Who pays the tax? The limits of merchant power in the Spanish wool trade.
In the second half of the 18th century, the flocks of Merino sheep that roamed the pastures of Castile were among the most valuable assets in the Spanish empire. Their fine wool – whiter, softer and finer than any European rival – was indispensable to the flourishing woollen manufactures of northern France, supplying roughly half of the value of total French wool imports during this period and underpinning a crucial branch of the French textile industry.
Portrait of Charles III of Spain by Anton Raphael Mengs (c. 1761)
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_III_of_Spain)
Between 1783 and 1789, the Spanish Crown nearly doubled the export duties on this precious commodity. The measure, implemented by Charles III, formed part of the King’s broader programme of reforms. But who actually paid these taxes? Did the cost fall on the Castilian flock owners who raised the sheep, the French manufacturers who needed the wool, or the Spanish merchants who moved it across the Bay of Biscay to the French port of Rouen? Historians have long assumed that merchants “earned the lion’s share” of the wool trade, one might thus expect them to transfer the tax either backward or forward along the chain – but the answer, as this paper shows, is far less straightforward.
Engraving, Rouen’s port in 1790 (https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/btv1b69492043)
In a new Fabric of Profit working paper, the author draws on the accounting books and correspondence of the Madrid-based merchant house Dutari Hermanos (Archivo Histórico del Banco de España) and the records of the Grandin woollen manufacture in Elbeuf, Normandy (Archives Départementales de la Seine-Maritime) between 1764 and 1792. This “archival handshake” across the Pyrenees traces the bales Dutari consigned to the Rouen market from the shearing stations of Castile to the looms of Normandy, connecting the fiscal ambitions of the Spanish Crown to their commercial consequences at the firm level.
By reconstructing the cost structure of the wool chain in the merchants’ sphere and combining aggregate price analysis with micro-historical evidence, the paper shows how the burden of Bourbon taxation was distributed – and contested – among growers, merchants, and manufacturers, with lasting consequences for the organisation of the Spanish-French wool trade on the eve of the Revolutionary Wars.
Read the full paper: Léa Meyer, "Power and Profit in the Spanish-French Wool Chain: The Distributional Effects of Fiscality (1764–1792)", Fabric of Profit Working Paper n°7.
Léa Meyer (The Fabric of Profit – University of Geneva)
FOOTNOTES
1 Phillips and Phillips, Spain’s Golden Fleece, 274.
Jan 17, 2025