The Spanish institutions of the Old Regime were the superstructure that, with some innovations, but above all through the adaptation and transformation of pre-existing political, social, and economic institutions and practices in the different Christian kingdoms of the Iberian Peninsula in the Late Middle Ages, presided over the historical period that roughly coincides with the Modern Age: from the Catholic Monarchs to the liberal Revolution (from the last third of the fifteenth century to the first of the nineteenth century) and which was characterized by the features of the Old Regime in Western Europe: a strong monarchy (authoritarian or absolute), a class society, and an economy in transition from feudalism to capitalism.
The dispersion, the multiplicity, and even the institutional collision are characteristics of the Old Regime, which makes the study of the history of institutions very complex. The very existence of the institutional unit of Spain is a problematic issue. In this historical period there were unitary institutions: outwardly, in the external perception of the Hispanic Monarchy, the person of the king and his military power; inwardly, the Inquisition. Others were common, like those of the estate society: nobility, clergy, and very different types of corporations were organized in a way not very different in each kingdom. A Catalan Cistercian monastery (Poblet) was interchangeable with another from Castile (Santa María de Huerta); a cattle rancher of the month of May, with another from the House of Saragossa; the aristocracy fused into a network of family alliances. But others were markedly differentiated: the courts or the treasury in the kingdoms of the Crown of Aragon had nothing to do with those of Castile and Leon. Even with the imposition of Bourbon absolutism, which reduced these differences, the Basque and Navarre provinces maintained their local privileges. The state and the nation begin forging, largely as a consequence of how the institutions responded to the economic and social dynamics, but they will not present themselves in their contemporary aspect until the Old Regime had ended.
Society in the Spain of the Old Regime edit
The society of modern Spain (in the sense of the Modern Age or of the Old Regime) was a framework of communities of diverse nature, to which individuals were ascribed by ties of belonging: territorial communities in the style of the house or the people; intermediate communities such as the manor and the cities and their land (alfoz or community of villa and land, to a very different extent); political communities or broad jurisdictions such as provinces, adelantados, veguerías, intendencias or kingdoms and crowns; professional communities such as craft guilds, fishermen's confraternities, or universities; religious communities; etc.
The kingdom was contemplated with an organicist analogy, as a body headed by the king, with its supremacy, with the different communities and orders that formed it as organs, joints, and limbs. Men and women were linked by personal ties, such as family ties and kinship. Each link had common rules that were to govern its operation and experience. In the Old Regime the communities were hierarchical, every body had its authority, with links of integration and subordination. But each link had an ambivalent value, of power and paternalism: they had to guarantee the survival of the individuals while maintaining social relations of subordination. What in the contemporary world are understood as civil services were in the hands of individuals, whether they be houses, lordships or domains of the king, one territory having total autonomy from another. The very concept of individual was meaningless, since there was no effective differentiation between public and private in pre-industrial society.