The historical study of war in the Spain of Philip II forms the starting point for the articles in this volume. They approach this not so much from a military angle, but as a problem of organization, procurement and finance. In a sense, the articles represent an assessment of the effectiveness of the Spanish government and so, given the apparent precocity of government growth in 16th-century Spain, they can also be seen as a critical commentary on the operational capabilities of the early-modern absolutist state. Six of the essays here focus on the Spanish Armada, in terms of its political...

These studies present various aspects of a long-running enquiry into the development of government, the state and absolutism in early-modern Spain, distinctively based on thorough use of central and local manuscript sources. In the first section, five papers on government and institutions cover the Spanish Council of War under Philip II, the military-administrative bureaucracy of Habsburg Spain, an authoritative general history of Spanish government under Philip IV and the nature of Castilian absolutism, together with a detailed review paper on the legal process and sociology of law in...