ABSTRACT
The Spanish economy of the 1850s was essentially an agrarian economy, an economy which lacked, with the exception of the Catalan textile industry, a significant industrial sector and which was characterized by poor means of inland transport. In 1855, Spain possessed only 434 kilometers of railroad track. The country’s economic policies continued to protect the traditional interests of the landowning oligarchy. The slow transformation of the economy after mid-century was engineered by foreign entrepreneurs and foreign capital whose entry into Spain became significant only during the latter half of the nineteenth century. Although at this time Spain’s aristocracy had attempted to impede the growth of bourgeois political and economic powers, it never opposed the penetration of the economy by ‘international capitalism’. Spain’s wealthy oligarchy never identified the entry of foreign enterprise and of foreign capital into Spain with a threat to its economic position; it correctly perceived that foreign business interests would have to depend on it for the passage by the Cortés of laws favorable to foreign investment. For the financial aristocracy the founding of commercial and industrial enterprises financed by foreign capital meant above all a growth in the number of lucrative positions its members could hold, positions which enhanced rather than diminished their economic power. In its assessment of the impact of foreign investment on its own politico-economic interests, Spain’s financial elite did not err. It welcomed the import of foreign capital and foreign technology as long as the latter did not seem inconsistent with the maintenance or growth of its political and economic powers.
