it attempts to link a close reading of Spanish economic theory with the imaginative literature of the period. Vilches produces a picture of a society beleaguered by cultural and in- tellectual anxiety over what was happening to its tra- ditional values. Some readers may feel that the author tends, at times, to overinterpret her texts, and her book would have benefited from a deeper knowledge of both the general and the specific historical context of the works she discusses. Anxiety about credit and prices was not confined to sixteenth-century Spain, and the obsession with precious metals needs to be closely re- lated to problems of state expenditure as well as to the practices of money markets. Distinguished, however, by its impressive analytical grasp, this book provides valu- able insights into a world with disturbing parallels to our own. J. H. ELLIOTT Oriel College, University of Oxford DAVID GONZÁLEZ CRUZ. Propaganda e información en tiempos de guerra: España y América (1700–1714). (Sı́lex Universidad.) Madrid: Sı́lex. 2009. Pp. 304. $21.00. In this engaging book, David González Cruz brings to- gether two subfields seldom brought into conversation, at least in the historiography of early modern Spain. He seeks to merge perspectives and methods from military and cultural history in order to shed fresh light on the War of Spanish Succession. He focuses on the role of propaganda, though the book is at its most innovative in its discussion of techniques of misinformation, modes of censorship, and the painstaking construction of the public image of the two protagonists in the con- flict: Carlos of Austria and Philip V. The breadth and depth of González Cruz’s research is impressive. Be- sides consulting myriad collections in Spain, he has ob- tained valuable material from the archives of France, Argentina, Portugal, Mexico, Peru, and Bolivia. Such archival range proves indispensable to González Cruz’s story, for he seeks to portray the War of Spanish Suc- cession as a global conflict whose repercussions for the Spanish Atlantic monarchy were varied and multifari- ous. He largely succeeds in using the methods of cul- tural, social, and intellectual history to reconstruct a se- ries of episodes and practices neglected by traditional military historians. The book concerns propaganda only in the broadest, 1200 Reviews of Books AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW OCTOBER 2011