Silver, Trade and War: Spain and America in the Making of Early Modern Europe.(Review)

Silver, Trade and War: Spain and America in the Making of Early Modern Europe, by Stanley J. Stein and Barbara H. Stein (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins U.P., 2000; pp. 351. $60).

`It is time', write Stanley and Barbara Stein in the Conclusion to their book, `to reconsider the evolution of the Atlantic economy from the Spanish and Spanish colonial vantage point and to examine the major elements of the legacy of the two-centuries-old Habsburg dynasty and their projection in Spain's early Bourbon era'. Silver, Trade and War is a substantial, if somewhat disconcerting, contribution to this process of reconsideration. Based on a wide range of contemporary manuscript and printed …