El sector textil y el comercio exterior de Mallorca en una época de cambio (1630/1720)

Abstract

Durinf the seventeenth century, the economy of Mallorca experienced a deep structural change associated especially with its export capacity. The traditional hegemony of wool manifacture was broken, giving way to the supremacy of olive oil. Low-quality clothes underwent a faster decrease, leading them ultimately to disappear from exports, while from 1680 the purchase of linen and cotton fibres and of dyes took off. The balance of trade deteriorated when olive oil exports, together with extractions of aguardiente, failed to compensate for the import fever. Textile manufacturers responded by producing linen and cotton clothes. However, they did not seem to be competitive in the foreing market and channeled their production towards the domestic market. Their links with the French market, the new protectionist measures of the second decade of the eighteenth century and the interruption of commercial traffic connected with the plague on Marseilles, open up a new field of relationships that remain to he studied.