Manufacturers Without a Factory

Through the trajectory of three generations of the Torelló Family, skilled workers from Igualada who made big fortunes, the author describes the changes that took place and were decisive for 18thcentury Catalonia.

Among the events dealt with in the book are: the workers’ guilds; the struggle for local power; the business of buying wool in Aragon and selling fabrics to Castile by the Torelló family; the confirmation of a Catalan “mercantile diaspora” to Spanish lands; and the consolidation of a “proto-industrial district” in Catalonia.