ABSTRACT

The few instances of research that have analysed the evolution of economic history as a discipline in Spain (Vázquez de Prada 1990; Fernández Clemente 1995a and 1995b) coincide in affirming that it was a late developer compared to other countries. Indeed, its consolidation tends to be dated in practical terms to the 1970s; in other words, way behind the leading countries in the production of economic history, such as the United Kingdom or the United States. If we take our indicator to be the appearance of specialist journals on the subject, the delay is more than evident: while the Economic History Review was first published in 1927, and the Journal of Economic History appeared in 1941, the Revista de Historia Económica did not see the light in Spain until 1983. In spite of this, the study of economic history has forged ahead in this country over the past decades, and has significantly reduced the gap as regards other western countries. Today, the area of knowledge referred to as ‘economic history and institutions’ is taught at almost all the country’s public and private universities; the Spanish Association of Economic History has 445 members, and when this figure is compared to the data available for other countries, it puts Spain in eighth place in terms of the number of economic historians, or in twelfth place in terms of their number per million inhabitants (Baten and Muschallik 2011). Numerous domestic conferences and workshops dedicated to different facets of the subject (including its teaching) are held each year, along with the issue of many specialist publications; besides the aforementioned Revista de Historia Económica – Journal of Iberian and Latin American Economic History (RHE–JILAEH), there are a further three journals specializing in the subject, which in order of appearance are the following: Historia Agraria (HA, which appeared in 1991), Revista de Historia Industrial (RHI, appearing in 1992) and Investigaciones de Historia Económica – Economic History Research (IHE–EHR, first published in 2005). Beyond our frontiers, the publications by Spanish scholars in foreign journals on the subject, including the most prestigious ones, have increased significantly in recent times, as has attendance at international congresses. Spain (together with Portugal) was the country with the highest residual propensity to take part in the editions of the World Economic History Congress (WEHC) held in 2002 and 2009. 2 Although no data have been analysed on the matter, the impression gained from the 2012 WEHC held in South Africa is that the presence of Spanish researchers is continuing to grow, and the trend is likely to be confirmed in the 2015 congress to be held in Japan. One may conclude that the evolution of the study of economic history in Spain has certain similarities with the country’s own relative161 level of development, in the sense that there has been a process of convergence with more advanced countries and, while admittedly not catching up with them, it has significantly narrowed the gap existing at our point of departure. It would be a mistake, nonetheless, to view this convergence process solely as a success story. The increase in research in the discipline, in the number of its dedicated publications and its growing internationalization all point to an improvement, but it is worth delving further into the matter in order to understand the keys that may explain this trend, while also seeking to appraise the problems that have accompanied it. These are this chapter’s main aims, in which the discipline’s evolution in Spain is analysed, contextualizing it within different historical periods and seeking to shed light on the main lines characterizing it. This is not a traditional historiographical analysis that provides a review of the leading authors and their main works, but instead a historical and thematic analysis of the discipline’s trajectory more as an economic–social and intellectual phenomenon than as the mere sum of its individual works.