Business, technology and institutions in Castilian flour milling in mid-18-century

Abstract

This text offers an approximation to the milling of wheat in the middle of the eighteenth century with respect to its mercantile, technological and institutional nature. For this purpose, the general responses of the Catastro del Marqués de la Ensenada in Palencia have been used. The base hypothesis is that the conditions used to obtain flour were extremely archaic in these three dimensions, but at the same time they were efficient and guaranteed the supply of bread to the Castilian population without altering the status quo between nobility, church and the council. However, a review of the accounts of the large wheat mills reveals that this balance started to break down around 1780, just when the new Enlightenment agricultural policy was implemented.