The figure of the entrepreneur has become a relevant factor that explains the process of growth and economic development. Rising unemployment rates have generated among institutional and private agents, a significant interest in promoting entrepreneurship as a formula to eradicate this social scourge of unemployment. Active policies that favor business culture and initiative are being promoted in all areas.
In the university world, academic research has multiplied the work on entrepreneurship, a term that includes a triple meaning: the figure of the entrepreneur, the business function and the creation of companies. This versatile meaning must be based on a consistent theory about the company and the entrepreneur. This book presents specific cases of companies and entrepreneurs that have had their role throughout the history of Spain. The intention is to show the techniques and learning acquired by those agents, which have allowed a considerable advance in the knowledge of the structure and business development.
This book brings together the research carried out by its authors with primary sources and makes it accessible to a wide audience—Spanish and Latin American—and will be of value to researchers, academics, and students with an interest in Spanish entrepreneurship, business, and management history.
1. Entrepreneurship and the History of Company by Mariano Castro Valdivia. 2. Entrepreneurship, strategy and networks: the development of commercial and financial companies in Early Modern Castile by David Carvajal. 3. Windmills, not giants. Competition and monopoly on the Reinosa route by Rafael Barquín. 4. Lacave & Echecopar: Strategies and businesses in the second half of the nineteenth century by María Vázquez-Fariñas. 5. The Sociedad Azucarera Antequerana, a successful company in late nineteenth-century Spain by Mercedes Fernández-Paradas and José Francisco García-Ariza. 6. Small, Medium and Large Companies in the Supply of Water in Spain (1840-1940) by Juan Manuel Matés-Barco. 7. Credit companies, merchant-bankers and large national banks. The case of Andalusia (1800-1936) by María José Vargas-Machuca. 8. The private period of Spanish railways 1848-1941: a liberal project to modernise Spain by Miguel Muñoz Rubio and Pedro Pablo Ortúñez Goicolea. 9. The Spanish travel agency business in the early years of the Franco regime by Carlos Larrinaga. 10. The international expansion of the Spanish insurance company MAPFRE by Leonardo Caruana de las Cagigas. 11. Spanish entrepreneurs and the two Transitions (1975-1986) by Jorge Lafuente del Cano. 12. From the sector to the automobile cluster of Castilla y León. Its study through the history of Lingotes Especiales by Pablo Alonso-Villa and Pedro Pablo Ortúñez-Goicolea
Juan Manuel Matés-Barco is Professor of Economic History at the University of Jaen, Spain. Leonardo Caruana de las Cagigas is Professor at the University of Granada, Spain.
