During Miguel de Cervantes' lifetime, the Mediterranean World was suffering a transformation in the internal distribution of power, both political and economic. Although the Ottoman fleet was defeated, which established the limits of dominance between the two empires, this did not prevent the entry in this space of the new commercial powers from northern Europe, which changed the trade in the Mediterranean. This article tries to provide a synthesis of this process, of which Cervantes was a direct witness both in his personal life and through the works which have survived to our time.

Agradezco a la Revista de Historia Económica que me permita publicar esta réplica. Stefan Houpt me contesta con dos argumentos: a) los costes del arrabio vizcaíno dados por los ingenieros del Crédit Lyonnais son erróneos; b) los costes del lingote de Altos Homos de Vizcaya eran menores que los del también no fosforoso de dos fábricas británicas de la Dowlais Iron Company, lo que prueba la competitividad intemacional de la siderurgia vasca. Como no puedo extender-me por encima del folio, me limito a replicar de modo «telegráfico»:

La economía evolutiva ha experimentado en los últimos años un notable auge en el ámbito científico europeo, desarrollando una amplia panoplia de modelos y teorías destinadas a estudiar diversos aspectos de los procesos económicos. Aunque la economía evolutiva se caracteriza como tal por utilizar los modelos poblacionales de la biología evolutiva, adopta elementos cruciales de las obras de Schumpeter y Simon, lo que dota a su trabajo de una gran originalidad y profundidad analítica. La presente nota tiene por objeto examinar la estructura y alcance de esta escuela de pensamiento a través de sus referentes intelectuales, con el fin de evaluar el alcance de sus construcciones teóricas.

This paper analyses how the progressive autonomy of the capital used to arrange the treasure fleets from Seville to America derived in a real chartered company, a precedent of today's joint-stock company, when the Crown finally privatised it through the asientos de avería. The parallelism among the asientos and the companies were so noticeable that the public officers appointed by the Count-Duke of Olivares to study the foreign companies couldn't detect any difference between both institutions.

The constant state of war which dominated the reign of Philip II and part of Philip III'S exerted a growing fiscal demand both on Castile and the American Colonies. The American treasure which opened the doors to credit to finance these campaigns increased substantially over the 17th century. Never the less, the merchants, which controlled the extraction of precious metals and their shipments to the metropolis, established a highly lucrative trade with the Peru and the Philippines which created a constant drain of silver to the Far East. Based on the complaints filed by the Consulado de Sevilla about the competition of Chinese goods and the loss of American silver, the Monarch imposed heavy restrictions on the triangular trade in the Pacific. These restrictions created conflicts with the American viceroys who were interested in this trade and resulted in the generalization of smuggling.

This paper is divided into three parts. In the first one we identify the project that led the Spaniards to settle in the Far East in the last third of the sixteenth century. In the second, we analyse the resources that the Spanish Crown counted on in order to support the project. And, finally, the incentives that the latter generated to stimulate the installation in the islands of settlers that assured their continuity, at least until the last third of the eighteenth century, are also studied. The sources used are basically the accounts of the Philippine Treasury of the late sixteenth century and first half of the seventeenth century, the primitive ‘relaciones’ of the conquest (1575–1590) and the ‘crónicas’ of the early sixteenth century.

This article studies in a single conceptual framework the complex game performed by the different historical dynamics in the Taiwan insular area between 1624 –the time of the Dutch conquest of southwest Taiwan– and 1686 –the date of Taiwan's absorption into the Manchu Qing Empire, as a Fujian prefecture. It pays specific attention to the mercantile conflicts between Chinese Diaspora communities in concurrence with the Dutch and Iberians.