Throughout early modern Europe, one of the most extraordinary royal fund-raising schemes was the seizure and sale of church property to finance foreign wars. The monarchs of Habsburg Spain extended these seizures to municipal property and used the revenue to maintain their empire. They sold charters of autonomy to hundreds of villages, thus converting them into towns, and sold towns to private buyers, thus increasing the number of seigniorial lords. In Hapsburg Spain, therefore, absolutism did not mean centralization. Rather, the kings invoked their absolute power to decentralize authority and allow their subjects a surprising degree of autonomy.

Signs of Power in Habsburg Spain and the New World consists of ten chapters that examine the representation of political, economic, military and symbolic power both in Spain and the New World under the Habsburgs.