Introduction

‘’TIS vain to look for birds in last year’s nests,’ said Don Quixote. And many economists would feel inclined to agree with him. We have often been warned against the sin of reading our own ideas into the work of older writers—so often, in fact, that earlier economic literature now seems remote from our own ways of thought and no longer holds much interest for us. In any case, the history of doctrine has generally been looked upon as a luxury in this country, and the refinements of modern theory leave less time for it than ever.

Still, there are certain milestones in the history of economic thought which are familiar to most students. We know, for instance, that Saxony was the scene of a famous monetary controversy in the sixteenth century. We know that Italy was the country with ‘the best monetary theory and the worst monetary policy’ in the seventeenth. We know that the Physiocrats invented an elaborate diagram called the ‘Tableau économique’. And we are justly proud of our own Adam Smith and Ricardo.

But there is one important country that has failed to provide us with a single famous name. Perhaps because Spanish is less widely studied than French or Italian, or perhaps because economics and Spanish studies just do not seem to go together, Spain is usually omitted from our list. Yet Spanish economic literature, particularly of the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries, is so extensive and interesting that it would take a whole series of monographs to do it justice. Let us therefore disregard Don Quixote’s advice and look into some of these old nests in Spain. Perhaps, after all, we may still find a bird or two in them.

We will begin by transporting ourselves in imagination to the plains of Castile. It is early autumn, somewhere about the year 1550, and we are travelling northwest from Madrid, towards the Portuguese frontier. This is the time of year when the universities reopen their doors, and we are bound to meet with more than one party of students on their way to Salamanca. They are of all ranks and conditions: young noblemen with their own coaches and retinues of servants, sons of humbler families mounted on horses or mules, and penniless youths who travel in the train of the richer students or beg their way on foot. There are many friars, notably of the Dominican and Augustinian Orders, and there are English and Irish seminarists on their way to the newly established Irish College. The students come from every part of Spain, and there are a fair number from France and Italy.

At the inn, when the long day’s journey is done, the talk will be of Salamanca. The students, I fear, will waste few words in praise of the exquisite Plateresque facade of the University with its proud motto: ‘Kings for universities, universities for kings.’ They will be more likely to describe the traditional evening ritual of the Plaza Mayor, where at twilight the whole population turns out for a stroll round the colonnade, the men revolving in one direction and the women in the other, while the two processions exchange critical glances and the great square reverberates with a thousand voices, like a gigantic sounding-board. Or they will dilate upon the splendid fishing they hope to enjoy from the willow-clad banks of the Tormes, not to mention the array of less innocent pleasures the town has to offer. The professors, too, come in for their share of comment. The Spanish universities are at the height of their glory, and Salamanca is queen among them all. The seventy chairs of the University are filled by the best scholars of the age and provide instruction not only in the usual subjects of a curriculum inherited from the Middle Ages—theology, canon and civil law, grammar, rhetoric, philosophy, and medicine—but also in more out-of-the-way branches of knowledge such as herbal lore, navigation, and Chaldee. Francisco de Vitoria, to whose reforms the University owes much of its fame, is now only a memory, but his colleagues and pupils have brought his work to maturity. The members of this group—the School of Salamanca, as it is generally called—are celebrated chiefly for their work in the field of natural law. Their contribution to the Law of Nations is of particular interest to their audiences, since it has fallen to the theologians and jurists of Salamanca to adjust in the light of Christian doctrine the confused relationship that has arisen between the Spanish Crown and the newly conquered peoples of America. The rights and wrongs of the difficult problems involved and the conflicting opinions of the various lecturers may well be touched upon by the students as they sit chatting together after supper at the inn.

Sitting a little apart from the noisy group of young people is a party of older men. They are merchants on their way to the autumn fair of Medina del Campo. Their conversation is of a very different order from that of the students. The long overdue arrival of the treasure fleet from the New World, the high price of wool and linen, the losses occasioned by the failure of some Seville banker, and, above all, the unaccountable reluctance of the Church to relax her outworn prohibition of usury, are the topics that form the thread of their discourse.

The students will be well advised to listen in a little to the merchants’ conversation, for when they get to Salamanca they will hear these very subjects discussed in the lecture-room. The problems of commercial morality that have sprung up in the wake of American gold and silver are receiving nearly as much attention as those of international justice occasioned by the conquest itself. The traditional doctrine of usury is in process of modification. In particular, considerable progress is being made in monetary theory, and it is rumoured that this may soon lead to the lifting of the Church’s ban on certain types of exchange transactions. Merchants and students, therefore, have more to learn from each other than is apparent at first sight. Let us see if we can persuade the merchants to tell us something about their business so that we may be better prepared for the sort of problems we shall be asked to consider when we enter the University of Salamanca.