Tracy also co-edited two volumes of state-of-the-question essays on Early Modern Europe, and published a textbook, Europe’s Reformations (1999), described as “a well-informed, critical, independent-minded, but essentially traditional view of the subject.”[9] Early modern wars were fought on borrowed money, but princes had terrible credit ratings.

[11] A Financial Revolution in the Habsburg Netherlands (1985) was said to have identified “a major development in European history that has somehow escaped all previous scholarly treatment.”[12] What Tracy calls “fiscal intermediation” took many forms.

[14] Prior to the 1980s, historians of the Dutch Revolt tended to pass over the preceding Habsburg era relatively quickly.

The Founding of the Dutch Republic (2008) argued that what held Spanish armies at bay in the difficult early years was that the States of Holland directed resources first and foremost to a successful defense of their own provincial border.

As director of Minnesota's Center for Early Modern History (CEMH), Tracy organized in 1987 a major research conference on “Merchant Empires.” He then edited one volume of substantial essays on long-distance trade in the early modern world and another on the characteristically European entanglement of state power and mercantile interest.

These volumes were well received: “To speak of these essays as attaining a high level would be faint praise; their quality is excellent.”[18] Subsequent CEMH conference volumes dealt with the global phenomenon of walled cities, and the relations between religion and the early modern state as seen from China, Russia, and Great Britain.

Historians pay little attention to conflicts during the sixteenth century, and virtually ignore the southern or Croatian sector of the frontier.

[19] Balkan Wars (2016) traces the connected histories of three adjoining provinces that shared the same language and culture but were divided among rival empires: Habsburg Croatia, Ottoman Bosnia, and Venetian Dalmatia.

Tracy does not read Turkish or Hungarian; he uses published sources in other languages and unpublished diplomatic correspondence to “break ground in a field as yet little cultivated.”[20] Several essays deal with the Hungarian sector of the frontier and propose a modified version of Samuel Huntington’s “clash of civilizations” thesis.

A Financial Revolution in the Habsburg Netherlands: Renten and Renteniers in the County of Holland, 1515–1565 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985, 276 pp.).

Holland under Habsburg Rule: The Formation of a Body Politic (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990, 332 pp.).

The Low Countries in the Sixteenth Century: Erasmus, Religion, Politics, Trade and Finance (Ashgate/Variorum, 2005), Fourteen essays from 1968 to 2000).

Edition, translation, and introduction, True Ocean Found: Paludanus’ Letters on Dutch Voyages to the Kara Sea, 1595/1596 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1980, 77 pp.).

Balkan Wars: Habsburg Croatia, Ottoman Bosnia, and Venetian Dalmatia (Lanham, Md: Rowman & Littlefield, 2016, 456 pp.).