This paper studies the figure of «Factor General del rey» in the organization and work of the Royal Finances of Castilla between 1627 and 1644, under the reformist government of the Count-Duke of Olivares. During these years, the Factor General was Bartolomé Spinola, one of the most importante Genoese bankers of Phillip IV. This article analyses the strategy of Royal Finances in the financial market during the early seventeenth century, and the role played by the most important bankers. To begin with, I examine why the Royal Finances needed a Factor General. At this moment, the Crown was establishing a system where the policy was established by experts. The presence of financiers in the court of Madrid grew as much as to influence economic policy. Later afterwards, I explain who Bartolomé Spinola was and how he got to become the main important banker, and then the Factor General. Drawing upon the experience and understanding he gained from his activities in the financial markets as a private banker, he could influence the direction of the political economy of the Spanish Empire. Finally, I analyse briefly some of the functions of the Factor General in the financing of the Crown's expenses, and his intervention in the problems relative to the vellon coinage.

Using the regional distribution of the Spanish residents patents from 1882 to 1935, the paper shows important divergences in the technology level of the Spanish regions. Those with the highest technology level were: Cataluña, Madrid, País Vasco and Valencia. The second group was formed by: Cantabria, Baleares, Aragón, La Rioja, Navarra and Asturias. Finally, the regions with the lowest technology level were: Murcia, Andalucía, Canarias, Castilla-La Mancha, Castilla y León, Galicia and Extremadura. Nevertheless, the evolution of patents per capita ratio shows that while some regions improved during this period, others got backwards relative to the rest of Spain. The distribution of patents by economic sectors shows a more complete picture of the technological development of the regions: it shows the sectors in which regions specialized and those in which they achieved technical advantages.

In this paper we use patent statistics in order to analyse the structure of the Spanish economy between 1759 and 1878. We depart from the hypothesis that inventive activity is demand driven. The results show how at the beginning of the Spanish industrialisation the majority of patents were concentrated in a few innovative sectors. Besides the textile and basic metal industries, it is possible to find some other sectors that have not usually been linked to technical change nor to productivity growth during that period. This is the case for the food, beverages and tobacco industries, machinery and equipment as well as chemical, construction and services sectors. A detailed analysis of patent records makes it possible to study the characteristics and peculiarities of the technical progress concerning each one of these sectors.

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 author searches into the reasons for the perpetuation of inefficient institutions. The monastery of Sta. Maria de Montederramo (Orense, Galicia) in the 13th century lets to underline the existence of formal and informal institutions defining agents' choices whose interests are building up in the process of social interaction. Moreover those interests emerge within socio-cultural context, rather than as the outcome of the institutional constreints over a given nature as profit maximazers. The article reviews the classical debate about the Cister. Given the Rule of the Order it is argued that Cistercians pursued the organization of coherent territorial estates, exclusive property rights over the land and own labour force. Working on the case-study, the gap between the theoretical principle of the Order and the specif management and contractual agreements about land tenancy are considered. The conclusion puts forward that monasteries were devices of accumulation because they developed practices of reciprocity, redistribution and identity within the peasant communities and through the organization of personal and social networks with some of the outstanding members of the local community. In the tied web of social and cultural dynamics, the economic patterns were hammered out.

This article surveys the most recent developments in the field of Mexican economic history.It argues that the last ten years has seen a significant shift in the methodology and focus of the field, away from dependency and traditional institutional analysis, and towards the extensive use of cliometric techniques and hypotheses drawn from the New Institutional Economics. This shift has greatly increased our understanding of several key issues in Mexico's economic history, but much of the work done to date has lacked a coherent focus on a specific set of issues. In other words, the field has recently made astounding progress, but still lacks sufficient order.

The aim of this paper is to analyse and compare the structure of rural properties of three houses of mendicants in Castile during the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. Analysing these three case studies we can gain a wide chronological view to show how the mendicants evolved to adapt to the feudal structures. We can also compare their role as members of the dominant class with that of other feudal lords, specially with other ecclesiastical institutions of previous foundation.

This articles surveys the developments in the field of Colombian economic history in the last fifty years, through a discussion of five fundamental books. It is shown how these studies has been dominated by marxism, traditional institutional history, Annales, and dependency. However, in the 1990's there has been a shift away from the field on the part of historians and an increasing amount of research on the part of economists working within the neo-classical tradition.

In this article we analyze the economic organization and the management strategies developed by the cathedral council of Barcelona in the seventeenth century, and its relation with the income and expense structures that characterized the institution's finances. It is claimed that the evolution of these variables was directhy related to the organizational and managerial capacities of the council and also to the position that it occupied in the diocesan ecclesiastical hierarchy.

This article discusses a new series of alternative indexes to measure Spanish protectionism in the period 1875–1930. The new indexes show that the biases downwards of the conventional index are relevant specially for the protection increase at given years and sectors. They confirm the relatively high level of protection at the beginning of the «Restauración» in the 1870's but contradict the stable level of protection before First World War and put forward an upward cyclical trend until the 1920's. From the beginning of the period Spanish protection was mainly industrial. When the general protection index is moderate, agriculture improves its position in relation to industry, and when protection increases the reverse occurs. The high level of departure, the upward cyclical trend and the permanent industrial bias support the traditional hypothesis of the existence of a strong influence of the industrial sector in Spanish comercial policy design and deny the «compulsory» or «accidental» explanation of the Spanish return to protection in the 1890's.

Rural andalusí settlements include both residential and hydraulic zones in their areas of political influence. These hydraulic zones, usually small and medium-sized, are the result of a previous design carried out by the peasant communities and determined by water collecting and the features of the terrain. This paper focusses on some hydraulic systems located in the old andalusí administrative district of Culla in the Spanish province of Castellón. Different field work techniques along with toponyms, documents and other references are used in this research.

This article studies the evolution of the composition of shareholders in one of the big companies in Spain, Compañía del Norte, devoted to railways sector between 1858 and 1941. Changes in property and interests groups inside the company are identified along the time. We establish the implications that this changes had in the Board of Administration by using modern agency theory, and looking for how the corporate structure advanced within the company. This process is studied from a comparative point of view in Europe and United States. The French influence in property, management and power in BA is highlighted. Only at the beginning of the XX century, when First World War broke out, Spanish capital got the majority of shareholders and the company introduced and international management style. The Spanish General Managers started to recruit new executives from qualified staff preferably with the same nationality, introducing a new system between the managers. This meant a break with hierarchic and militar system imposed by French style. Finally we analyse the evolution of the organization of the company which grew up rapidly from line schemes into a more complex structure although without arriving at a multidivisional one.

This article offers an overview of the evolution of economic historiography of the First Republic in order to consider why it has taken so long for domestic financial history to gain importance on the research agendas of Brazilian economic historians. It contends that the focus of dependency theory on international markets resulted in neglecting the structure of domestic finance. Recently, scholars have turned their attention to approaches that emphasize a balance between domestic and international economic factors, including looking at the distribution networks and institutional frameworks of domestic finance. Evidence from this perspective suggests that within private sectors, financial stability emerged during the First Republic and finance made positive contributions to growth, despite the vicissitudes of public finance. This tentative finding offers a very different perspective on the nature of Brazilian economic development and raises challenging new questions.

The objetive of this paper is to have another look at early 20th Century Santander's economy. It seems to be desirable to carry out this kind of studies for homogeneous groups, so we rearrange available data in seventeen branches of activity. Then, by using aggregate production functions, we get measurements of neutral technological progress, the degree of returns to scale and the magnitude of the elasticity of substitution.

The aim of this study is to establish the broad outlines of the changes in the economy of Majorca between 1830 and 1930. It focusses in two major areas: the evolution of the pre-industrial agricultural model, with the advance of crops meeting a growing demand from commercial networks (almonds, wines, citrus fruits), and, in particular, the development of industry sustained by non-leading sectors, such as the production of soap, woollen cloth and footwear. In the author's opinion the changes analysed show that the Majorcan economy had a much more solid and diversified base than has hitherto been supposed.

I study the introduction of electricity in Spain (1875–1900) and the consolidation of this industry (1900–1950), from a managerial perspective. The private sector took the lead. The State's participation was subsidiary, helping to create an institutional and legal framework. Firms became local monopolies, and acted jointed as an oligopoly in their relationships with the Administration. Under protected markets and little regulation, their production and pricing strategies aimed at short run profit maximization. As a result, the Spanish consumer was not well attended, and electricity contributed only mildly to growth.

This paper is concerned with recent development of Economic History in Uruguay. It focuses on its institutional features as well as on the prevailing theoretical and methodological approaches and research topics. A foundational period 1960–1985 is shortly reviewed. Recent development is thereafter discussed and characterised as one of dispersion, re-foundation and specialisation. The paper concludes that, notwithstanding Economic History loosed its central place and weight among the social sciences, the discipline has gone through a process of institutional and organisational strengthening. This embraces specialised graduate education, fluent relationships to the international community and an attempt to combine historical knowledge with rigorous treatment of theory and method. On this basis, the production of more and better facts has been increasing and, hopefully, the discipline may regain an outstanding place in academic life.

This paper analyses those factors that determined the regional specialization of pepper crop as well as the competitiveness of its industrial product, paprika, in international markets. Thus, it focuses on the relationship between agriculture and food industry. On the agriculture side, it is emphasised the role of cultivators on pepper diffusion in some irrigable areas of Segura river and Caceres valley. The demand expansion favoured crop intensification, provoked significative changes in peasant work organization, and facilitated technological advances in small farms too. On the industrial side, the present article shows the consumption importance in the national market at the end of nineteenth century and the foreign trade in the early twentieth century. In addition, it presents how Spanish exporters became to control the international market in the 1910's in conflict with Hungarian paprika. The role of industrial and commercial firms was decisive in paprika difussion in international markets enhancing its quality and standarization. Finally, the importance of marketing in the commercialization throughout 1920's and 1930's preventing paprika adulteration is reported.

The aim of this work is to study the diffusion of the changes towards a diversified manufacturing structure in the different Spanish regions during the first third of the XXth century and the evaluation of the factors which explain the manufacturing industrial growth of these regions. The considerated factors are the localization economies (Marshall's externalities of specialization) and the urbanization economies (externalities of diversity or Jacobs's externalities). Owing to the non-existence of an industrial census in Spain, we estimate a data set based on a reconstruction of the industrial direct taxes in 1913 and 1929, for 50 provinces and 20 manufactures. We find that in this period of creating of an important manufacturing basis to realize the industrialization process, the different regions did not increase their specialization and, the urbanization economies were even positive to the manufacture growth between 1913 and 1929.