11 - Business History in Spain

Summary

Business history is an academic field that developed very late in Spain but has nevertheless shown considerable vitality over the last few years. It has its roots in Spanish economic history and has closely followed that discipline's development and lines of research, meanwhile enriching economic history with its microeconomic insights, theories of the firm, and empirical evidence.

The founder of economic history in Spain is the Catalan scholar Jaume Vicens. Vicens argued the need to integrate business and entrepreneurial studies within the framework of his discipline forty years ago. However, no effort was made to forge this link until the 1970s, when the Research Section of the Banco de España (Spanish Central Bank) made seminal contributions to studies on banks and railroads. These papers, together with two other groundbreaking works, invigorated Spanish economic history and greatly influenced its subsequent development. As such, they may be considered among the first contributions to the embryonic discipline of business history.

At the risk of oversimplifying, one can say that Jordi Nadal's book, El fracaso de la Revolución Industrial en España, 1814–1913, which appeared halfway through the decade, marked the path taken by both disciplines. Nadal (a disciple of Vicens) was the first to put forward a sound general thesis providing the framework for the debate among Spanish economic historians on Spain's failure to industrialize in the nineteenth century. His work is considered the most influential work in Spanish economic historiography.