This article examines the idea of nobility in the Iberian Peninsula and overseas. Using the historiographical balance, it analyses the social mobility of various groups, but particularly of traders and miners who resorted to its assets to serve the monarchy, to purchase nobility titles and habits of the military orders. The study emphasizes regional particularities, but highlights how wealth has become a powerful engine for the ennoblement of commoners in the societies of the Old Regime eighteenth century.
Nobility; wealth; Iberian societies; traders