User:OldBookClub/Spanish Institutions of the Old Regime (1)
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The Spanish institutions of the Old Regime were the superstructure that, with some innovations, but above all through the adaptation and transformation of pre-existing political, social, and economic institutions and practices in the different Christian kingdoms of the Iberian Peninsula in the Late Middle Ages, presided over the historical period that roughly coincides with the Modern Age: from the Catholic Monarchs to the liberal Revolution (from the last third of the fifteenth century to the first of the nineteenth century) and which was characterized by the features of the Old Regime in Western Europe: a strong monarchy (authoritarian or absolute), a class society, and an economy in transition from feudalism to capitalism.
The dispersion, the multiplicity, and even the institutional collision are characteristics of the Old Regime, which makes the study of the history of institutions very complex. The very existence of the institutional unit of Spain is a problematic issue. In this historical period there were unitary institutions: outwardly, in the external perception of the Hispanic Monarchy, the person of the king and his military power; inwardly, the Inquisition. Others were common, like those of the estate society: nobility, clergy, and very different types of corporations were organized in a way not very different in each kingdom. A Catalan Cistercian monastery (Poblet) was interchangeable with another from Castile (Santa María de Huerta); a cattle rancher of the month of May, with another from the House of Saragossa; the aristocracy fused into a network of family alliances. But others were markedly differentiated: the courts or the treasury in the kingdoms of the Crown of Aragon had nothing to do with those of Castile and Leon. Even with the imposition of Bourbon absolutism, which reduced these differences, the Basque and Navarre provinces maintained their local privileges. The state and the nation begin forging, largely as a consequence of how the institutions responded to the economic and social dynamics, but they will not present themselves in their contemporary aspect until the Old Regime had ended.