Richard Kagan writes in his insightful article, "Prescott's Paradigm" that Spanish history is often overshadowed by historians' fixation on the "decline" of Spain. While some of the prejudice could originally be ascribed to anti-Catholicism and racism, most modern historians have managed to overcome the worst of these biases. However, there are still some historians who focus on Spain's perceived backwardness or decline, citing the cause of Spain's fall from a world power on an inept monarchy and a lack of innovation among merchants. In this paper, I will attempt to discover what the possible causes were for Spain's disappearance from the world scene.
             In his recent article, "Elite Self-Interest and Economic Decline in Early Modern Europe," Richard Lachmann uses his elite model to assess Spain's decline, claiming that Spain failed to advance because of a lack of a centralized state and a greedy merchant class. He writes, "The Spanish Empire failed to achieve economic dominance despite its geopolitical primacy because locally based elites in each Spanish province and colony limited the appropriation of fiscal or human resources by the central state or by a putative commercial elite." Lachmann's Elite Model focuses primarily on who controls the state and commercial resources, rather than on the resources themselves. He argues that the combined Habsburg and Catholic Church domination caused a failure when it came to economic growth: "The joint Habsburg-aristocratic domination of peasants, towns, and the Catholic Church retarded Spanish economic development." Lachmann's claim smacks of the same type of racist and anti-clerical scholarship that Kagan warned against. Can Spanish decline really be laid at the doorstep of the monarchy and the Catholic Church? Or are there larger forces at work that contributed to Spain's decline?
             The t...