Beyond the guilds and calico textile factories. The diversity kinds of the industrial production in Catalonia (Eighteenth and nineteenth centuries)

Abstract

In this paper, we focus on dozens of economic activities that are developed in rural areas beyond farming. They are seasonal, require a lot of manpower and became a vital income for the rural population. They are not proto-industrial activities, but involve certain level of transformation of raw materials in those rural areas. In this paper we describe those activities to show how they have played an important role in the production of goods and services in Catalonia and therefore, are key factors to understand economic growth in rural areas. Technical changes and new raw materials imports are largely the cause of its disappearance. And consequently, some of the rural population should adapt to this new situation, sometimes reinventing those activities, and some other migrating elsewhere.

Keywords: protoindustrialization, economic diversification, pluriactivity.