Amazon.com description: Product Description: As Duke University's website for the "Earl J. Hamilton Papers on the Economic History of Spain, 1351-1830″ so aptly states: Hamilton "helped to pioneer the field of quantitative economic history during a career that spanned 50 years." Certainly his most important publication in this field is the 1934 monograph that is the subject of this "classic review." It provided the first set of concrete, reliable annual data on both the imports of gold and silver bullion from Spain's American colonies ? principally from what is now Bolivia (Vice Royalty of Peru) and Mexico (New Spain) ? from 1503 to 1660 (when bullion registration and thus the accounts cease); and on prices (including wages) in Spain (Old and New Castile, Andalusia, Valencia), for the 150 year period from 1501 to 1650. His object was to validate the Quantity Theory of Money: in seeking to demonstrate that the influx of American silver was chiefly, if not entirely, responsible for the inflation of much of the Price Revolution era, from ca. 1520 to ca. 1650: but, principally only for the specific period of ca. 1540 to ca. 1600. Many economic historians (myself included, regrettably) have misunderstood Hamilton on this point, concerning both the origins and conclusion of the Price Revolution. Of course the Quantity Theory of Money, even in its more refined modern guise, is no longer a fashionable tool in economic history; and thus only a minority of us today espouse a basically monetary explanation for the European Price Revolution (ca. 1515/20-1650) ? though no such explanation can be purely monetary.