The aim of this essay is to analize the role of the Spanish American colonial market in the development of the Spanish industry during the second half of the XVIIIth century. Specially we discuss the traditional view wich emphasizes the importance of the colonial trade for die development of the modern cotton industry in Catalonia. With the support of new evidence furnished by recent research we conclude that the internal market was the engine of the Spanish industrialization.

Using the reconstructed royal treasury records for the three principal colonies of Spanish America from the last quarter of the 17th century to the first decade of the 19th century, this essay constructs the changing fortunes of royal income end expenditures in these crucial American economies. The viceroyalties of Peru and Mexico and the Audiencia of Charcas were the principal sources of surplus revenues in the American colonies. Until 1700 the two Andean regions domineted the Spanish American colonial system in terms of generating royal income and in producing silver for export to Europe. But these soon declined relative to Mexico, which in the 18th century become the dominent economy and major source of royal income. The various royal revenues and expenditures and their performance over time are analyzed for ell three colonies to determine the long term trends in their growth and relative importance.

Although only recently the positive performance of the landlords in the Spanish agricultural growth has been standed up, we know relatively little about the participation of the landed aristocraty in these changes. Through the analysis of the administation, the accounting, investments and strategies of some aristocratic families, the article emphasizes the slowness and very often failure of some transformations. The work shows that nor mental factors neither the scarcity of resources and opportunities explain these failures. Instead it is pointed out their incapacity in creating an efficient organization which could solve, at die same time, the problems of a scattered inheritance and the ambiguities of formal property rights.

The Land Tax, established in Spain in 1845, suffered from the lack of an efficient system of data collection concerning ownership and the use of land. The documents known as «amillaramientos» are unworthy of trust, not only due to their high level of concealment, but also as result of the fact that they were by nature the fruits of political negociations and not of statistical research. A detailed analysis of die province of Cádiz confirms this hypothesis. As a result, the study of the Spanish agricultural growth of the second half of the nineteenth century and die first third of the twentieth century must consider the coincidence between this time period and die growing improvement in the quality of the official information concerned with cultivated areas, productions and profits. The series so far used depart, from artificially low figures, distorted by the antifiscal efforts which dominated the Spanish rural world at the time.

Towards the year 1900, the Spanish countryside witnessed the emergence of an agricultural co-operative movement, formed by farmers of small or middle sized holdings. The importance of the economic activity thus generated is evaluated, whilst analysing some of the obstacles which prevented its development. The conclusion reached is, that despite the existence of some co-operative nuclei of great vitality, the Spanish agricultural co-operative movement during the first third of the 20th century, was characterised by decapitalisation and by a lack of consolidation. As a result, its capacity to introduce small scale farming was very limited.