2026-2029 More industrial than once thought. Manufactures in 18th century Spain. Financiado por el Ministerio de Ciencia, Innovación y Universidades, Proyectos de Generación de Conocimiento, Investigación No Orientada B (PID2025-171078NB-I00). Principal investigator: Carmen Sarasúa
This new project intends to a) measure and b) explain the transformation of the occupational structure in the 18th century—what factors favored this transformation and what factors slowed it down. Our previous work with historical cartography specialists showed that a necessary first step is to locate industrial activity. We will analyze what variables correlate with industrial activity (energy supply, labor supply, access to transportation networks, access to urban centers), which could explain competitive cost structures that would have compensated for scarce capital; and the extent to which measures like trade policy and infrastructure policy were also determinative. At the same time, the unequal distribution of industry helps explain other territorial imbalances—population, wealth, infrastructures, services, and political weight—which negatively affected those regions with less industrial activity. We focus on the manufacturing sector, locating and describing industrial activity in all of its forms. To locate industrial activity we will convert our databases to maps. Following the Cambridge Group’s advances in industrial cartography, our project will constitute a qualitative and innovative leap forward in terms of sources, volume of data, and results. Situating manufacturing production across Spain for the entire 18th century will allow us to evaluate the impact of physical conditions; detect groupings, specializations, and patterns of diffusion; and compare territories. Our research confirms that in fact a large portion of manufactures took place outside of cities—in rural households and workshops attached to employers’ homes or within workers’ own homes. To ignore such domestic manufacturing—or to group it with production for household consumption—affects our understanding of women and children’s work. This also means that the rural economy cannot simply be identified with agricultural production, and that rural populations cannot simply be identified with agrarian employment. The main outcome of the Project will be the Atlas de las manufacturas en la España pre-industrial. Together with the series of journal articles planned focusing on regional and sectoral analysis, it will make a fundamental contribution to our knowledge of the roots of the modern economy and labor markets.
2022-2025 The long-term transformation of the occupational structure, Spain 1700-1920. Non-agricultural occupations as a proxy for economic modernization. Financiado por el Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación, Proyectos de Generación de Conocimiento, Investigación No Orientada (PID2021-123863NB-C21). Investigadora principal. In preceding projects, we have explored women’s participation rates and wages and those wages contribution to family economies over the long term (1700-1975) in Spain. Furthermore, we have shown that women and men’s occupational structures had important differences. As could already be inferred from empirical, local studies for other European countries, Spanish women were overwhelmingly occupied in manufactures and services, while men were concentrated in the primary sector. In this project we will take an important step in our analysis by looking systematically at the causes for the evolution of Spain’s occupational structure. Our main theoretical and methodological principles include the following:
- Occupational structure is as relevant an indicator of economic and social modernization as GDP structure. We study structural change—the gradual loss of agricultural employment and the parallel growth of non-agricultural employment—to understand when and where such modernization took place.
- Sectoral analysis of employment must include women, not only because they composed half of the labor force but also because they were concentrated in different sectors than were men; therefore, excluding them creates a distorted view of occupational structure (Sarasúa 2019). Rebutting a traditional argument, we have demonstrated that sources documenting women’s work in pre-census periods do in fact exist.
- We center our research in the preindustrial era, to find out where and how the Spanish population was working during the “long 18th century”, which ended approximately in 1820 with war and the resulting economic, social, and political turmoil.
2018-2021 Occupational Structure and Income in the Long Run: Redefining Economic Modernization and Living Standards in Spain, 1750-1975, principal investigator: C. Sarasúa, financed by Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad (HAR2017-85601-C2-1-P) The standard interpretation of economic modernization, based on the concept of structural change in GDP and employment (Kuznets), argues that the portion of a population occupied in non-agricultural activities begins to grow as a result of industrialization. Thus, Spain’s delayed industrial growth would be reflected not only in its large agrarian share of GDP but also in its heavily agrarian share of employment, which only fell below 50 percent in the 1920s. This interpretation has endured because the sources on which it is based—population censuses, beginning in 1877—exclude the majority of women’s work. When women's work is taken into account, not only does the total occupied population grow, but also the relative weights of the economic sectors change, since women were concentrated in non-agrarian occupations: manufacturing (particularly, textiles) and services (especially domestic service and retail sales). In recent years, research groups across Europe have begun to recover and analyze evidence of women's occupations in pre-industrial labor markets. With this international context and the ongoing debate on modernization as its starting points, this project aims to describe how structural change in employment took place in Spain. We have a number of goals. First, we will reconstruct the occupations of the Spanish population before, during, and after industrialization, particularly for women and children. Second, we will use the PSTI system to codify our databases of historical occupations, which will allow us to cross reference the occupations with demographic, wage, and educational indicators, thus facilitating international comparisons. Third, we will examine the importance of textile manufactures in rural Spain and, therefore, the extent to which the share of non-agricultural employment was actually higher in the 18th century than in the 19th century. Fourth, we will extend the research on historical wages, moving from the individual wage to family income as the ideal variable for identifying trends in inequality and poverty. Fifth, we will construct a series of nominal wages for a particular occupation of women—wet nurse of foundling hospital—whose wages are not affected by the methodological problems that hamper studies on historical wages. Sixth, we will study the extent of ‘pluriactivity’, especially with regard to seasonal and temporary migrations, which contributed greatly to family income and yet remain poorly understood and little studied.
2014-2018 Wages, Women's Participation and Living Standards, 1750-1950, principal investigator: C. Sarasúa, financed by Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad (HAR2013-47277-C2-1-P)
2010-2012 Reconstructing Women’s Activity Rates in Spain, 18th and 19th Centuries, principal investigator: C. Sarasúa, financed by Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación (HAR2009-11709)
2010-2011 Reconstructing Women’s Activity Rates in the Territories of the Crown of Aragón, 1716-1816, principal investigator: C. Sarasúa, financed by Institut Català de les Dones (U-35/10)
2010 Reconstructing The Female Labor Force Participation Rate in Western Europe, 18th and 19th Centuries, convenor: C. Sarasúa (co-convenor: J. Humphries), Exploratory Workshop, financed by European Science Foundation (Standing Committee for Social Sciences)
2009-2013 Economic Institutions, Living Standards, Environment, principal investigator: C. Sarasúa, Research Group (SGR 962), financed by AGAUR
2005-2010 Gender and Well-Being: Interactions between Work, Family and Public Policies (COST-A34), principal investigator: C. Borderías, financed by European Science Foundation (ESF) and European Cooperation in the Field of Scientific and Technical Research (COST)
2003-2005 Women's Work and Union Participation during Franco's Dictatorship (1940-1980), principal investigator: C. Sarasúa, financed by Ministerio de Trabajo y Asuntos Sociales +
2001-2004 The Socio-Economic Role of Domestic Service as a Factor in European Identity, principal investigator: A. Fauve-Chamoux, financed by European Commission
2001-2003 Tensions of Europe: Technology and the Making of 20th-Century Europe, principal investigator: J. Schot, financed by European Science Foundation
1993-1995 Gender and the Construction of Working Time, principal investigators: O. Hufton and Y. Kravaritou, financed by European Commission, DG VII