This essays analyzes the historiography of Italy's modern economic growth. A distinction is made between those interpretations that emphasize the uniqueness of the Italian experience and those that include Italy in the general process that started in Britain and spread to the rest of Europe through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In addition, the article surveys the most recent attempts to establish the timing, the causes, and the obstacles to Italy's economic growth during the last century.

The reform of the craft guild system in Spain, encouraged by the enlightened reformism of the second half of the eighteenth century, reached one of its most radical moments with the abolition of the Guild of Silk Throwsters in 1793. In this essay we look into the effects and reactions that this measure unleashed inside the important silk sector in the city of Valencia. Spinning, whose last and most skilled stage was throwing, had become a bottle-neck which put in jeopardy the future of an economic activity of vital importance for the urban population and economy. The abolition of this guild had the twofold effect of bringing to light the deep-seated troubles which were plaguing work organization in spinning, and disclosing the complex position of merchant capital in the silk trade. Valencian commercial bourgeoisie did not get involved in the much-needed reconversion of spinning. This is an essential factor to explain the failure of all the measures designed to provide the mills with cheap, good-quality yarn in large quantities. Furthermore, the absence of a restructuring of spinning is one of the reasons which accounts for the fact that the commercial bourgeoisie itself ended up maintaining a frontal opposition to this anti-guild decree issued by the Royal Court.

The few works which talk about the transition from sail to steam in the Spanish merchant marine, analyze it in terms of decadence and failure. But these impressions do not pair with an analysis of the Spanish fleet from an international perspective: it was among the pionneers, together with Great Britain, to complete the technological modernization of its ships. The objective of this paper is to describe and explain the process of technical diffusion, the changes in the institutional framework, and the business strategy of Spanish shipowners in this context.

This article examines the relationship between capital market development and industrial structure during the early stages of industrialization, contrasting the experiences of Brazil, Mexico and the United States. It argues that the two constraints placed on the formation of credit intermediaries in Latin America, namely, poorly defined property rights and government regulatory policies, produced greater concentration in the Mexican and Brazilian cotton textile industries than that which developed in the United States.

This paper analyzes the Spanish industrial product during the period between the Spanish Civil War and the stabilization plan of 1959, whith special attention to the 1940's.

The essay carries out a revision of the Industrial Production Index, developed by Albert Carreras. The new industrial production index is made by breaking down the aggregate, in such a way that an index for each sector can be compiled, allowing for the changes in the productive structure of the Spanish industry of the period.