This is a comprehensive long-run history of economic and political change in the Iberian Peninsula. Beginning with the development of the old medieval kingdoms, it goes on to explore two countries, Portugal and Spain, which during the early modern period possessed vast empires and played an essential role in the global economic and political developments. It traces how and why both countries began to fall behind during the first stages of industrialization and modern economic growth only to achieve remarkable economic development during the second half of the twentieth century. Written by a team of leading historians, the book sheds new light on all aspects of economic history from population, agriculture, manufacturing and international trade to government, finance and welfare. The book include extensive new data and will be an essential work of reference for scholars of Portugal and Spain and also of comparative European economic development.

Spain's development from a premodern society into a modern unified nation-state with an integrated economy was painfully slow and varied widely by region. Economic historians have long argued that high internal transportation costs limited domestic market integration, while at the same time the Castilian capital city of Madrid drew resources from surrounding Spanish regions as it pursued its quest for centralization. According to this view, powerful Madrid thwarted trade over large geographic distances by destroying an integrated network of manufacturing towns in the Spanish interior.

Challenging this long-held view, Regina Grafe argues that decentralization, not a strong and powerful Madrid, is to blame for Spain's slow march to modernity. Through a groundbreaking analysis of the market for "bacalao"--dried and salted codfish that was a transatlantic commodity and staple food during this period--Grafe shows how peripheral historic territories and powerful interior towns obstructed Spain's economic development through jurisdictional obstacles to trade, which exacerbated already high transport costs. She reveals how the early phases of globalization made these regions much more externally focused, and how coastal elites that were engaged in trade outside Spain sought to sustain their positions of power in relation to Madrid.

"Distant Tyranny" offers a needed reassessment of the haphazard and regionally diverse process of state formation and market integration in early modern Spain, showing how local and regional agency paradoxically led to legitimate governance but economic backwardness.