This work offers a new vision of the agrarian reformism carried out by the Government during the Restauración. This revision focusses on die study of the contributions of Rafael Gasset, die everlasting minister of Fomento during the Restauración —a duty he occupied nine times between 1900 and 1923— to the solution of so called agrarian question in the historical period which started in the critical moment of 98 and finished with the liquidation of die turno de partidos system in September 1923. The analysis looks at the reasons of die failure of the hydraulic agrarian policy during die years of die Canovite system —in our opinion essentially political—, as well as to the reasons that explain its historical continuity and success during die dictatorships of Primo de Rivera and Franco; it also serves to establish some hypothesis which allow us to understand better the nature of these historical regimes.

The 1976/1977 crisis was the most severe in Spanish history, but the losses associated with the 2008 crisis are huge. This paper compares these two great banking crises and identifies the main parallels and differences between them. Is the current crisis as severe as that of 1976? What is the impact on the banking and financial sectors? We show that the 1976 crisis is being surpassed by the 2008 crisis in terms of the decline in GDP, industrial production and unemployment, and that these two events have had at least a similar impact in terms of output gap and output loss. Finally, the financial impact measured by different financial indicators confirms the greater severity of the 2008 crisis.

The few works which talk about the transition from sail to steam in the Spanish merchant marine, analyze it in terms of decadence and failure. But these impressions do not pair with an analysis of the Spanish fleet from an international perspective: it was among the pionneers, together with Great Britain, to complete the technological modernization of its ships. The objective of this paper is to describe and explain the process of technical diffusion, the changes in the institutional framework, and the business strategy of Spanish shipowners in this context.

El estudio de la economía española del siglo xix, según Jordi Nadal, ha de partir del supuesto de que el capital doméstico era escaso (2). No obstante, cuando se preguntó a James Rothschild, primer banquero de la época, en el otoño de 1865 sobre los préstamos extranjeros a España, contestó que cinco sextas partes de los empréstitos gestionados en el exterior habían ya vuelto a España (3). Ambas afirmaciones no son necesariamente incompatibles; pero la deducción es clara. Rothschild, cualquiera que fuera su opinión sobre la influencia de los financieros extranjeros en España, tendía a no valorar en exceso la cantidad real de la inversión extranjera en España.

The Spanish pattern of economic growth during the last two centuries is quite unique. In the nineteenth century the country remained outside the process of industrialization, but during the twentieth century he has joined the small group of developed economies. This article tests the existence of discontinuities between 1850–1936 in the series of PNB, industrial production and private and public investment by utilizing recent developments in the econometric analysis associated with the work of Perron and Zivot and Andrews. The results confirm the continuity of the Spanish growth during the decades considered. However, they also show two breakpoint years: 1870 in the serie of industrial production and 1919 in the data of public investment.

There has been a lot of research into the economic contribution of the periphery to European economic development during the early modern era. This paper estimates quantitatively the value added in the sugar trade from the Caribbean to Britain in the 18th century. The trade generated a value equivalent to around 1 per cent of British gross domestic product (GDP) by the early 18th century, growing to 4 per cent of GDP a century later. The results show that the sugar trade constituted a dynamic and rapidly growing part of the British economy, most importantly the tertiary sector.

Desde hace ya años la economía española en la época de la Restauración borbónica está siendo un objeto de interés preferente entre los investigadores. Como cabia esperar —desde la optimista actitud del creyente en el progreso intelectual—, una concentración de esfuerzos semejante ha acabado por producir una cierta convergencia en los juicios sobre el período.

The article analyses the development of the coffee export business of the British company Edward Johnston & Co. in the years 1840-1880. Established in 1842 in the city of Rio de Janeiro, the firm's senior partner was the English merchant Edward Johnston. The departure of partners and the crisis of 1847 made Edward Johnston reorganise the firm in Brazil. In the 1850s, the company established itself as a family business based in Liverpool and then in London in the 1860s. The expansion of the coffee market in the United States made Edward Johnston create a network of firms which consolidated the company as a major exporter of Brazilian coffee by the late 1870s.

El tema de la industrialización empezó a tener vida propia en la historiografía a partir del ensayo de Toynbee sobre la revolución industrial. Su interpretación sugería una repentina transformación de la economía inglesa en 1760. Desde 1884, una pléyade de autores se han encargado de ir ampliando aquel enfoque. Más que describir un proceso, que pronto se dio por supuesto, los objetivos se centraron en la búsqueda de las causas de la revolución industrial y en la determinación de su cronología inicial.

The telegraph has been of great importance in the development of commerce, both as a technical support of railways and as a means of accelerating the transmission of information and of cutting transaction costs in the firms. This article places the Spanish case, seldom considered by the literature, in a European context. It outlines the economic and institutional factors which affected the first Spanish telegraphic system. Unlike what happened with the railways and the telephone, the telegraph was state constructed and owned. For different reasons, Spain lagged behind other European countries in the evolution of the telegraphic service.

Al abordar el tema del precio de la tierra hay dos tipos de preocupaciones —de índole teórica y metodológica— que merecen ser afrontadas de entrada. Respecto a las primeras, un criterio excesivamente rígido de lo que se entiende por mercancía nos situaría frente a la paradoja de un bien que genera un precio, pero que carece de valor al no ser un producto específico del trabajo humano. Sin embargo, si aceptamos llamar mercancía a aquello que es comprado y vendido (y, por tanto, circula) en unas relaciones capitalistas de producción y distribución, no deberíamos tener reparos al hablar de precio de la tierra: igual que se compra la fuerza de trabajo, también se adquiere en el mercado este mediode producción que es la tierra.

The historiography on Campomanes, in particular that referring to his writings on factory matters, has established a cliché of their anti-capitalistic or anti-industrial character. This appraisal, which can be traced back to a biased interpretation of his Discurso sobre el fomento de la industria popular, has secluded both the remaining doctrinal contributions on industry made by this author and the achievements of his proposed industrial policy. A more careful reading of his industrialist writings, adequately placed within their historical context, will no doubt contribute to discard platitudes and to rehabilitate one of the leading intellectuals of Spanish economy during the 18th century.

El proceso desamortizador permitió una reestructuración capitalista del campo español al remover todo el sistema de relaciones de producción propias del Antiguo Régimen en favor de la propiedad burguesa de la tierra. Era un paso necesario para que el modo de producción capitalista pudiese desarrollarse con plenitud en España.

El propósito de este pequeño ensayo es replantear la discusión sobre la existencia o inexistencia de una auténtica depresión agraria en la Castilla del Seiscientos y, en su caso, sobre el alcance y los factores determinantes de aquélla.

Hasta hace pocos años, independientemente del grado de fundamentación de los juicios, podía hablarse de unanimidad, o casi completa unanimidad, en las caracterizaciones de los especialistas acerca de la evolución de la economía española durante el siglo xvii: más aliá de matizaciones espaciales, temporales o sectoriales, todos reconocían la existencia de una crisis generalizada y prolongada en la España de los Austrias menores. Dos artículos de Gonzalo Anes, publicados en 1978, han puesto en cuestión ese balance de la actividad productiva de nuestro Seiscientos que había sido, hasta entonces, suscrito por la inmensa mayoría de historiadores y economistas. Los textos de Anes abrían una importante polémica e incitaban a nuevas reflexiones e investigaciones sobre la trayectoria de la economía española en el siglo XVII. Quiero reiterar que mis consideraciones se circunscribirán al sector agrario castellano.

Through the case of one family from the regional nobility, this paper examines the adaptation of the old landowner elites to the new board carried by the Liberal Revolution. Despite the large struggle against the manorial power and other contingencies, the Magallón procured to repair their fortune on a new basis. With a double strategy such as lessors and husbandmen, their incomes rose during the second half of the XIX century. Indeed, they were very far from the arguable Spanish stereotype of the absent landowner.

This article presents, for the first time, a continuous series of value of Honduran exports and imports for the period 1880-1930, extending the series previously available from Notten (2012). The new series were constructed based on the official statistics of the main trading partners of Honduras (United States, Great Britain, Germany and France) corrected from Honduran and complementary sources. The correction criteria applied are based on the results of a previous reliability validation exercise. The data obtained allow to delimit a new chronology of the foreign trade of Honduras where the “export age” began before the banana export boom that took place between 1903 and 1930.

This article analyses the impact of market forces and regulation in the Spanish telephone sector. It aims to explore the combined effects of the intersection between regulation of the monopoly, economic policy and entrepreneurial strategies, and hypothesizes that the regulation had a decisive influence on the development of the networks and services. Chronologically, the study covers the two decades of the transition from autarky to the Stabilization and Development Plans. In its double supply-demand approach, the article quantifies investment as an expression of supply and reviews the ground rules within which these two market forces developed. Finally, it examines the situation of shortages that the intervention created, and explains the intervention in prices from the perspective of the trade-off between its use as an element of stabilization and the bargaining power of the sector. The conclusions reflect the impact of the regulation and highlight its more complex aspects.

Italy's colonial history is better known for its failures (notably the battle of Adwa, the major defeat of a Western power by an African army in the 19th century) than for its achievements. Italy succeeded in conquering a substantial «empire» only in the 20th century, when the traditional colonial powers were already in retreat1. But this has not always been the case. The Venetian republic successfully ruled for many centuries the first «colonial» empire in Western Europe 2.

Lo más destacado de la historiografía agraria española reciente es, tal vez, que se han empezado a superar las graves limitaciones que existían para un análisis riguroso de la dinámica del sector al haberse empezado a aportar, sobre todo por el GHR (Grupo de Historia Rural), una serie de estados sobre la producción y las superficies cultivadas, deducidos de fuentes oficiales empleadas críticamente. Esto último ha permitido realizar importantes trabajos sobre rendimientos y evolución del producto agrario, entre el último cuarto del siglo XIX y el segundo decenio del xx.