The aim of our paper is to study some aspects of the textile industry of the city of Segovia and its land in the second half of the 16th century, interpreting them through spatial economy theories and specifically the industrial district approach. It is about seeing the competitive advantages of the integration and diffusion of the business organization in its geographical framework. The district's competitive advantages are linked to both transaction and production costs. One of them is to maximize the benefits of labor market segmentation with the emergence of a primary market for skilled labor. Another is the ease of diffusion of both technology and organizational and commercial techniques.

This article explores the financing of early industrial corporations using newly constructed panel data from Imperial Russian balance sheets. We document how corporate capital structures and dividend payout policies reflected internal agency issues, information asymmetries with external investors, life cycle considerations, and other frictions present in the Russian context. In particular, we find that widely held, listed and more profitable corporations were less reliant on debt financing. Asset tangibility was associated with lower debt levels, suggesting that Russian corporate debt was short-term, collateral was largely irrelevant, or agency problems dominated. Finally, we find that many of these same issues, for example ownership structure and access to securities markets, also mattered for financial performance and that dividends may have compensated investors for poor legal protections.

This scoping paper addresses the role of financial institutions in empowering the British Industrial Revolution. Prominent economic historians have argued that investment was largely funded out of savings or profits, or by borrowing from family or friends: hence financial institutions played a minor role. But this claim sits uneasily with later evidence from other countries that effective financial institutions have mattered a great deal for economic development. How can this mismatch be explained? Despite numerous technological innovations, from 1760 to 1820 industrial growth was surprisingly low. Could the underdevelopment of financial institutions have held back growth? There is relatively little data to help evaluate this hypothesis. More research is required on the historical development of institutions that enabled finance to be raised. This would include the use of property as collateral. This paper sketches the evolution of British financial institutions before 1820 and makes suggestions for further empirical research. Research in this direction should enhance our understanding of the British Industrial Revolution and of the preconditions of economic development in other countries.

Miguel de Cervantes placed some passages of his masterpiece in Catalonia. Nevertheless, the features he uses to approach the Catalan reality -halfwaybetween 16th and 17th centuries- are obviously influenced by Don Quixote's personality. At that time, the Catalan economy was making its way in every sphere of activity which could operate at a profit. Far away from that magnificent Middle Ages, agriculture had to be rearranged and it was necessary to promote the most competitive products and to try to find markets for them. New generations devoted themselves to this purpose, people who were equally distant from the old patrician oligarchies and from the fickleness of the marginal nobility. They were laying, perhaps without knowing it, the path to modernity.

This article deals with the consumption and marketing of textiles in some Castilian areas during the first decades of the 17th century. The study uses a new documentary source: the 1618 inquiry. Part one describes the main characteristics of this documentary source. The second part analyzes textiles sales according to the fibre the different fabrics were made of. The third part presents some notes on the typology of the textiles sold in the country. This allows us to describe the marketing areas of two highly representative products of the Castilian woollen industry: the Segovian and Andalusian cloth. Finally, in the fourth and last part we have estimated the consumption of textile fabrics by household. This analysis has also been completed with a study of the terms of trade between grain and some textile fabrics between 1614 and 1616. The results support the hypothesis of a higher consumption of textile products in Andalusia than in Old Castile at the beginning of the 17th century.

This article presents three new annual indices of industrial output for Andalusia, Catalonia and the Basque Country between 1830 and 1975. The comparative analysis, the first to include the Basque Country, allows to specify the main tendencies of growth and structural change in the regions studied, two of them pioneers of the Spanish industrialization, Andalusia clearly left behind. The analysis highlights as well the changes operated in the composition of their respective industrial products and, with them, the different regional paths, going from specialization to the manufacturing diversification, followed during the 19th and 20th centuries.

This article verifies the existence of three different and complementary geographies in the 1790–1830 period, a stage in the Catalan industrialization process that has deserved little attention among historians. The first one, of manual spinning by means of an improved jenny –locally named bergadana– in inner Catalonia; a second one of improved water-frame spinning in Manresa and the surrounding villages; and, finally, a third one of wood mule-jenny in Barcelona and some towns of the seaside district of the Maresme. These three areas were characterized by using distinctive power sources and producing different types of thread; they also had different wage levels; but they were complementary until the 1830's when the introduction of new mechanical instruments required important and innovative organization changes. The article ends with two analitical case studies: Salient as a typical example of manual spinning, and Manresa as a case of water frame spinning.

This article presents a comparative analysis of the productive performance of the modern Spanish iron and steel industry from its origins up to the Spanish Civil War. Three aspects are examined: the extent to which the industry had the potential to compete in world markets, whether or not Spanish mills applied new technologies to re-establish or maintain their competitivity and which elements limited or increased the advantage of their products. The analysis shows a revealed advantage in products intensive in iron ore. Part of this advantage can be traced back to preferential ore supply contracts. The limits to these preferential contracts introduced incentives for maintaining the reduced scale of Spanish installations. The attempt to gain control over home markets on behalf of Altos Hornos de Vizcaya may be related to these contractual limitations. The high profits reaped through the cartelisation of the industry and the wide margin of benefit obtained by producing within the scale of the preferential ore supply contracts provide an alternative explanation for the industry's performance in the period.

This article clarifies the means whereby the Catalan cotton industry attained independence from imported yarn in a critical stage of its development between the 1790s and the War of Independence. It does so by tracking the origins, and early diffusion, of the Arkwright technology in Catalonia in the form of a machine-making and spinning company formed between an Olotí stocking frame knitter, a Barcelona silver-smith and an Ávila trained machine-maker. The spinning and weaving initiatives of the Company inform on the circumstances conditioning the Catalan industry's incorporation of the spinning processes. Light is also thrown on the character of machine-making at this stage of Catalan industrialization in a pilot-enterprise anxious to restrict technical diffusion.