Catalonia in Spain (eBook)

Gabriel Tortella is Professor Emeritus of Economic History at the Universidad de Alcalá, Madrid, Spain. He received the King Juan Carlos Economics Prize in 1994, and has been President of the International Economic History Association, the Spanish Economic History Association, and Chairman of the Academic Council of the European Association for Banking and Financial History, Frankfurt. Among his many publications, recent books include The Development of Modern Spain, The Origins of the Twenty-First, with J. A. Consiglio and J. C. Martínez Oliva, Banking and Finance in the Mediterranean with Gloria Quiroga, Entrepreneurship and Growth (Palgrave, 2013), and with José Luis García Ruiz, Spanish Money and Banking (Palgrave, 2013).

Catalonia in Spain 4
Contents 7
List of Figures 11
Introduction 13
1 Medieval Origins of the Spanish Nation 17
The Slow Birth of Spain: One Thousand Years of History (479–1479) 17
Medieval Catalonia 21
Toward Union 26
The Penultimate Step 33
Union 37
Conclusions 42
References 44
2 Catalonia in Early Modern Spain 45
The Difficult Welding of Two Crowns 45
The Seventeenth-Century Crisis 52
A Time of Depression 52
The War of the Reapers, the First Catalan Rebellion 55
Recovery 60
References 64
3 Reform and Progress in the Eighteenth Century 65
The War of Succession, Catalonia’s Second Rebellion 65
The Nueva Planta: Political, Economic, and Fiscal Innovations 73
The Political Nueva Planta 73
The Fiscal Nueva Planta: The Catastro 74
The Onset of Catalonia’s Development 80
Population 80
Agriculture 81
Catalonia in the Spanish Empire: Commerce and Industry 83
Commerce 83
Industry 85
Conclusions 87
References 88
4 The Peninsular War: Birth of a Nation 91
Introduction 91
Spain’s War of Independence 93
The ‘War of the French’ in Catalonia 97
Conclusions 100
References 101
5 Liberalism and Reaction 103
Economic Stagnation and Political Paralysis 103
A Growing Gap 103
Reactionary Catalonia: The Carlist Wars 105
The Slow Establishment of the Liberal System 110
Catalonia’s Political Weight 118
The Beginnings of Industrialization 130
Slow Recovery 130
The Rhetoric and the Cost of Protectionism 136
The Catalan ‘Renaissance’ 141
Nationalism and the 1898 Crisis 146
Conclusions 149
References 152
6 The Twentieth Century (1900–1975) 155
Spain in the Twentieth-Century Crisis 155
Catalanism in the Happy Twenties 163
The Lliga: Catalanists in the Spanish Government 163
Catalanism and the Primo de Rivera Dictatorship 168
The Second Republic 173
The Catalan Statute of Autonomy 173
From Revolution to Civil War 176
The Civil War 181
Postwar Repression 187
Economic Stabilization and Development 191
Politics in the Twilight of Fascism 191
Economic Development in Spain and Catalonia 194
Industrialization and State Intervention 195
The Problems of Catalan Banks 197
Commercial and Fiscal Balances: The Early Studies 199
Conclusions 200
References 203
7 From Dictatorship to Democracy 205
Introduction 205
Transition to Democracy 208
Is Still Catalonia ‘The Factory of Spain? 218
Crisis and Change in the Spanish Economy 218
The Catalan Economy at the Turn of the Century 222
The Generalitat in Action 223
First Steps 223
The 1979 Estatut: The Beginnings of Enforced Catalanization 225
The Banca Catalana Affair 230
Success and Failure of a Coercive Linguistic Policy 243
Controlling the means of Communication 249
The Catalan Population 252
The Education Policy of the Generalitat 257
Monolingualism 257
Nationalism 261
Nationalist History 264
The Social Support for Independence 274
Some Hotly Debated Issues 279
Fiscal Balances 279
Commercial Balances 283
Political Consequences of Separation 286
References 293
8 Conclusions 295
The Weight of History 295
Nation and Nationalism 298
The Causes of Catalan Nationalism 303
Why Now? 305
References 312
Bibliography 314
Index 317