Internationalism No. 86, April 2026 Page 8 From the series Spain 1936 Spain, Marx observed in 1854 in the article Revolutionary Spain , was the first European feudal State to develop absolutism in its most unmitigated form , but political and fiscal centralisation never really took hold there. Similarly, it was Spanish caravels that opened up the era of the world market, and the Kingdom of Spain was the first great bourgeois maritime-trading empire. Yet that early and rapid rise ended up transforming itself from a favourable precondition for development into the cause of Spain's subsequent failure. In fact, the maritime overextension of the empire, combined with the failed political and fiscal centralisation of the Iberian heartland, resulted in stagnation and a subsequently inglorious and protracted putrefaction . While the economic and social arteries were becoming sclerotic, the State brain was moving away from European absolutism and t...