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Between the 1940s and 1970s, Spain used a variety of economic policies that hindered international trade. Because the mix of tariffs, quotas, administrative barriers, and exchange rate regimes varied greatly over time, the quantification of the effect of the various trade policies on international trade in this period is particularly elusive. In this paper, we use historical bilateral trade flows and a structural gravity model to quantify the evolution of Spain's border thickness, a summary measure of its barriers to international trade. We find that Spain's borders in the period 1948–75 were thicker than those of any other country in Western Europe, even after the liberalization of trade that started in 1959. These comparatively higher impediments to international trade implied substantial negative effects on consumer welfare. We estimate that accumulated welfare costs over the period 1948–75 exceed 20 per cent of a year's total consumption. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper studies the way workers and firms behaved in a highly cyclical sector such as the Catalan cotton textile industry. Using firm level evidence from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the paper shows that, in spite of weak unionization and the lack of regional or local collective bargaining institutions, piece rates in cotton spinning and weaving were not subject to competitive rate cuts and remained fixed over the cycle. When facing a negative demand shock, firms adjusted by reducing output, hours of work, labour productivity, and employment. The paper finally evaluates the possible sources of wage rigidity in the industry. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this response, we demonstrate that Mauricio Drelichman and Hans-Joachim Voth, in their 2015 Economic History Review note 'Duplication without constraints: Álvarez-Nogal and Chamley's analysis of debt policy under Philip II', provide a misconceived and inaccurate account of our argument about the finances of Philip II in 'Debt policy under constraints: Philip II, the Cortes, and Genoese bankers' ( Economic History Review, 2014). Here, we summarize our position in the context of the current literature and provide a few comments on data gathering. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines changes in the organization of the Spanish cotton industry from 1736 to 1860 in its core region of Catalonia. As the Spanish cotton industry adopted the most modern technology available and experienced the transition to the factory system, cotton spinning and weaving mills became increasingly vertically integrated. Asset specificity, more than other factors, explains this tendency towards vertical integration. The probability of a firm being vertically integrated was higher among firms located in districts with high concentration ratios, and rose with size and the use of modern machinery. At the same time, subcontracting predominated in other phases of production and distribution, where transaction costs appear to be less important. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article discusses the use of copper sheathing to protect the hulls of wooden ships from the ravages of the worm and the encrustations of weeds and barnacles in the eighteenth century. Though there are a few references to instances of sheathing with copper or its alloys before the middle of the eighteenth century, the overwhelming mass of references to sheathing up to that time are to sheathing with wood, a doubling of the outside planking of the ship below the waterline. The limited efficiency of wooden sheathing made it inevitable that other materials would be tried. Lead sheathing appears to have been known to the Romans, and was revived in the sixteenth century in Spain and Portugal, and used experimentally by this country on at least one occasion. Most works on the subject state that the first beginnings of copper sheathing date from the 1760's, but as early as 1708 the Navy was being approached by Charles Parry and others who had recently applied for a patent for sheathing ships with copper which without any hindrance to their sailing, will preserve them from worms and barnacles in their voyages to the East and West Indies, and prevent all occasions of covering and repairing them.

Infant and childhood sex ratios in nineteenth‐century Spain were abnormally high, thus pointing to some sort of unexplained excess female mortality. This article analyses internal regional variation and shows that certain economic and social factors mitigated gender discrimination against newborn and/or young girls. In particular, the presence of wage labour opportunities for women and the prevalence of extended families in which different generations of women cohabited had beneficial effects on girls' survival. Likewise, infant and child sex ratios were lower in dense, more urbanized areas. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The rise of a mass, agri‐industrial diet after the Second World War was crucial for the culmination of the nutritional transition that western countries had been involved in since the second half of the nineteenth century—but why did the industrial diet triumph? This article takes the massification of dairy consumption in Spain 1965–90 as a study case. Using a newly constructed database and qualitative material within an evolutionary socio‐economic framework, the article reaches two conclusions. First, the massification of dairy consumption was linked to most households' transition to a softer budget constraint, which was driven mainly by increasing household incomes (and only secondarily by consumer price reductions caused by food industrialization). Second, the reason why the softening of the budget constraint played such a major role was that it was joined by a substantial increase in consumer trust in dairy products, which in turn resulted from industrial standardization. The article is in line with recent work that underlines the dietary change brought about by food industrialization, but questions whether the latter's major contribution was of a quantitative, price‐related nature and suggests that more attention should be paid to the qualitative, preferences‐related dimension. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Spanish land reform, involving the breakup of the large southern estates, was a central issue during the first decades of the twentieth century, and was justified on economic and political grounds. This article employs new provincial data on landless workers, land prices, and agrarian wages to consider whether government intervention was needed because of the failure of the free action of markets to redistribute land. Our evidence shows that the relative number of landless workers decreased significantly from 1860 to 1930, before the approval of the 1932 Land reform during the Second Republic (1931–6). This was due to two interrelated market forces: the falling ratio between land prices and rural wages, which made plots of land cheaper for landless workers to rent and buy; and structural change that drained the rural population from the countryside Given that shifts in factor prices were already helping workers gain access to land by the 1930s, the economic arguments for introducing reform at that time remain unclear. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article studies the impact of insecure property rights on the behaviour of owners of land before the Spanish Civil War. The theoretical literature on land reform argues that legal threats to the status quo determine agrarian organization, with owners selling land and moving to other asset classes or engaging in large‐scale substitution of sharecroppers and tenants with wage labourers. This study, which uses municipal data on tenant evictions in Catalonia in 1934–5, does not find that uncertainty over property rights in the 1930s meant that owners tried to substitute tenants with wage labourers, especially in the case of the controversial rabassa morta contracts on vineyards. Here it is argued that after 40 years of organizational adjustment to shocks related to phylloxera infestations, legal changes, urbanization, and changes in relative prices, by the 1930s the margin for adjustment was small. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There is no consensus among specialists in agricultural contracts over whether the long-term inefficiencies that classical economists attributed to sharecropping actually exist. This article maintains that they do exist and are partly caused by the fact that sharecropping is hardly compatible with the tenant being compensated for improvements, viticulture being the main historical exception. In line with recent contributions to the sharecropping literature, the article contends that the widely held belief among scholars of agricultural contracts that sharecropping was very frequent in Europe's vineyards is incorrect. However, it also provides evidence of an issue whose importance has gone largely unnoticed: prior to the twentieth century, many of the European vineyards worked by sharecroppers had been created by the sharecroppers themselves, through contracts which entitled them to compensation. Those contracts abounded while viticulture depended basically on two inputs, land and labour. When viticulture became a heavy consumer of capital, they were rapidly abandoned, but not in Catalonia, with a paradoxical result: the Catalan rabassa morta contract, which for centuries had made it possible to eliminate both the long- and short-term inefficiencies of sharecropping, ended up becoming an obstacle to overcoming the short-term inefficiencies. The article discusses why that happened. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

During the decades prior to the Civil War, Spain experienced a rapid process of urbanization, which was accompanied by the demographic transition and sizeable rural-urban migrations. This article investigates how urban housing markets reacted to these far-reaching changes, which increased demand for dwellings. To this end, this study employs a new hedonic index of real housing prices and constructs a cross-regional panel dataset of rents and housing price fundamentals. This new evidence indicates that rents were not a significant financial burden on low-income families and, hence, housing was affordable for the working classes. The article also shows that families' access to new homes was facilitated by a sizeable growth in the housing supply. Substantial investments in urban infrastructure and the institutional framework enabled the construction of new homes at affordable prices. Our results suggest that housing problems were not as pervasive during the urban transition as the literature often seems to claim. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drawing on a large database from the register of inhabitants of Madrid, this article confirms that the literacy levels of internal migrants moving to the Spanish capital city in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century were higher than that of those who remained in their provinces of origin. This article also explores the different factors influencing the nature and intensity of the selection process. The empirical exercise stresses that the stock of previous migration was a fundamental factor in allowing less literate individuals to join the migration process as well. Interestingly, distance to Madrid hardly affected the profile of male migrants, but it was a strong influence on female migration, although its importance diminished over time. Lastly, the results presented here show that other internal destinations were attracting different types of migrants, often resulting in negative self-selection. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Research on economic inequality in early modern Europe is complicated by the lack of appropriate data for reconstructing income or wealth distributions. This article presents a study of income inequality in mid-eighteenth-century Old Castile ( Spain) using the Ensenada Cadastre, a census conducted between 1749 and 1759. The article describes the information provided by this census and then discusses its advantages and disadvantages for reconstructing income profiles and calculating income inequality. This is followed by analysis of a dataset derived from the Cadastre that consists of more than 4,000 observations from Palencia (a province in northern Spain) and contains information on sources of household income, each household head's main occupation, residence location, and other household characteristics. Demographic data from this census is used to weight observations in the sample and thereby minimize selection bias. Findings show that inequality in eighteenth-century Spain was probably substantial despite its relative backwardness; that the relationship between inequality and per capita income was not clear-cut and was probably influenced by measurement of the higher incomes; and that although income inequality was largely driven by uneven land distribution, labour income also contributed to overall inequality-especially in urban centres. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Carlos Álvarez- Nogal and Christophe Chamley recently published an article in the Economic History Review on ' Debt policy under constraints: Philip II, the Cortes, and Genoese bankers'. In this note, we show that several claims in their article are very similar to earlier research results, published or circulated long before Álvarez- Nogal and Chamley's original submission, by ourselves and other scholars (section I). These results are repeated without attribution or even mention of the earlier work. In addition, we show that what Álvarez- Nogal and Chamley present as new quantitative insights are actually replications of earlier results of ours (section II). Finally, Álvarez- Nogal and Chamley misrepresent our contributions, as well as those of several other scholars (section III). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Catalonia was the only Mediterranean region among the early followers of the British industrial revolution. The roots of this process can be traced back to the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries when the Catalan economy became integrated into international trade, and a successful printed calico industry concentrated in the city of Barcelona. Although the factory system was largely adopted by the cotton industry in the 1840s, the diffusion of the spinning jenny in Catalonia had occurred earlier, in the 1790s. In line with Allen, this article explores whether relative factor prices played a role in the widespread adoption of the spinning jenny in Catalonia. First, series of real wages in Barcelona are supplied for the period 1500-1808. Second, the prices of labour and capital are compared and the potential profitability of the adoption of the spinning jenny is analysed. Findings show that although Catalonia was not a high wage economy in the way that Britain was in the second half of the eighteenth century, evidence from the cotton spinning sector confirms the relevance of relative factor prices in the adoption of new technology. Within the booming cotton sector after the 1780s, high wages created strong incentives for the adoption of the labour-saving spinning jenny. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Very few empirical studies have analysed the labour market performance of migrants in European countries in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This article uses a rich new micro-dataset to examine the occupational attainment of migrants, mostly internal migrants, in the city of Barcelona, a key destination from the late nineteenth century onwards, adding to the literature on internal migrations in Spain during the period of industrialization. The study shows that the occupational outcomes achieved by early migrants tended to match those of natives, the reference group. However, some groups of migrants who arrived at the end of the period covered by the study show poorer outcomes than natives. The relative underachievement of these groups is explained by changes in the type of migrants and in the characteristics of the labour market. Our estimates also suggest that Spanish migrants did not experience upward occupational mobility after settling in Barcelona. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Two distinctive regimes are distinguished in Spain over half a millennium. The first one (1270s-1590s) corresponds to a high land-labour ratio frontier economy, which is pastoral, trade-oriented, and led by towns. Wages and food consumption were relatively high. Sustained per capita growth occurred from the end of the Reconquest (1264) to the Black Death (1340s) and resumed from the 1390s only broken by late fifteenth-century turmoil. A second regime (1600s-1810s) corresponds to a more agricultural and densely populated low-wage economy which, although it grew at a pace similar to that of 1270-1600, remained at a lower level. Contrary to pre-industrial western Europe, Spain achieved its highest living standards in the 1340s, not by mid-fifteenth century. Although its death toll was lower, the plague had a more damaging impact on Spain and, far from releasing non-existent demographic pressure, destroyed the equilibrium between scarce population and abundant resources. Pre-1350 per capita income was reached by the late sixteenth century but only exceeded after 1820. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article revises the traditional view of Spain as a predatory colonial state that extracted revenue from natural resources and populations in the Americas while offering little in return. Using eighteenth-century Spanish American treasury accounts, we show that local elites exerted important control not only over revenue collection, as previously argued by the authors, but also over expenditure allocation. The Spanish colonial state developed into a stakeholder model, in which local interests were deeply invested in the survival and expansion of empire. The means of co-optation were intra-colonial transfers, as well as credit relations between the state and colonial individuals and corporations, which guaranteed that much of colonial revenue was immediately fed back into the local economy, while minimizing enforcements costs. By allowing stakeholder control of both revenue and expenditure, Spain managed to avoid the problems faced by France, where royal control of expenditure clashed with partial elite control of revenue-raising. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article uses historical fact as a natural experiment to measure a country's welfare loss from shifting from an allowed to a restricted trade situation, based on international trade theory. A welfare loss of 8 per cent of GDP is found. The evolution of domestic import and export prices in Spain in 1940-58 fits international trade theory assumptions. The main years of autarky are not those commonly considered, but 1947-55, marked by the exclusion of Spain from the Marshall Plan and the Madrid Treaty between Franco's regime and the US. The upper-bound welfare loss for 1947-55 is 26 per cent of GDP. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Colonial Mexico’s economy experienced a long phase of growth during the eighteenth century. Around 1800, silver exports and fiscal surplus remittances from the colony rose to unprecedented levels. We study the contribution of the Spanish imperial state’s policy to the expansion of silver production and the leading role of mining in economic growth and its fiscal implications. We find evidence to support a more favourable view of both the mining sector and the imperial state than that commonly presented in the literature. The interruption of colonial ‘mining-led growth’ helps to explain the ‘lost decades’ for the economic development of Mexico after independence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Fixed-rent contracts do not free landlords from the need to supervise the land if it is of high value and fragile fertility, nor do they free them from the costs of monitoring farmers if they are poor peasants prone to fall into arrears. In such cases, however, compensation for improvements will encourage tenants to farm with care and act as a bond against non-payment of rent. This article studies the repercussions of these kinds of situations by analysing what happened in nineteenth-century Valencia, where being the owners of the improvements led to tenants eventually becoming the owners of the land. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The concept of proto-industrialization is considered by many historians to have outlived its usefulness. This article seeks to argue the contrary, using a case study from Catalonia, in southern Europe, which provides a rare example of early industrialization on the periphery of Europe. Using an in-depth study of an important proto-industrial community, Igualada, the article puts forward two key arguments. First, it shows how the proto-industrialization of the woollen industry and later the cotton industry shaped the transition to the factory. There were important continuities throughout in terms of human capital and organization of production; in particular, the persistence of the family as unit of production. Second, the impact of proto-industrialization on the family economy is shown to have had important consequences for demographic behaviour. As in other areas of Europe, there was a notable impact on age at marriage and on marital fertility. Equally important, however, was the impact on mortality and migration, aspects that have been neglected by historians. In particular, the high infant and child mortality rates for Igualada suggest that historians need to rethink the effect of proto-industrialization upon life chances. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Cotton was central to Catalan industrialization and, within cotton, progress in spinning and weaving, originating in the late eighteenth century, provided the cutting edge in the industry's modernization. This article tests the current orthodoxy concerning the timing and causes of this breakthrough. It does so by first evaluating what were external influences on the success‐government policy, the elasticity of supply of spun yarn (a potential disincentive) and of raw cotton‐and then providing an analytical narrative of the advance first in hand and then mechanical spinning. On this basis a conclusion is reached that government policy was more advantageous to the development than posited in the current orthodoxy, that elasticity in the supply of spun yarn slowed the transition and that, though growing availability of American cotton eased the transition, the key to the development is to be found within the Catalan economy, experiencing a 'Smithian'‐type growth process in the eighteenth century, within which industrialization of cotton was nearly the last achievement before Spain's severe 'old régime crisis' curtailed economic opportunity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on obstacles to the emigration of Spanish labor. Contrary to the consensus in the subject literature, it seems that the wheat tariff exercised a positive impact on labor emigration, rather than a negative one. Within a Heckscher-Ohlin model, tariffs increased impediments to trade and stimulated the international mobility of the relatively abundant factor which in the Spanish economy was labor. Emigration from Spain may have been income constrained, in which case higher real wages would have stimulated emigration. However, currency depreciation during the period under consideration actively discouraged emigration. The calculations presented here show that in the absence of depreciation, emigration from Spain could have been more than 40 per cent higher during the period 1892-1905. The difference is significant because of "chains" that these potential emigrants might have developed, and it may account in great part for the differences in labor emigration between Spain and countries such as Italy.

The article discusses the economic history of Spain since 1800. Before the First World War, industrialization made very little headway south of the Pyrenees. Modern industrial development remained overwhelmingly confined to peripheral regions such as Catalonia, the Basque Country, Asturias, and the Pais Valenciano. The expansion of the Catalan textile industry, Spain's leading sector, after the loss of the Spanish American market came about largely at the expense of inferior goods such as the linen industry of Galicia. During the agricultural depression of the late 1880s, the cotton industry of the principality sought some consolation in the protected Cuban market. Yet once the Antilles were lost following the Spanish-American War of 1898, the Catalan textile industry was plunged into a 30-year crisis of over-production. After 1860 the mining sector might have made a considerable contribution to the economic development of Spain owing to Spain's rich deposits of metals such as lead, copper, and zinc.

The article focuses on the medieval origins of the great landed estates of the Guadalquivir valley. Although knowledge of the agrarian structures of Islamic Andalusia, Spain is very limited, it would nevertheless be sensible to recognize that there were already inequalities in the way in which land was shared out among the Muslims. Moreover it is perfectly clear that irrigation, however important it may have been, only characterized a very small part of the total cultivated area of the region. Similarly, it would seem obvious that, after their successful conquest in the thirteenth century, the Christians carried out a complete change in patterns of agrarian exploitation. In any case establishing a classification of landed estates is always a difficult problem. The extent to which it is legitimate to apply modern concepts about the latifundios to the medieval world, given both the differences between the agrarian systems then and now is questioned and the different results to be expected from radically dissimilar levels of technological expertise.

The article focuses on the economic development of Basque, Spain in 1876-1936. According to the author, the principal obstacle to Spanish economic development during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was the persistence of profound structural problems in the dominant agricultural sector. The refusal to implement far-reaching agrarian reform, in particular the redistribution of landed property, meant that the performance of Spain's embryonic and uncompetitive industrial sector became inextricably bound up with the fortunes of traditional agriculture based on the monocultivation of wheat, the vine and olives on dry lands which gave some of the lowest yields in Europe. Nevertheless, as generations of Spanish businessmen were to discover to their own cost, the policy of relying on the unrepresentative and inefficient political elite in Madrid to help solve their problems was fraught with all kinds of risks. The Basque region of northern Spain, with its coastal location adjacent to the Bay of Biscay, proved initially the ideal site for exploitation.

The article discusses the key trends of wool trade in Spain in the seventeenth century. A key transition period widely recognized as being that in which the long phase of growth in the European economy, dating from the mid-fifteenth century, finally ended and the protracted general depression of the seventeenth century began. Shipments of Castilian wool to the main European markets were at a drastically lower level in the 1620s than they had been for many decades and lower also than they were to be subsequently. Although Castilian wool exports largely recovered again within a decade or so, there are grounds for thinking that analysis of this striking phenomenon may add to our knowledge of what appears to have been a general shift of exceptional importance in early modern European history. During the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, with the deterioration in the quality of English wool and mounting restrictions on its export, Castilian wools gradually emerged as the principal raw material in making high-quality cloth in Western Europe.

The article focuses on the economic history of Spain. The huge and unprogressive agricultural sector which dominated the Spanish economy in terms of output and employment received a major setback in the last quarter of the nineteenth century due to the entry of cheap foreign wheat coupled with outbreaks of phylloxera which ravaged Spanish vineyards. Explanations of Spain's agricultural backwardness highlight the lack of rural credit banks in a countryside riddled by usury and the tacit encouragement of emigration by successive governments which simultaneously failed to enact basic agrarian reforms. The socio-economic effects of the mass exodus of peasants from the Castilian heartland during the Restoration years--between 1903 and 1917, one-twelfth of all Spaniards quit the Peninsula--are evaluated by Ricardo Robledo. Contemporary agrarian reformers, inspired by the Aragonese lawyer, Joaquin Costa, campaigned for a solution to the problems of Spanish agriculture not in the wide-scale redistribution of land aimed at breaking up the large-scale estates of the south or to reconstitute the microscopic plots of the north-west, but in the widespread use of irrigation.

This article discusses the study of the economic and social history of Spain. The fundamental introduction to the demographic history of Spain is the short study by scholar J. Nadal. Although it covers only the modern period, the book is a masterpiece of succinct analysis, the main themes of which are provided by contrasts: the Spanish experience is compared to a European model, and an ancient regime cycle is contrasted with the new demographic cycle of growth which, while lagging behind the European model, began in the eighteenth century. Within this framework Nadal also manages to include much data on related themes, such as diseases, epidemics, the regional distribution of population, migrations, and expulsions. It is against the background of Nadal's book that comments on recent studies must be set. Firstly, there are the variables of documentation. The fogatges and libros de fuegos of late medieval Catalonia and Navarre, for example, have to be set against an almost complete absence of similar evidence for the kingdoms of Castile and Granada. Secondly, there is the intractable problem posed by the moving frontier.

This article focuses on the decline of noble income in Spain during sixteenth-century with investigating the income of the estates of the marquises of Mondéjar during 1480-1580. The decline of the real incomes of the Castilian nobility has been one of the few points of certainty in the debate over the causes, extent, and effects of the sixteenth-century price rise. According to the author, the lack of researches and literature concerning this issue is particularly serious because the nobility were the great agricultural landlords of the country and the Spanish economy was essentially agricultural. Two aspects of the Mondéjar estate have wide implications for the nobility as a whole. First, in tracing a specific set of archival documents through a century of administration and litigation, it becomes apparent that the functions of three legal instruments common to all noble estates have not been clearly understood. Second, the archival evidence for the income and expenditures of the Mondéjars shows that their real income did not decline during this period.

The article comments on the article "British Armaments and European Industrialization, 1890-1914: The Spanish Case Re-Examined," by R.J. Harrison. Harrison's article examined the economic and political conditions in Spain from 1890 to 1914. It is discusses the industrialization of European countries and how Great Britain was imbibed on building armaments. The article also considers Spain's working population that is engaged in agriculture during the period. It explores the scandal involving the Spanish naval program of the government of Antonio Maura. Official Assessor of the Naval Ministry, Juan Macias, accused the whole government of prevarication in the adjudication of tenders for the squadron.

The article looks at the economic and political conditions in Spain from 1890 to 1914, the period when European countries were industrialized and Great Britain was imbibed on building armaments. It discusses the controversy on the contract awarded by the Spanish government to a British company to construct several naval ships. The percentage of Spain's working population that is engaged in agriculture during the period. The article also discusses the Maura legislation, which involved the elimination of a program for the economic regeneration of Spain based on the improvement of agricultural yields, the development of communications, the extension of the market for consumer goods, and the creation and safeguarding of agricultural employment.

The article examines the attempts of the manufacturers in Catalonia, Spain to overcome the effects of the loss of the Cuban export market in 1898. Judged by western European standards, nineteenth-century Catalonia displayed few features of a modern industrial region. In the region's leading sector, the cotton industry, small-scale units predominated throughout the century as did a cult of individualism spread by the continuance of family firms, out-of-date machinery, and an unhealthy disregard for the virtues of an efficient banking system. It was the manufacturing classes of Catalonia who led the demand for the protection of national industry. From 1780 they organized themselves into a series of associations with this objective solely in mind. An important consequence of Catalonia's industrial retardation and of the defensive attitude of a good many of its entrepreneurs was the relative unimportance of overseas markets for the region's manufactured goods. The overwhelming majority of Catalonia's manufactures found an outlet in the rest of the peninsula.

This article provides a historical account of internal transpiration, the status of carters and carting organizations under the Spanish government between 1476 and 1700, based on the literary works of Julius Klein. The only coherent description of even a portion of the internal transportation of early modern Spain is buried in the work of Julius Klein. In 1920 Klein devoted three pages of his book on the Mesta to a description of cart transport and its relationship to the government. He described a national organization of carters, called the "Cabana Real de Carreteros," which was recognized by Isabella I in 1497 and given a number of privileges similar to those of the Mesta. Among the many reforms which Isabella's reign brought to Castile was the direct assistance for the carters which Klein suggested, though not in the form he described. In revising and clarifying its relationship with the carters, the crown systematized privileges previously used irregularly. At the same time it defined the carters' obligation to give priority to royal demands.