Introduction

Abstract

At age fifty, Joan Baptista Sirés became anxious that he would not find the right heir for his thriving Barcelona cotton factory. He had never married and had no illegitimate children; he had no younger brothers, and only one nephew and a younger cousin were interested in the business of printed cottons. Thus, in 1781, Sirés began to court his younger cousin Jacinto for the job while trying to arrange a marriage for him with the daughter of a wealthy family. The family of the future bride was very well connected in the commercial world of the cotton trade. Thus, the union was meant to help Jacinto in his professional future and, if Jacinto did become Sirés’s heir, it would also aid the factory’s interests. But Jacinto ruined his elder cousin’s plans by marrying a vicar’s niece from València instead.¹ Sirés treated Jacinto’s act as treachery and refused to name him heir, although Jacinto kept working for his cousin’s business until 1798. The persistent factory owner next focused on his nephew Antón, already a foreman in his factory. But the nephew also decided to become independent and left the factory to establish his own. In what was probably a desperate move, in 1793, at the age of sixty-two, Sirés got married, but for unknown reasons, the marriage lasted less than a year and left no offspring. Finally in 1806 Sirés decided to appoint his older brother Pau as head of the factory. Maybe his hope was to get Pau’s son interested in the family business. This probably never happened. When Sirés died, at eighty-four, he left all his fortune—by then diminished—to his grandnephew, the son of Antón, the nephew who deserted Sirés to establish his own factory.