Constructing a Fiscal Military State in Eighteenth Century Spain

Historically, Spain has often been represented as a financial failure, a state limited by its absolutist monarchy and doomed to fiscal and financial failure without hope of lasting growth. The collapse of the Spanish state at the beginning of the nineteenth century would seem to bear out this view of the limitations of Spain's absolutist state, and this historical school of thought presents the eighteenth century as the last episode in a long history of decline that is directly linked to the fai