ABSTRACT
The expansion of commerce promoted economic diversification and regional specialization, highlighting the role of towns and cities as commercial centers. By the Renaissance era, such economic development had made much of Europe dependent on trade for even basic and necessary commodities. Difficult access to the two critical commodities of gold and spices posed a problem for the continued growth of the European economy. By the early seventeenth century, economic, political, and cultural developments had placed Europe at the center of a global economy. Social change had brought capitalism, Protestantism, literacy, and urbanization to many parts of Western Europe. Individualism, perhaps the most critical element of modernization, and the one that binds the rest together, was for the first time becoming a widely accepted social norm. Spain became a society with a few tremendously wealthy people, and a great mass of impoverished, unskilled, and illiterate peasants, while their towns and cities experienced high levels of unemployment.
