Heavy Industry, the State, and Economic Development in the Basque Region, 1876-1936.

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.