This paper analyses the attempts of the Spanish state to regulate industrial relations in the early 20th century. The main conflict being over union recognition, workers faced strong opposition from employers, which generated a situation in which all possible agreements to end strikes were unstable. Faced with an increasingly active labour movement, the state tried to regulate industrial conflict but hesitated to apply state authority to force recalcitrant employers to recognize unions. A transitory system was in place for more than 20 years in which the state and employers clashed over the issue of the freedom to work and the state selectively applied its coercive power to force employers to give up on some of the strikers' demands. Tracing the role of authorities in strikes, I show how the intervention of state officials in strikes granted workers at least the partial satisfaction of their demands. I finally argue that state intervention in industrial conflict fuelled the radicalism of both unions and employers' associations.

Based on anthropometric data and descriptive information contained in the records of the Rio de Janeiro city jail (Casa de Detenção), this paper explores patterns of change in living conditions during the nineteenth century. The research shows that there were significant changes in the heights of prisoners over time and according to race and nationality.Most importantly, heights of Brazilian-born slaves declined for the cohorts born in the 1830s through the beginning of the 1860s. In addition, differences in heights for natives of the city of Rio de Janeiro and for other Brazilian prisoners provide evidence of an «urban penalty» in stature during this period. Poor nutrition, the high cost of food and shelter, the movement of some slaves out of the city and into plantation work after 1850, and urban epidemics are assessed as the factors influencing trends in prisoner heights. Throughout the analysis, height trends discovered in Rio de Janeiro are placed in international comparative perspective.

In 1821 a clearly modern tax reform was undertaken in Buenos Aires. Ancien Regime taxes were suppressed and it was created a system which included usual assessments related to international commerce, but also direct taxes on capitals, in order to diminish the dependence on duty customs and to distribute the fiscal weight in a more equitable manner, by taxing proprietors in proportion to their wealth.

In these work, we reconstruct fiscal series, showing the little weight of the «Contribución Directa» over fiscal income. Also we study some attempts to improve this tax collection, which failed once and again.

Finally we try to explain those failures and the reasons to maintain a regressive tax system which, nevertheless, was efficient and brought lesser political costs than direct taxes.

Price statistics and, in particular, food price statistics are much more abundant that those of consumption. In this article we use price statistics to analyze the qualitative variations in consumption and, specifically, the diet composition, a variable which is difficult to observe, but has remarkable implications in the evolution of living standards, health and mortality. Our analysis focuses on the years between 1910 and 1912, in a period of important changes in Spanish mortality, in order to analyze the provincial variation in the level and structure of food prices. The estimated relative price indexes suggest significant regional differences in diets which should be taken into account in living standards and mortality studies.

This paper proposes a new interpretation for a main issue of modern Spanish monetary history. The Spanish legal monetary system became bimetallist, as result of the Figuerola Decree, in 1868. The bimetallist system in force throughout the XIXth Century allowed the Bank of Spain, as the Bank of France did, pay its notes with silver, gold or both. As a result there was neither an inconvertibility declaration, nor any imaginary gold standard was abandoned in 1883. Law and legal practice always guaranteed convertibility of the peseta, that can't be identified only with gold exchange. In Spain there was never a suspension of tender notes convertibility such as in Italy, Portugal, Austria or France.