Mucho antes de que se produjera la primera revolución industrial en Inglaterra, la industria como tal se había desarrollado en muchos lugares con profusión. Se trataba de una expansión de la producción, así como de un incremento de la mano de obra industrial. Estudios tradicionales atestiguan el desarrollo de estas actividades industriales en el occidente europeo a lo largo de la Edad Moderna. Todavía no se había producido el cambio cualitativo necesario para pasar a la «industria moderna», cuya aparición caracterizaría, en frase de Hicks, el nacimiento de la revolución industrial. Este cambio cualitativo es muy complejo; pero, en última instancia, se reduce a las condiciones que hicieron posible la aplicación de la máquina a la industria.

La historiografía tradicional explicó la aparición de la mecanización como algo más o menos súbito; en cualquier caso, el primero y fundamental de los cambios cualitativos en la producción industrial. No nos parece hoy que la realidad fuera así. A lo largo de la Época Moderna hubo ya una serie de cambios cualitativos que fueron transformando la naturaleza de la producción y organización industriales y que conformaron esas condiciones necesarias para dar el último salto. Entre estos cambios hay uno que tiene singular importancia. No se trata de algo que pueda precisarse bien en el tiempo. Es más bien un fenómeno que va adquiriendo cuerpo a lo largo de los siglos modernos, en concomitancia con el desarrollo del capitalismo, y que ha venido en llamarse protoindustrialización.

Based on primary sources, baskets of consumption for Buenos Aires are reconstructed for the 1780-1820 period, applying current international methodologies. They build on previous work based on 1835 data. It can be seen that the consumption pattern did not vary substantially in the period and, considering the salary of both urban and rural workers, we are able to establish that standards of living were high and experienced a significant increase after 1835, especially during the 1840s. This placed Buenos Aires among the cities of the Western world with highest welfare ratio levels.

This paper aims to analyze the changes in the standard of living of workers in the popular sectors of Mendoza during the “great expansion” of the Argentine economy. A series of real wages of the construction pawn in public works is calculated for 1895–1914, in order to compare it with series of real wages of low and medium public employee grades (low-level policeman, porter and clerk) and vineyard employees, which were previously estimated. In this way, we try to know if the dynamism of viticulture and public investment improved their living conditions. In addition, it seeks to compare these results with the cost of a basic basket of goods and services and calculate family income for some construction laborers identified in the National Population Census of 1895, in order to know if they insured family subsistence.

This paper investigates the reasons why provincial issuing banks in Spain maintained high reserves in the 19th century and the effects this had. The introduction of banknotes into the economy meant that convertibility had to be guaranteed. If convertibility was respected, this gave banks a good reputation and made them reliable. The Palmer Rule was a control mechanism stating that a well-managed bank should keep one-third of its liabilities as cash in hand and two-thirds in securities. In Spain the banking system, constituted in the mid-19th century, was characterised by a plurality of issuing banks. Regulations required reserves only to secure notes, with no mention of reserve requirements for banks’ other types of liabilities. However, Spanish provincial banks of issue adopted the Palmer Rule. The Bank of Spain did not follow the same path.

This article explores the development of railway nationalism and «railway imperialism» within Colombian politics during the early 20th century. It uses the experience of the hitherto unstudied Great Northern Central Railway of Colombia British «free-standing company» as a lens to evaluate the way in which these political currents impacted railway development in the Colombian department of Santander. It argues that the rise of railway nationalism intertwined with regionalism and personal interests represents an important and unacknowledged factor in the collapse of the British company, as well as the overall lack of railway expansion and subsequent economic decline in the department.

El estudio de la economía y de la política económica durame la Segunda República sigue despertando entre nosotros un gran interés, El advenimiento del nuevo régimen coincidió con el peor año de la depresión mundial iniciada en 1929 y durante su corta existencia tuvo que sobrevivir en circunstancias económicas muy deslavorables. En sus escritos, los políticos republicanos hieieron notar este desafortunado suceso, destacando cómo la crisis internacional limitaba seriamente su capacidad de acción. Naturalmente, el adverso escenario económico de la década de 1920 hubiera tenido menor trascendencia si no hubiese sido por las exageradas expectativas de mejoras sociales y económicas que había suscitado la llegada al poder de los partidos de izauierda v de los urunos republicanos.

This paper presents the first results of our most recent research on the Bilbao Stock Exchange (BSE) from its foundation in 1890 up to the Spanish Civil War. We examine the origin of the Exchange and follow its evolution over the first half-century of existence. To this end we introduce some of the stock exchange indexes we have calculated for Bilbao and put them into comparative perspective with the existing series on general economic and industrial activity and the indexes for other Spanish exchanges for the period considered. These comparisons show Bilbao’s evolution from a public debt-dominated market to an industrial exchange very much tied to regional development. Finally, we contrast the degree of financial market integration associated with the existing Spanish exchange indexes. Our analysis finds strong support for considering the BSE index as an industrial index and little evidence of capital market integration between the principal Spanish exchanges before the 1920s.

Landlord-peasant land relationships embodied in different management strategies and forms of possession, constitute a central chapter in the medieval and modern agriculture history of the Castilian crown. In the following text, we analyse its evolution within the extended monastic patrimony of León, connecting it to social and economic circumstances between the end of XIIth century and the beginning of the XVIth century. Understanding them becomes all the more important since they play a key role in the explanation of exploitation field patterns applied in the modern era and of the agriculture system where they thrived.

The aim of this article is to think about the expansion in peasant property detectable from the end of nineteeth to the middle of twenteeth centuries. The research is centred around one particular Catalan region, the Baix Empordà. The main parts of the process were the break-up and, the sale of old estates, as well as its purchase —fragmented— by peasant sectors. Some explanatory elements are set, both related to the behaviour of landed sectors, and to the means that make possible the expansion of a significant group of peasant properties.

This article attempts to analyse the role that the Rothschild House played in the evolution of Spanish Public Finances along the 19th Century. Therefore, it endeavours to describe an elementary chronology of the relationships between the Spanish Government and the Rothschild House during the whole Century, analysing the main financial operations they underwrote, quantifying their annual aggregate figures and, finally, trying to comment upon the different consequences of the process above mentioned. To cover these aims, we have deployed original records from the Rothschild Archives in London and Paris, their contents having been supplemented with information from National Public Records in Spain and France, and other financial institutions, namely the Bank of Spain.

In this article the author pays attention to the role of credit in the negotiation of wool sales by big and small flockowners in the region of Soria during the sixteenth and the seventeenth centuries. He proves that the small flockowners always sold their wool several months in advance of its delivery, in order to borrow money from the merchants that bought it. Next he proves that during the sixteenth century the big flockowners usually sold their wool to the merchants on conditions and could delay the payment for a long period of time; they also obtained favorable very good prices for their products. Finally he proves that in the course of the seventeenth century the big flockowners of Soria had to face increasing financial difficulties that forced them to borrow money with increasing frequency in order to be able to preserve their flocks.

Este artículo estudia dos temas referidos a los orígenes de la incorporación de España a la modernidad desde la perspective de la historia del consume y la culture material. Xomando como ejemplo el caso de Madrid, en primer lugar se indaga la adopción por parte de sus clases medias y altas de lo que se conoce como cultura de consume moderno. En segundo lugar se analiza en qué medida esa cultura contribuyó al moldeado de las identidades politicas que propiciaron la movilización en torno al ideal revolucionario del liberalismo. Las conclusiones extraidas se fundamentan en el estudio de una muestra de 766 inventarios post mortem de families establecidas en Madrid entre 1750 y 1880.

El objetivo de la presente comunicación consiste en precisar los diversos modos en que el agua, recurso económico fundamental, resultó afectada por el proceso de modernización que implicaba la labor revolucionaria antifeudal del siglo xix y las consecuencias que de ello se derivaron. Para conseguir esta meta será necesario definir brevemente el régimen feudal de propiedad de las aguas y justificar el significado del neologismo despatrimonialización, que me he tomado la libertad de acuñar. Trazo general de las soluciones que dio la revolución liberal a los problemas de las formas de propiedad típicas del antiguo régimen es su carácter negativo, es decir, la eliminación de los factores que la hacían inmovilizada, amortizada o.vinculada. Como la tierra, tampoco las aguas tenían, en la etapa de predominio del sistema feudal, la condición de bienes libres de propiedad particular. El mencionado carácter negativo está en la base, incluso en su misma construcción gramatical, de los términos castellanos desamortización y desvinculación. Esta es una de las razones por las que me he decidido a emplear, en el caso del agua, el término despatrimonialización. He elegido también, y principalmente, esta expresión porque integra muy bien, en su parte positiva, las distintas situaciones que se dan respecto de la propiedad del agua en la sociedad feudal.

The «Compañía de Nuestra Señora de los Desamparados» was made by the silk craftsmen in 1772, but the General Board of Commerce changed its nature to authorize all the social classes to take part in share-holders. Although that circumstance favoured its growth, it laid the foundations of its final failure to provoke a serious conflict between the craftsmen sector, who exercised sole right the managines charges, and the rest of share-holders, which fundamental discord motive was the loss suffered in the commercial crisis of 1779–82. Anyway, the preservation of its private documentation has made it possible to analyse its manufacturing activity and the result of its business; the commercialization of the silk textile in Cádiz stands out.

Qué duda cabe que el ferrocarril es un vehículo privilegiado para explorer la situación de la economía de un país, sobre todo en el momento en que se construye el grueso de las redes. Si uno no se limita a realizar una historia interna, ténica, jurídica o económica, no tiene más remedio que analizar las conexiones que se establecen entre ese moderno medio de transporte y el resto de la economía; esas relaciones son múltiples y ricas en significación para la historia económica de un país. Precisamente, en el libro objeto de comentario (1), esas relaciones son la principal preocupación del autor.

En la literatura económica sobre tipos de cambio pueden encontrarse diferentes teorías o explicaciones sobre la determinatión del valor de cotización de las monedas. De todas ellas, las que gozan de mayor aceptación son la teoría de la balanza de pagos, la teoría del mercado de cambios a futuros, la teoría keynesiana sobre determinatión del tipo de cambio, el reciente enfoque monetarista y, por último, la traditional teoría de la paridad del poder adquisitivo.

This essay aims to introduce an issue of the RHE-JILAEH dedicated to the reconstruction of historical trade statistics of Latin American countries. It comments on the early perceptions of the quality and utility of historical trade statistics and on the way in which more recent analyses have overcome the distrust that prevailed until the last third of the 20th century. It then summarises the different criteria and methodologies that have been used to assess the accuracy and reliability of trade statistics in order to make them useful for the purpose of reconstructing new, more complete and precise trade series or re-estimating those available. The introduction ends with a brief description of the contents of this volume.

This paper studies the evolution of the Chilean economy in the late 19th and early 20th century, a period when the country's convergence with developed countries came to an end. We analyse this problem in the context of the modern literature on the middle-income trap. The social, political and economic history of Chile between 1875 and 1939 is examined and the presence of most of the factors associated with the middle-income trap is found. We complement this narrative through a quantitative analysis based on the synthetic control method and argue that the process of state-led industrialisation undertaken in the country leading to the formation of CORFO was a key economic and political event. Our work presents some general lessons for developing countries facing a similar context.

This paper examines educational inequality in nine Latin American countries at the sub-country level from the 1950s to the 1990s. Educational inequality is measured by the difference in schooling years between the taller and the shorter half of the female population. Schooling years significantly increased across birth cohorts, especially before the 1980s, regardless of socio-economic stratum, region or country. However, educational inequality persisted. This finding reflects the achievement of the import substitution industrialisation era in educational development and its failure in mitigating the unequal distribution of education rooted in Latin America's social structure. Trade liberalisation and educational expansion are found to reduce educational inequality in capital and urban regions, whereas democracy and tax reform increased it. By contrast, educational inequality in rural regions was hardly influenced by policy changes. This finding urges future explorations into whether the persistence of educational inequality in rural regions is due to endemic social structure.

This article aims to analyze the territorial taxes in the province of Alicante during the Década Moderada (1844–1854). Besides a structural analysis of the territorial taxes —quota and its charges—, the sharing out of taxes among the villages of the province, as well as the individual share of taxpayers in the town of Alicante and its province will be studied. Reference to the objections from villages and individuals to the sharing out effected by the provincial and local oligarchy is therefore necessary in order to understand the political and social implications of the new tax. Such objections show the extent to which the sharing out was unfair and the resistance offered towards the taxes, which resulted in high levels of tax evasion.