We can consider, quite rightly, that this book, while being the collective work of more than 70 authors, is overall the posthumous work of Pedro Lains, who sadly passed away on 16 May 2021. Pedro always expressed concern about southern Europe not being sufficiently represented in the analyses of the continent’s economic past. Therefore, he believed that the countries of the Iberian Peninsula shared sufficient common features so as to deserve a monograph, published in English, to address their trajectory and facilitate their integration in European economic history.

His efforts with this book were titanic. He designed the structure of a text that had to span from the Early Middle Ages to the present day. The perspective that he sought was not to analyse the Iberian territories separately but to integrate them in a common vision.