Antonio Domínguez Ortiz, a historian specialised in the Spain of the 16th, 17th and 18th centuries, writer and teacher during his long career, was born in Seville in 1909. He studied at university in his home town and did his doctorate in Madrid, in his own words "because in those days it was compulsory."

His future professional tendency is already evident when, under the supervision of Eloy Bullón, he wrote his PhD thesis on "Los manuscritos geográficos de la Biblioteca Nacional". Geography was one of his first fields of research, and geography was also one of the three university chairs for which he applied, although, for different reasons, he did not gain any of them, being a head of department in secondary education until his retirment, which took place at the start of the eighties. Perhaps for this reason, Dominguez Ortiz has been labelled as suffering from a promotion trauma which, as he has confessed, afflicts many Spanish students of his generation.

His first solid work on historical themes, apart from some articles and minor works, was "Orto y ocaso de Sevilla", published in 1947. From then on he tended towards historical studies, and although he continued doing some work of a mixed nature, from the nineteen-fifties he abandoned geography to specialise definitively in history and, within that, in the field of modern history.

Domínguez Ortiz stood out from the beginning for his patent and painstaking researches in Spain´s historical archives, in which he found socio-economic material which had, until then, been left to one side by a great many historians, as well as other subjects unrelated to conventional history, such as the question of ethnic cleansing or slavery in modern Spain.

In 1942 he moves to Granada as head of department in a high school, beginning a stage of accumulating historical material in the University Library of Granada. It was also at this time when he made contact with the Balmes Institute of Sociology, part of the Higher Council for Scientific Research (Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas), which was headed by Carmelo Viñas. Thanks to this man´s support, in 1952 he published his study of slavery, "Los judeoconversos", and later, in 1955, "La sociedad española del siglo XVIII".

At the end of the fifties, he began to receive proposals to cooperate in projects, among them, a commission from the Institute for Financial Studies to carry out research work on the Spanish "Hacienda" (Exchequer). It so happened that Domínguez Ortiz had spent various summers in the town of Simancas, working on records which were practically unexplored: those of "the Consejo y Juntas de Hacienda" (Exchequer), where, as has been said, lie the keys to the whole socio-economic history of modern Spain.

Dominguez Ortiz has probably brought us closer to Spanish society in the days of the Hapsburgs than anyone else, especially through works such as "Crisis y decadencia en la España de los Austrias" and "La España de los Austrias", published in the "Historia de España - Alfaguara" series, with which he has managed to capture the melting-pot that was Spain in those days, when the driving forces were social, religious and racial conflicts. For decades, he has researched unceasingly, to then explain these questions with the simplicity of a man whose whole life has been spent teaching.

Perhaps Domínguez Ortiz, Member of the Academy of History, doctor "honoris causa" of various universities - including the Complutense of Madrid and Barcelona - is the man wh has made the greatest contribution to our knowledge of Spain in the 16th, 17th and 18th centuries.