La presencia de la minoría bayonesa en la dinámica del comercio franco-español del siglo XVIII

Abstract

Taking into account the importance of the French community on the commercial activities of the different areas and markets of seventeenth-century Spain, this study focuses on the penetration of these markers by the original traders from southwestern France (Basques and people from Bearn), one of the largest groups of French people operating in Spain in mid-century, through the analysis of two representative commercial firms from Bayonne. Beginning with the process whereby commercial links based on family relationship and shrared rural background were formed, the article then looks more deeply at commercial distribution systems on the regional scale (in the current provinces of Navarra, Soria and La Rioja). Understanting this phenomenon would not be possible, however, without its being contextualized in a global analysis of the commercial growth of the port of Bayonne, and its hinterland, at the western end of the Pyrenees, from the middle of the seventeenth century, and the links that connected in through Navarre with eastern castile.