opposition turned violent and quickly became known as the
Comunero Rebellion. Charles was able to crush the
rebellion with loyal troops. Throughout the rest of the
sixteenth century, though, there was a continuous battle as
the Crown tried to wrest away from the Cortes what rights
to levy new taxes and increase old ones that it had. Though
this battle ebbed and flowed, it was ultimately won by the
monarchy. After 1664 the Cortes did not meet again until it
would be reconstructed during the Napoleonic invasions
almost 150 years later.
In England the defeat of absolutism in 1688 led not only
to pluralistic political institutions but also to the further
development of a much more effective centralized state. In
Spain the opposite happened as absolutism triumphed.
Though the monarchy emasculated the Cortes and
removed any potential constraints on its behavior, it
became increasingly difficult to raise taxes, even when
attempted by direct negotiations with individual cities.
While the English state was creating a modern, efficient tax
bureaucracy, the Spanish state was again moving in the
opposite direction. The monarchy was not only failing to
create secure property rights for entrepreneurs and
monopolizing trade, but it was also selling offices, often
making them hereditary, indulging in tax farming, and even
selling immunity from justice.
The consequences of these extractive political and
economic institutions in Spain were predictable. During the
seventeenth century, while England was moving toward
commercial growth and then rapid industrialization, Spain
was tailspinning toward widespread economic decline. At
the start of the century, one in five people in Spain was
living in urban areas. By the end, this figure had halved to
one in ten, in a process that corresponded to increasing
impoverishment of the Spanish population. Spanish
incomes fell, while England grew rich.
The persistence and the strengthening of absolutism in
Spain, while it was being uprooted in England, is another
example of small differences mattering during critical
junctures. The small differences were in the strengths and
nature of representative institutions; the critical juncture was
the discovery of the Americas. The interaction of these sent
Spain off on a very different institutional path from England.