|
Basque Center
BASQUE STUDIES
Tutorial Ph D
Minor
Online courses
Guggenheim
Lesson
1
Lesson 2
Lesson
3
Course Syllabi
Language
|
|
Online Course C460 ·
Bilbao Guggenheim Museum
Lesson two
Bilbao’s history and the world
economic system
The English connection
Required reading
Eduardo J. Glass. “The Development of the Mining
Industry” (Chapter 2, Bilbao’s Modern Business
Elite, Univ. of Nevada Press, Reno, 1997.)
Eric Wolf. “Industrial Revolution” (Chapter 9,
Europe and the People Without History, Univ. of California
Press, Berkeley, 1982.)
Suggested reading
Raymond Williams. “Country and City” and
“Pastoral and Counter-Pastoral” (Chapters 1 and 3,
The Country and the City, Oxford Univ. Press, New
York, 1973.)
Learning goals
1. Situate Bilbao’s history in the European
and global contexts.
2. The dialectics of the economic-cultural
relationship between Bilbao and its Basque hinterland.
3. The direct connections between the English
industrial revolution and Bilbao.
4. The symbiotic relationship between local and
global capital.
Bilbao is situated in the Spanish province of
Bizkaia. It is the birthplace of both Basque nationalism and
Spanish Socialism.
Its history, social makeup, and political
significance underscore the role of serving for centuries as
the commercial center for its rural Basque hinterland as
well as, for the last hundred and fifty years, the mining
and industrial magnet for Spanish migrants. To better
appreciate the historical differences attached to urban city
formations, one must situate Bilbao in its larger
geographical setting.
”Country” (in the sense of land and nation)
and “city” are very powerful words, argues Raymond
Williams. The “country way of life” has included
hunters, pastoralists, farmers, and factory farmers, as well
as their respective various social organizations. Likewise,
the city has been of many kinds: administrative base, state
capital, religious center, market-town, port and mercantile
depot, and industrial concentration. For centuries Bilbao
was a small mercantile port, but since the turn of last
century it has been an industrial city. It is the sense of
possibility that characterizes a city.
In an otherwise “pastoral” Basque society,
Bilbao has represented the counter-pastoral. The pastoral
implies a particular structure of customs, beliefs, and
sentiments tied to the epic of animal husbandry. Agriculture
and trading are part of a way of life in which effort and
prudence are primary virtues. The myth of a golden age is
always close. The pastoral has a long literary tradition
going back to the Hellenistic world. The Virgilian arcadia,
the idyllic world, the utopian vision of a Second Coming and
the restoration of the golden age are all part of this
pastoral world view.
Basques, widely depicted as shepherds, have had their
share of pastoral representations, but the main industrial
and urban Basque center shatters that salient collective
representation of the Basques. This illustrates well the
fact that all traditions are selective and the pastoral as
much as any other. In such tradition the transition from the
rural to the industrial is a kind of fall. The power of this
myth has been extraordinary not only in Basque nationalist
politics but in modern social thought as
well.
Bilbao’s mining tradition represents the
counter-pastoral. It goes back at least to Roman times when
Pliny wrote about a “mountain of iron” near
Bilbao. The ferrerias or foundries kept the mining
tradition alive throughout the Middle Ages, but it was the
second half of 19th century, when approximately one hundred
million tons of ore were extracted from the Mount Triano,
which proved that Pliny was right. Bilbao became one of
Europe’s busiest seaports and attracted immigrants from
other parts of Spain. Bilbao had placed itself at the
industrial center of the European capitalist
system.
Wolf provides the world historical perspective from
which to understand Bilbao’s role. From the 15th
century on, European soldiers and sailors, merchants in the
service of “God and profit,” provided wide-ranging
military and naval support while furnishing commodities to
overseas suppliers in exchange for goods to be sold as
commodities at home. The outcome was the creation of a
commercial network on a global scale. As a result, for three
and a half centuries Spain and Portugal divided South
America among themselves; England and France, the Antilles
plus North America.
The growth of European commerce encountered its own
limits and contradictions. The State had to be transformed
from a tributary structure to a structure of support for
capitalist enterprise. The breakthrough from mercantile
domination to the capitalist mode of production was achieved
in England. Why England? There is no comprehensive answer
but Wolf points to the transformation of agriculture into
business, the high degree of interaction among commercial
agents, the weakening of the aristocracy, and the fact that
peasant lands were converted into
leaseholds.
Mechanization was a crucial aspect of the industrial
revolution. Inventors had to render spinning more
productive, and by 1830 Watt’s steam engine was
transforming a manual operation into a mechanical one where
one mule spinner could work as many as 1,600 spindles. The
new labor conditions forced females and juveniles into the
work force and by 1838 only 23% of textile factory workers
were adult men. The English textile industry gave birth to a
new mode of production. Capitalists could buy machines and
hire workers to operate them in exchange for wages. Thus,
capital could control the means of production and rearrange
them in the service of profitability. At the same time,
capital began a process of international
migration.
In addition to machines and labor, a crucial aspect
of this international expansion had to do with raw
materials. Factories needed materials from far away regions
of the world. One of those raw materials, iron ore, was
crucial for developing the new railroad and shipbuilding
industries. With this Bilbao became a strategic partner with
the British Empire, and with capitalist specialization,
economic dependence became worldwide. The movement of
commodities reached a market of global magnitude, which
necessitated an articulated system of capitalist and
non-capitalist relations of production linked by relations
of exchange that were dominated by capitalist accumulation.
One of the consequences of the new worldwide system was the
creation of about 12 million slaves (36 million died on the
journey from Africa). American natives, originally estimated
between 12 and 18 million, were reduced to 500,000 in
1900.
As described by Glass, in Vizcaya, a small group of
owners took advantage of their early acquaintance with the
iron trade by controlling the most productive mines.
Production increased substantially and Bilbao’s iron,
with its rich metallic content, was ideal for the Bessemer
converter (applied in Bilbao since 1856), and could be
extracted cheaply. On the other hand, Vizcaya was relatively
close to England and thus explains the strong relationship
between Bilbao and Great Britain. More than two-thirds of
British imports of ore came from Bilbao.
The invention of Henry Bessemer’s converter in
1856 allowed cheap production of steel in vast quantities.
Bilbao’s output of iron ore went from 55,000 tons in
1861 to 2,684,000 tons in 1880 to 6,496,000 in 1898. The
fact that Great Britain, the world’s imperial power,
imported two-thirds of her iron ore from Bilbao (or 65-75%
of Bilbao’s annual exports) gives us a sense of
Vizcaya’s crucial role in the global capitalist system
of late 19th century. Foreign companies came to Bilbao not
only as buyers of ore, but also as backers and participants
in the exploitation of the mines. Investments in the iron
and steel industries, railroads, and the harbor, proved that
international capital was crucial to the region’s
industrialization. In fact, the two most important foreign
companies, the Orconera Iron Ore Co. and the
Société Franco-Belge des Mines de Somorrostro,
were multinationals. Orconera Iron Ore Co. was formed in
1873 by the association of the Ybarras, two British pioneers
of the Bessemer converter and the German industrial firm
Krupp. The Ybarras were also founding partners in the
Société Franco-Belge, formed in 1876. Why did
the Ybarras associate with foreign partners? Essentially, to
spread the risks in an uncertain time.
The harbor was a key part of the infrastructure and
was renovated and financed by private (national and foreign)
and public funds. Railroads connecting three mines with the
harbor were built on the 1870s.
Massive infusions of foreign capital were needed to
meet the needs of mine owners. Such complex realities cannot
be easily translated into assumptions that mineral resources
were “colonized” or “plundered” by
foreigners. For example, the Ybarra’s income was
derived from royalties and dividends and represented more
than 50% of the Orconera’s profits, which was much
higher than their 25% of the company’s stocks. Glass
estimates that overall the local business elite pocketed
between 56.3% and 74% of all the mining profits. Far from
being deleterious to local interests, it was therefore a
good symbiotic relationship, which included, besides
profits, the transfer of European technology. Needless to
say, without foreign capital Vizcaya’s
industrialization would have been much more difficult.
Foreign companies extracted 40% of Vizcaya’s iron from
1880-1900. All in all, there was good symbiotic relationship
between foreign and Basque capital. Historians estimate that
between 60 and 75% of all the gains remained in the pockets
of Bilbao’s industrial elite.
Written Lesson for Submission
Please write a two to three page essay on one of
the topics below or choose another relevant topic. Again,
the essay should creatively engage with the facts and ideas
presented in the written materials and should not consist of
merely repeating the information offered by the instructor
and the readings.
1. Situate Bilbao’s industrial
development in the European economic context.
2. Assess the widespread pastoral representations
of the Basques.
3. Was Bilbao at the core or at the periphery of
the world capitalist system?
4. Discuss the validity of colonial
interpretations of Basque economic history.
|
