This paper deals with the role played by the Maritime Guilds in the development and management of the fisheries conducted from the Basque shore until the first half of the 20th century. It contends that thanks to a particular institutional framework Guilds were able to build up a management model based on the exclusive use of the fishing resources. The character of this regime of use stems from the behaviour of the fishing resources and from the characteristics of the fish markets in Spain before the 20th century, but it is also related to an historical model of organisation and relationship between society and nature. Finally, the social and economic consequences of the process of institutional change that eliminated the legal basis of the exclusiveness are analysed.

The article focuses on an analysis of the evolution of tax burden in the Peruvian region between 1691 and 1790 and its relationship with local revolts. Tax income and tax burden have been calculated on the basis of data collected from Cajas Reales (colonial tax revenue offices) and an estimate of the product. XVIII Century revolts appear to be consequence of the continuous increase in the tax burden.

El pasado 21 de enero falleció en Granada don Antonio Domínguez Ortiz. Uno de los grandes, uno de los más importantes historiadores españoles del siglo XX. Dedicó su vida a investigar con primor la sociedad y la economía de España durante la Época Moderna.

Era previsible el éxito que habría de tener la historia del consumo en el panorama historiográfico posterior cuando, ya a fines de los años sesenta, F. Braudel llamara la atención sobre la importancia de estudiar la cultura material como una manera de entender la historia de las civilizaciones. No ha sido, sin embargo, una línea recta lo que ha llevado de las reflexiones del maestro francés al desarrollo actual en este campo. Hoy se reconoce que otros historiadores, N. McKendrick, J. Brewer y D. Roche, entre otros, han prestado un servicio esencial en el proceso por el cual este enfoque se ha convertido en una comente poderosa y frecuentada en las explicaciones del pasado.

El artículo consta de dos partes. En la primera se subrayan los problemas conceptuales que entraña El estudio de los orígenes del crecimiento económico moderno partiendo del lado de la demanda, pero también se destacan las perspectivas nuevas que este enfoque abre en una disciplina cuyos programas de investigación todavía privilegian el enfoque basado en la oferta. La segunda parte del artículo examina diversas cuestiones de la historia económica de España en los siglos XVIII y XIX sobre las que arrojan nueva luz los trabajos incluidos en este volumen, en particular la temprana cronología de los cambios en el consumo de artículos textiles.

This article studies the proceedings used by the Spanish public finances to deal with the unpaid taxes during the last decades of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th. The connections between the concerned public institutions, and between these and the taxpayers, are analysed using the statements of tax collectors. The great amount of land seized by the State, as a consequence of unpaid taxes, are a sign of the changes that the Spanish rural areas were suffering. This phenomenon became a serious source of conflict and it made evident the important structural problems of the Restauration Administration.

This paper studies the composition and administration of municipal finances in the Kingdom of Aragon during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Economic prosperity during the sixteenth century allowed town councils to carry out significant projects in order to transform the terms between man and landscape, to expand economic activities or to increase the public power. As a result of this administration, raising indebtedness during the seventeenth century caused the bankruptcy of town councils. Their financial difficulties were sharpened by the fiscal demands from the monarchy during the second quarter of this century and imposed to municipal authorities the increase of incomes. Final bankruptcy of town councils in Aragon will transfer the control of propios and communal lands to Juntas composed by creditors and an important representation of clergymen.

The creation of a tax system linking the interests of the crown as well as the elites constitutes one of the most important developments for the early modern State. It requires the setting up of a «fiscal constitution» in which all parties abide by certain rules, implicit or explicit, to ensure the correct functioning of the system. This article considers the profits arising from the surpluses that resulted from the collection of alcabalas by town councils on agreement of the Crown. This will be done by comparing the amount due to the crown in the encabezamiento with what was actually collected by the town of Madrid. So, it will be shown that the resulting surpluses were a constitutive part of this mutually beneficial system.

Researchers in Economic History have traditionally used income per person as a measure of welfare. Due to the limitations of this indicator, recent investigations have extended the measurement of welfare to alternative indicators. Following this Une of investigation, this article compares four welfare indicators for Spain (income per person, Human Development Index, Physical Quality of Life Index and stature). Two of these indicators (HDI and PQLI) have been novelty constructed for Spain. The overall evidence suggests some hypothesis to be contrasted by future research, as some unresolved puzzles remain.

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.

Se aborda el estudio de la propensión al consumo de aquellos bienes duraderos que estarían en el trasfondo de la industrialización, como fue el caso del textil. Qué cantidad se consumía, cómo fue su difusión social y espacial en el largo plazo, qué determinantes y condicionantes afectaron tanto a la cantidad como a la variedad de los que se consumía, dentro de qué pautas y a través de qué mecanismos de promoción y de venta, de qué manera incentivaron o no la producción de bienes manufacturados, son cuestiones a las que se dan respuesta a partir de la información protocolizada en localidades asentadas en ámbitos geográficos diferenciados que, en su conjunto, han proporcionado una imagen caleidoscópica bastante ajustada del carácter multidimensional de los origenes de la industrialization.

This article clarifies the means whereby the Catalan cotton industry attained independence from imported yarn in a critical stage of its development between the 1790s and the War of Independence. It does so by tracking the origins, and early diffusion, of the Arkwright technology in Catalonia in the form of a machine-making and spinning company formed between an Olotí stocking frame knitter, a Barcelona silver-smith and an Ávila trained machine-maker. The spinning and weaving initiatives of the Company inform on the circumstances conditioning the Catalan industry's incorporation of the spinning processes. Light is also thrown on the character of machine-making at this stage of Catalan industrialization in a pilot-enterprise anxious to restrict technical diffusion.

In the first decades of the 20th century, several processes modify the Spanish insurance market from the inherited characteristics of the past century. Moreover, the increment of competition promotes the diversification and setting up cartels for control of market. The first process drives the specialised companies to general companies and the second one leads to agreements between them to control the competition. Both parallel procedures originate later on the leadership of particular companies.

The aim of this article is to analyse the influence that regional public intervention had in the economic growth and development of Navarre between the end of the XIXth century and 1970. By means of a «sui generis» fiscal federalism, Navarre's Treasury's provision of «merit goods» and infrastructure were above the average level of Spain. However, it was not until the 60s that these incentives, and a lower tax pressure, contributed to the industrialisation of the region. The Programme of Industrial Promotion of 1964 favoured business investments, which accelerated the transformation of this regional economy. Nevertheless, public intervention was preceded by the forces of the market, which inserted Navarre among one of the principal axis of the economic development of Spain at the end of the XXth century.

This article presents a comparative analysis of the productive performance of the modern Spanish iron and steel industry from its origins up to the Spanish Civil War. Three aspects are examined: the extent to which the industry had the potential to compete in world markets, whether or not Spanish mills applied new technologies to re-establish or maintain their competitivity and which elements limited or increased the advantage of their products. The analysis shows a revealed advantage in products intensive in iron ore. Part of this advantage can be traced back to preferential ore supply contracts. The limits to these preferential contracts introduced incentives for maintaining the reduced scale of Spanish installations. The attempt to gain control over home markets on behalf of Altos Hornos de Vizcaya may be related to these contractual limitations. The high profits reaped through the cartelisation of the industry and the wide margin of benefit obtained by producing within the scale of the preferential ore supply contracts provide an alternative explanation for the industry's performance in the period.

El objetivo de este trabajo es contribuir al estudio de las pautas de consumo de tejidos de la población catalana de la segunda mitad del siglo XVII. Para Uevarlo a cabo se ha utilizado documentación procedente de la recaudació;n del impuesto de Bolla y, en especial, los libros de Manifest de Botigues. Los resultados han permitido définir las preferencias de la población en el consumo de tejidos, constatar la existencia de tiendas especializadas en la distribución de tejidos importados y en los de seda, y precisar el peso que en la oferta tenian tanto los tejidos de producción autóctona como los de importación. Por último, la información proporcionada por los Manifests ha posibilitado el establecer un índice aproximado de rotación del stock en este tipo de establecimiento.

El artículo describe la transformatión de la venta al por menor a través de diversas botigues de teles de Barcelona con el fin de arrojar luz sobre la compositión de la oferta textil, por una pane, y, por otra, la evolución del crédito comercial y al consumo. Se pone de relieve que a lo largo del periodo estudiado aumentó y se diversificó la oferta de tejidos y creció la capacidad del botiguer para destinar recursos a financier la venta al fiado a sus clientes, entre los que se fue reforzando el protagonismo de los grupos menestrales.

The Soviet Union experienced two very pronounced changes of direction in 1921 and 1929. At the beginning of the decade, the strategy of «War Communism» was abandoned, substituted by the completely different «New Economic Policy» (NEP); and changed again, at the end of those years, towards a strategy of forced industrialization based on the collectivisation of the agricultural sector. In recent years, some specialists have argued that this second change was unnecessary: i.e., rapid industrialization could have been achieved within the framework of NEP and the Law of Value. The purpose of this paper is to argue, from a theoretical point of view, and with the help of the model that best summarizes the strategy of rapid industrialization, that this new interpretation cannot be sustained, and that those authors that defended the incompatibility of NEP and rapid industrialization were correct.

Spanish banking has been considered as an industry ruled by oligopolistic conducts. It has been even dealt as a cartel, which has been able to keep along xx century with the support of the State. This paper checks this interpretation with the aid of a set of indexes of the degree of competitori in a market: an annual series of economic concentration and another one of intra-industrial turnover, as well as some proxi figures of the height of the barriers to entry. Doubts about the thesis of the banking cartelization are yielded by our results. To be precise, the competitive nature of the Spanish banking industry is defended, at least for the time before the civil war, and it is questioned that big banks emerged unharmed from the statu quo declared by Franco's goverments.

The aim of this paper is to study the water market in Canaries in the long run and to show how this resource was managed in the Canary Islands. In the first section, a theoretical model of operation is presented and then is tested to examine the evolution of water prices. We show that the evolution of waterprices is conditioned by the fact that the property of water has been concentrated only in few hands. Finally, we discuss if in the Canary Islands the water has been efficiently managed during XXth century.