ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on a more traditional sector of the Catalan economy, cloth manufacturing, in which tariff protection remained low and largely ineffective and state intervention was only of secondary importance. By its output, as well as by the amount of labour employed, the Catalan wool textile industry compared favourably with the cotton industry and its contribution to the overall growth of this period must not have been negligible. The chapter traces in detail the rise of a cloth manufacturing family firm in one such town and puts forward several reasons for its success. Eighteenth-century Catalonia experienced a manifold process of economic change, in sharp contrast to the prevailing sluggishness of the contemporary Spanish economy. In short, commercial life in eighteenth-century Spain was still largely dominated by the activity of different 'trading diasporas' or associated networks of foreign merchants and tradesmen.
