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
2 - Catalan industry in the ‘long term’
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
If trade, contemporary texts often repeat, has survived in the Principality, it is thanks to the cloth business
(Vilar, La Catalogue, 1, p. 545)The achievement of one of the central purposes of this book – the assessment of the extent of the discontinuity caused by the growth of the cotton industry in Barcelona between the 1730s and 1830s – presupposes a knowledge of the position of industry in the local economy before the eighteenth century. It is the aim of this chapter to contribute to providing this. A brief account of different phases of the history of Catalonia's principal industry until the eighteenth century, woollen cloth, will be followed by some general comments on this industry's particularities.
THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE CATALAN CLOTH INDUSTRY
Origins
As Miguel Gual has pointed out, there were two possible sources for a Spanish textile tradition – a Muslim and an extra-Pyrenean. The former is the less well documented but it seems to have been responsible for the existence of concentrations of dyeing-, silk- and cotton-working skills in certain parts of the peninsula. The latter is clearly the principal influence on the development of the industry in Catalonia.
It was first exercised, predictably, on areas close to the frontier.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- A Distinctive IndustrializationCotton in Barcelona 1728–1832, pp. 26 - 49Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1992