Bullionism, Specie-Point Mechanism and Bullion Flows in the Early 18Th-Century Europe
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Bullionism, Specie-Point Mechanism and Bullion Flows in the Early 18th-century Europe Pilar Nogués Marco ADVERTIMENT. La consulta d’aquesta tesi queda condicionada a l’acceptació de les següents condicions d'ús: La difusió d’aquesta tesi per mitjà del servei TDX (www.tesisenxarxa.net) ha estat autoritzada pels titulars dels drets de propietat intel·lectual únicament per a usos privats emmarcats en activitats d’investigació i docència. No s’autoritza la seva reproducció amb finalitats de lucre ni la seva difusió i posada a disposició des d’un lloc aliè al servei TDX. No s’autoritza la presentació del seu contingut en una finestra o marc aliè a TDX (framing). Aquesta reserva de drets afecta tant al resum de presentació de la tesi com als seus continguts. En la utilització o cita de parts de la tesi és obligat indicar el nom de la persona autora. ADVERTENCIA. 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Institut d’Etudes Politiques de Paris ECOLE DOCTORALE DE SCIENCES PO (Co-supervision with the University of Barcelona) Doctoral Program in International Finance Chaire de Finances Internationales Ph.D. in Economic Sciences BULLIONISM, SPECIE-POINT MECHANISM AND BULLION FLOWS IN THE EARLY 18TH CENTURY EUROPE Pilar NOGUES-MARCO Thesis supervised by: Marc FLANDREAU, Professeur des Universités Paris, 22 January 2010 Members of the jury: Albert CARRERAS, Professor at the Pompeu Fabra University, Barcelona (president) Marc FLANDREAU, Professor at the Graduate Institute, Geneva and detached Professor at the Institut d’Etudes Politiques, Paris (supervisor) Larry NEAL, Professor at the University of Illinois and Visiting Professor at the London School of Economics (referee) Carles SUDRIÀ, Professor at the University of Barcelona (co-supervisor) Nathan SUSSMAN, Professor at the Hebrew University, Jerusalem (referee) Referee for the European Mention at the University of Barcelona: Vincent BIGNON, Associate Professor at the University of Paris 10 (referee) I am very grateful to Marc Flandreau for supervising the dissertation, to the referees for their reports and to the members of the jury for accepting to be part of the jury. 1 BULLIONISM, SPECIE-POINT MECHANISM AND BULLION FLOWS IN THE EARLY 18TH CENTURY EUROPE ABSTRACT The market requires that exchanges are voluntary and the law may restrict the workings of a given market. This is the case with Castile bullionist regulations, which led to an illegal bullion market in Early Modern Cadiz. This paper focuses on the structure of this illegal bullion market in order to understand the logic of silver outflows. Arbitrage is explained by the presence of an oligopsony power that depressed the price of silver in Cadiz and created a systematic bias between domestic and international market prices. The lesson that emerges from this paper is that understanding the specie-flow mechanism in the Early Modern Period demands the comprehension of the bullion market structure for the place and time examined. Sea smuggling: 18th-century glazed tile piece of pottery from Valencia, in Heros Fernández, J. A. (1989): Discursos sobre el comercio, BBV & Espasa Calpe, Madrid, p. 356 bis. 2 PREFACE AND ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I consider a dissertation as the result of a process of intellectual maturity and, in this sense, I have tried to present it as a finished product. To that purpose, I have tried to present a well defined question and answer it in a very straight way. I hope to have been able to transmit a simple and clear thesis. However, in fact, for me making this thesis has not been a straight, simple or clear process. On the contrary, as any intellectual venture, it has been a long and tortuous way. Many doubts and ideas have emerged during the process, which has taken five years of research work, over my previous economic history background. My interest in monetary history awoke long time ago, while studying commodity-money during my Economic History PhD courses at the University of Barcelona. I was fascinated by that topic from a conceptual point of view, and commodity-money turned into an intellectual challenge for me. Despite my interest, my early research, during the pre-dissertation period, was focused on related subjects, but not directly on commodity-money. Concretely, I started researching on prices and finance. On the one hand, my Master’s dissertation, on consumer prices, gave me the opportunity to get involved in the construction of historical databases. Since my Bachelor’s degree was in Economics, that was a useful experience for the subsequent PhD dissertation, because it taught me to deal with primary sources. Additionally, on the other hand, I also had the opportunity to get involved in financial history, thanks to the Group of Financial History of the Departament d’Història i Institucions Econòmiques of the University of Barcelona. I am grateful to Yolanda Blasco, Lluis Castañeda, Pere Pascual, Marc Prat and Carles Sudrià, members of that group, for the 3 time that we shared and the exchange of ideas that we held during that period. I am especially grateful to Yolanda, with whom I had the pleasure to share a research project on the Bank of Barcelona. I hope that we will soon conclude our “trilogy”, with the paper on “insider lending”. Papers and conferences on both prices and finance gave me enough experience as to decide to start the dissertation process. I was still seduced by the topic of commodity-money but I was not getting answers to my questions from my readings. For that reason, I decided to convert commodity-money into my research subject. Step by step, I tried to define my concrete topic of analysis, paying attention to the Spanish case. As my previous research had focused on the early 19th century, I was at first interested in the Spanish monetary adjustment after the independence of the American colonies. However, I soon understood the difficulty to focus on this question, as the Spanish monetary system during the colonial period had not been well understood yet. Spain was an exceptional monetary case in the Early Modern period, since it was the main country of origin of the precious metal. While the historiography had long focused on bullion flows from the American colonies to Europe and Asia through Castile, the logic which governed those flows was not well known. In order to analyse such a complex topic, I looked for the intellectual support of one of the main specialist on arbitrage, Marc Flandreau. I am grateful to Carles Sudrià for having encouraged me to move from Barcelona to Paris to work with him, and I am most grateful to Marc for having accepted to supervise my dissertation. 4 Marc Flandreau offered me the perfect intellectual framework for my research through the Chaire Finances Internationales in Sciences-Po. I am very grateful to the colleagues and professors who welcomed me to the Chaire in October 2004, and with whom I had the privilege to share three years of research work: Olivier Accominotti, Vincent Bignon, Béatrice Dedinger, Norbert Gaillard, Clemens Jobst, Riad Rezzik, Stefano Ugolini, Camila Vam Malle and Frédéric Zumer. I am especially grateful to my office-mate Riad for his moral support, and to Camila, with whom I had the pleasure to write the paper on “India bonds”, and who taught me how to write a good paper in an efficient and pragmatic way. I am also very grateful to Marie-Annick Payen and Linda Armani for their administrative support, which was so helpful for me to deal with the French bureaucratic system. And I am also grateful to Cristina, with whom I had the pleasure to share my flat in Paris. My dissertation has been carried out (successfully, I hope!) thanks to Marc’s rigour and perseverance. From our first meeting and during three years he focused on the importance of keeping the topic into the specie-point mechanism framework and, therefore, on the need to connect the right variables: exchange rates and bullion market prices. However, this task was really hard to undertake, because market prices were not available for Castile in the Early Modern period. Being Castile a bullionist realm, bullion market was forbidden and no evidence on market prices was available in the Spanish sources. I unsuccessfully looked for traces of the market in many Spanish archives (starting in the 19th century and moving back to the 16th century): Archivo Central del Ministerio de Hacienda (Madrid), Biblioteca de la Bolsa de Madrid (Madrid), Archivo Histórico del Banco de España (Madrid), Biblioteca Nacional de 5 España (Madrid), Archivo General de la Administración (Alcalá de Henares), Archivo Histórico Nacional (Madrid), Hemeroteca Municipal (Madrid), Archivo de la Casa de la Moneda (Madrid), Archivo de la Corona de Aragón (Barcelona), Biblioteca de Catalunya (Barcelona), Arxiu Municipal de Barcelona (Barcelona) and Archivo General de Indias (Sevilla).