Spanish Cortes

The Spanish Cortes was an assembly that pressed for rights and a measure of control over the monarchy in a period when Spain, England, and France were all governed by relatively absolutist rulers. Its authority included a say over taxation, but it failed to secure the kind of lasting constraint on royal power that would help determine England’s different institutional path. The account uses that contrast to show how political bargaining, rather than rulers’ economic knowledge alone, shaped who could exercise power and who benefited from it.

The Cortes and royal authority

In 1588, Spain’s Philip II, England’s Elizabeth I, and France’s Henry II ruled as relatively absolutist monarchs, each facing an assembly demanding rights and greater control over the Crown. The Spanish Cortes and English Parliament both had power over taxation; the French Estates-General did not. These similarities made the differences between Spain and England appear modest, but the assemblies did not prevail equally in their struggles with their monarchs.

The Spanish Crown’s position was strengthened by its American empire. After 1492, the monarchy benefited greatly from the gold and silver obtained there, reducing its dependence on the Cortes for revenue. England’s circumstances differed: Elizabeth I was less financially independent and had to ask Parliament for taxes. Parliament used that leverage to demand concessions, especially restrictions on the monarch’s ability to create monopolies.

A conflict with different outcomes

The English Parliament gradually won its contest with the Crown over taxation and monopolies. In Spain, the Cortes lost a similar conflict. Trade was not merely monopolized; it was monopolized by the Spanish monarchy. The contrast concerns more than the formal powers of the assemblies: it shows how access to independent sources of revenue could affect the Crown’s need to bargain and the assembly’s ability to constrain it.

These political differences acquired greater importance as overseas commerce expanded after 1600, particularly across the Atlantic. English colonization began at Roanoke in 1585; the English East India Company was formed in 1600, Jamestown was founded by the Virginia Company in 1607, and Barbados was occupied in 1627. The book sets these developments against Spain’s more concentrated royal control of trade, arguing that the consequences of expanding commerce for institutions differed according to the political constraints already in place.

Institutional power and economic outcomes

The Cortes’s defeat forms part of a broader argument that economic policy cannot be explained simply by whether rulers knew which policies would promote growth. In the account of Ghana, Kwame Nkrumah’s economically irrational projects—including a footwear factory poorly sited in relation to its planned supply chain and market, and a mango cannery in a region that did not grow mangos—are attributed not to ignorance but to the political need to buy support and sustain an undemocratic regime. Likewise, Kofi Busia’s currency devaluation under an agreement with the International Monetary Fund provoked rioting in Accra and ended with his overthrow by the military. Such cases frame economic decisions as responses to political incentives and constraints.

The same focus on the distribution of power appears in the discussion of Mobutu’s Congo. Mobutu and his elite circle prospered while citizens were impoverished; the book argues that institutions capable of increasing national prosperity could also redistribute power in ways that made a predatory ruler worse off. Economic growth therefore has winners and losers, and established elites may resist changes that threaten their position. The Spanish Cortes’s failed struggle over royal authority belongs to this wider comparison: control over institutions determines not only the scale of wealth but also who can command it.

The contrast with pluralism and legal constraint

The later English comparison clarifies what was absent from the Spanish outcome. After 1688, authority shifted toward Parliament, whose members had interests in trade and industry and supported stronger protection for property rights. Parliament also gained control over government spending and backed a stronger navy to protect overseas commerce. Yet political participation remained sharply limited: less than two percent of the population could vote in the eighteenth century, and major industrial cities lacked independent representation.

The book distinguishes this imperfect pluralism and rule of law from systems in which law serves as a tool of power or can be evaded by the well-connected. It contrasts Mexico’s use of the amparo by Telmex to frustrate efforts to limit its monopoly with the stronger constraints imposed on elites in Britain after the Glorious Revolution. These comparisons reinforce the significance of the Spanish Cortes’s defeat: an assembly’s formal authority mattered, but its practical force depended on whether the political and economic institutions around it could constrain the Crown.