La quiebra de la poderosa casa bancaria de Baring Brothers, en noviembre de 1890, sacudió violentamente al mercado de capitales en Londres, desatando una corta pero intensa crisis financiera internacional. Sus efectos se hicieron sentir no tan sólo en Inglaterra y varios centros financieros de la Europa continental, sino, además, en Sudamérica. Las ondas expansivas y destructivas alcanzaron con particular fuerza a la opulenta metrópolis de Buenos Aires, dando lugar al desplome vertical de los valores de docenas de empresas financieras, mercantiles y ferroviarias que operaban en el Río de la Plata. El hundimiento de la Bolsa bonaerense fue seguido al poco tiempo por la bancarrota de las dos principales entidades bancarias del país, el Banco Nacional y el Banco de la Provincia de Buenos Aires, casi inmediatamente forzando la suspensión de pagos internacionales por parte del Gobierno. En esta forma dramática y hasta cataclísmica se cerraba un decenio —el de 1880–1890— signado por el más impresionante boom financiero que había conocido cualquier país latinoamericano hasta esas fechas.

De entre las diverses relaciones contractuales establecidas en torno a la posesión y uso de la tierra, la medianería o aparcería es, sin duda, una de las más complejas. Así, desde Adam Smith hasta los neoclásicos, ha sido considerada desde una perspectiva fundamentalmente negativa —tesis compartida por algunos autores para el caso isleño —, en cuanto que reduce la capacidad de capitalización agraria por parte del propietario, al tiempo que el medianero se beneficia de dicha capitalización, pues no dispone de los recursos suficientes para proporcionar su correspondiente contribución al coste marginal de aquélla. Por su parte, el análisis marxista de la aparcería, enriquecido indudablemente desde su primitiva formulación, destaca su relevante significado en la fase de transición del feudalismo al capitalismo.

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.

Se ha escrito mucho sobre las causas del atraso andaluz, sin que hasta el momento exista ninguna explicatión definitiva. La mayor parte de los planteamientos que se han hecho, unos mejor fundamentados que otros, son insatisfactorios por su monocausalidad. En términos generales, se busca al gran culpable del atraso relativo del Sur con respecto a otras regiones peninsulares, atraso que no se inició hasta bien entrada la segunda mitad del siglo xix, al invertirse la tendencia expansionista seguida hasta entonces.

This article explores the impact of Asian goods in the Rio de la Plata area through the navigation course of two frigates of the Royal Company of Phillipines, forced by the maritime conflict between the Spanish and British Empires, dock in the Southern estuary. Examining the value and traits of the shipment and the details of the ‘comercio de pacotilla’, this study analyzes the distribution of the goods from China, Philippines and in particular, India, in the port basin, the hinterland of the Viceroyalty, and its connections to the Alto Peruvian space, the trans-Andean region, and the Littoral way to Paraguay. This episode enables an understanding of the distribution of goods, as well as a more detailed recognition of the actors of this traffic and a renewed evaluation of the role of the company in the global market of Asian goods.

One key step in the process of development is the transition from the personalistic rules and privileges that characterise developing societies to open access orders and rational–legal bureaucracies sustaining impersonal rules. This article uses a micro-data set of Spanish officers to study the politicisation of the army during the Second Republic (1931–1939) taking Franco's Africanist faction as the case study. The military reforms during 1931–1933 increased the impersonality of rules determining the promotion of officers, but executive discretionary powers persisted. The results suggest that changes in the government affected the dynamics of the army. Under conservative governments (1934–1935), Africanists were promoted more rapidly. Centre-left governments during the period of 1931–1933 did not systematically promote Africanists differently, but the revision of promotions in 1933 slowed their careers. The politicisation of the army was one of the factors contributing to the military coup that started the Spanish Civil War.

This paper deals with Anglo-Spanish trade and finances for the period c. 1810-1850. It concentrates on the business activities of a London merchant bank (Huth & Co. or Huth) with Spain during this period by paying special attention to the support given by Huth to the many bilateral trades between Spain and Britain in which the company participated. It also focuses on the support given by Huth to much trade in and out of Spanish ports but which did not go through British ports. This overall support included the provision of credit facilities, exchange rate brokerage, insurance services and commercial intelligence. In addition, the article covers the links between Huth and the Spanish crown, thanks to which the bank became an important conduit of Spanish investments in American securities before 1850. Huth was also the paymaster abroad for the Spanish state. In view of Huth's close connections to the Spanish economy during this period, it is perhaps surprising that this is the first study of this «Spanish» house in London.

This essay shows that the growth of the economy of New Granada during the Eighteenth Century made an important impact on its political center, Santafé de Bogota, at least until 1808. Such prosperity was the result of a process of specialization and division of labor between different regions of the new kingdom, derived from the dynamics of gold mining that gave a strong impulse to Santafé's economy as a trade center for the handicraft production of Eastern Colombia and the fertile savanna surrounding it, which was a net food exporter. The Mint established in Santafé, which was a de facto monopoly, attracted merchants and miners who established there a center for the exchange of gold dust for coin.

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.

This paper analyse the evolution of income and wealth distribution in the settler economies in order to evaluate the manner in which the historical conditions generated certain productive structure and trade pattern and, therefore, the economic dynamic in the long run.

We consider two channels to interpret the relations between the distributive pattern and the productive and trade structure: the aggregate demand and the institutional and geographic factors. The analysis focus on four proximate causes of the specialization, i.e., learning capacity, innovation and technical progress, accumulation of fixed capital and formation of human capital. We use a comparative approach to look for the main differences in the development of settler economies during the period 1870–1940.

Firstly, we present the historical context and, then, some econometric exercises are tested to give more insights to this view. The evidence shows that economies with high inequality present an economic structure characterized by production with small incorporation of knowledge and low added-value. As a result, in the long run they verify worse performances than other economies with a more equitable distributive pattern.

In this paper we explore the determinants of women's work using data from Barcelona in 1930. Although participation rates were much lower in Barcelona than in cities in the UK or the US at roughly the same time, our estimates of the labour supply suggest women in Barcelona did respond to wage incentives. The most distinguishable feature of the household division of labour in Barcelona is the lack of substitution effects among family members, especially among women. The sensitivity of the participation of each individual woman to the participation of other members of the household might indicate that labour markets were highly segmented and anticipates the existence of large differences in household earnings and welfare. We argue that the persistence of labour-intensive methods of production requiring on-the-job training might explain the type of household division of labour that we find in Barcelona.

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.

Six decades ago, Cuba initiated a momentous social and economic experiment. This paper documents the effects of the experiment on Cuban living standards. Before the revolution, Cuban income per capita was on a par with Ireland or Finland. Indeed, Cuba was one of the richest of the Spanish-speaking societies. Growth is glacially slow after the revolution as GDP per capita increased by 40 per cent between 1957 and 2017 equal to an annual growth rate of 0.6 per cent—among the lowest anywhere. To be sure, other dimensions of well-being such as education and health improved, yet broader welfare measures do not change the conclusion that the revolution impoverished Cuba relative to any plausible counter factual.

This article analyses the role of women and gender discrimination in the mortgage credit market in Peru between 1860 and 1875. Relying on a large sample of notarised loans, the article shows that women participated in the credit market as lenders and borrowers. However, their participation was lower than that of men. In addition, women received smaller loans and paid higher interest rates than men. The evidence suggests that the lower participation of women as borrowers and their smaller loans were largely a consequence of the distribution of collateral. In addition, much of the difference in interest rates resulted from the differences in loan sizes. As women received smaller loans and there were probably fixed costs involved in granting a loan, making a loan to a woman implied a higher average cost.

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.

The article is divided in two parts. In the first part we analyse the reasons why it is not possible to quantify the agrarian macrovariables of the Old Regime. In the second part, we point out the most salient features of valencian agriculture during the XVIth, XVIIth, and XVIIIth centuries, such as the adoption of new techniques and the increasing comercialization of all types of crops.

El ministro de Marina, Luis María Salazar, había enviado, en los primeros meses de 1829, a Gregorio G. Azaola —director de las Fundaciones Estatales de Liérganas y la Cavada— a París y Bélgica para ponerse en contacto con los productores de hierro europeos, pues

Pocos meses después, el industrial belga Adolphe Lesoinne recorre el norte de España, conducido por Azaola, tratando de encontrar un lugar adecuado para la industria del hierro, siguiendo «le vif désir du ministre Salazar de voir l'industrie métallurgique et la fabrication des armes de guerre s'installer en Espagne».

This article analyzes sovereign debt defaults in four Latin American countries—Argentina, Brazil, Chile and Mexico—for the period 1870-2012. The impact of sovereign defaults on real GDP growth is generally short-lived, while the impact in terms of output losses is deep and lasts long. Defaults in the period 1972-2012 show a deep and long-lasting impact compared to defaults in earlier periods. Moreover, the length of the contraction that follows a default is associated with favourable international conditions in the run-up to a default, while the depth of the contraction is associated with an expansive domestic economy in the run-up to a default. The results fit with boom–bust theories and sudden stop models.

Through the analysis of Argentina-World Bank (WB) relations between 1971 and 1976, this article examines how democracies and dictatorships, as well as political and economic constraints did (or did not) impact WB lending to Latin America. This period is especially revealing. Between May 1971 and September 1976, the WB did not grant any new loans to Argentina, thereby generating an exceptional and unusually long break in WB lending to the country. Drawing on previously undisclosed files from the WB Archives and additional primary sources from Argentina and the United States, this article unveils the actual mechanisms, criteria and justification that stood behind the decision to lend or not to lend to Argentina. It maintains that the WB’s self-imposed principle of «neutrality» played a crucial role in facilitating the WB’s relations with Argentina during the politically and economically unstable early 1970s.

It has often been argued that large landowners formed the core of the Buenos Aires' economic elite during the first half of the nineteenth century. According to this interpretation, the crisis of independence forced the colonial wealthiest capitalists to move from commerce to ranching, which soon emerged as the elite's major source of income. The evidence produced in this article suggests that this interpretation requires revision. Analysis of sucesiones (probate records) for a sample of fifty of Buenos Aires' largest capitalists of the central decades of the XIXth century indicates that, rather than concentrating on rural production, wealthy porteños sought to diversify their assets. This article suggests that this pattern on investment emerged as a result of businessmen's attempts to cope with economic and political instability.