A Microcosm of Families: Workers, Factories, Owners

Abstract

In 1779, the Spanish journalist and Anglophile Francisco Mariano Nipho praised Catalonia’s industrial achievements by asserting, “If Catalonia were all of Spain, Spain would overshadow England.”¹ Nipho’s exaggerated claim had a grain of truth. The cotton industry had transformed the urban landscape of Barcelona in the second half of the century. Calico factories of all sizes replaced the characteristic vegetable gardens of neighborhoods such as El Raval, in the southeast part of the city. At the end of the century, factories in Barcelona employed more than 10,000 individuals and fostered a culture of prosperity and conspicuous display of wealth among Catalans.² This alone gave Barcelona the flair of a cosmopolitan, industrialized city that many observers praised.³ Arthur Young, the Englishman known for his travel diaries, invited other Spaniards to act like the industrious Catalans by establishing prosperous factories of wool and cotton textiles.⁴ In particular, it was the cotton industry that prompted Young’s and other visitors’ admiration for Barcelona’s burst of industrial activity. In 1792, the French Baron de Bourgoing observed how Barcelona owed its “splendor and wealth” to the activity of its many calico factories, of “which there are up to 150.”⁵