Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of maps
- List of tables
- Acknowledgements
- Abbreviations, languages, measures and monetary exchanges
- 1 Introduction
- 2 Catalan industry in the ‘long term’
- 3 The establishment of calico-printing in Barcelona
- 4 Why did merchant capital move into the industry in the 1740s?
- 5 The development of the industry in the 1750s and 1760s: adaptation to the requirements of ‘merchant capital’
- 6 The industry at its height, 1768–86, with investment in it as common as in drapers' shops
- 7 Spinning
- 8 The crisis of the fábrica: the industry from 1787 to 1832
- 9 The Bonaplata mill and Catalan industrialization
- Bibliography
- Index
1 - Introduction
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 22 September 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of maps
- List of tables
- Acknowledgements
- Abbreviations, languages, measures and monetary exchanges
- 1 Introduction
- 2 Catalan industry in the ‘long term’
- 3 The establishment of calico-printing in Barcelona
- 4 Why did merchant capital move into the industry in the 1740s?
- 5 The development of the industry in the 1750s and 1760s: adaptation to the requirements of ‘merchant capital’
- 6 The industry at its height, 1768–86, with investment in it as common as in drapers' shops
- 7 Spinning
- 8 The crisis of the fábrica: the industry from 1787 to 1832
- 9 The Bonaplata mill and Catalan industrialization
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
Barcelona is a capital of the north with respect to Spain: rich, industrial, hard-working, a bit cold, pragmatic. In contrast it is the most southerly of the capitals of Europe… the Mediterranean relativizes the harshness of scrupulously capitalist relations of production.
(M. Vázquez Montalbán, Barcelones (Barcelona, 1990), p. 37)This book is a study of the early history of the Spanish cotton industry, in Barcelona. It covers two principal phases in the industry's development: a first, from approximately 1736 to 1783, which was characterized by a concentration above all on calico-printing and a second, from 1783 to 1832, during which there was a gradual expansion in spinning and weaving and a start was made to introducing the cotton machinery which had been invented in England. It is limited, thus, principally to the period generally defined as ‘pre-’ or ‘proto-’ industrial; indeed it ends in the year of the foundation of the city's first steam-powered factory, that of Bonaplata, Rull and Vilaregut.
The concentration on Barcelona is justified by the fact that the development of the national industry was largely confined to the city during these two first phases. It was only during the second phase, with the expansion firstly of manual spinning and then the progression to dependence on hydraulic and steam-power, that the extent of this predominance began to be reduced with significant diffusion of the industry to other parts of Catalonia.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- A Distinctive IndustrializationCotton in Barcelona 1728–1832, pp. 1 - 25Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1992