Transportation and Economic Stagnation in Eighteenth-Century Castile

Since at least the seventeenth century the economic development of Spain has been limited because the rates of growth achieved in the peripheral areas of Catalonia, Valencia, and Vizcaya were greater than that of the interior under the old Crown of Castile. The stagnation of the Castilian interior not only created a dull market for manufactured goods, but conserved a persistently strong traditionalist faction which long hampered Spanish political development. The resulting tension between the interior and the more modern peripheral sectors of society dominates Spanish history of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.