Sobre la protoindustrialització. Reflexions a partir d'un cas local, Alcoi (segles XVI-XIX)

At the end of the sixties was reconsidered, from another premises, the role represented by the traditional industry in the transition of the agrarian society to the industrial, from the feudalism to the capitalism. Front the positions that defended a rupture between the traditional factory and the modern based on the factory system, a vision surged that recognized in some elements of the industrial organization previous to the process of mechanization and concentration, the genetic antecedents of the Industrial Revolution. In this context a new term in the economic history appeared: the protoindustrialization, defined as the first phase of the process of industrialization. With this contribution, the author intends to incorporate some elements that call it in question, by means of the analysis of a case that seems to adjust to the demands of the theory, that of the preindustrial drapery of Alcoi. For the author, the paradigm results insufficient in order to explain the process, neither just in the case that fulfill the conditions demanded by him.