Abstract
In the second half of the nineteenth century the cork industry mechanized the production of cork stoppers, the main and, almost, the only cork product of that time. This movement began in the midnineteenth century in the most industrialized and non-cork forest countries, threatening the dominant position of the Spanish cork industry, located mainly in Catalonia. Subsequently, from the 1880s, the Catalan industry began a rapid process of mechanization, regaining part of its global prominence in the transformation of cork. This article explores the mechanization of the Portuguese cork industry with the objective, on the one hand, of under-standing if there was a delay in relation to the Catalan process and, on the other hand, of tracing the technological modernization of the Portuguese cork industry within the general picture of Portuguese industry.
Highlights
Nowadays the Portuguese cork industry leads the world market, with more than two thirds of the world industrial exports of cork coming from Portugal,1 an amount that is expected to have exceeded 1 billion euros in 2018
Several applications sent to the Civil Government of Évora requesting licenses for the establishment of factories for cork stopper production, between 1913 and 1917, did not indicate the existence of any machinery for producing cork stoppers
In Silves/Portimão, the low percentage of mechanical cork stopper producers in the total number of workers of this kind is not explained by the absence of mechanization
Summary
Nowadays the Portuguese cork industry leads the world market, with more than two thirds of the world industrial exports of cork coming from Portugal, an amount that is expected to have exceeded 1 billion euros in 2018. In the nineteenth century, the core of the cork industry was located in Spain, especially in Catalonia, with the rise of Portugal as the world leader of the cork sector an issue explored by Santiago Zapata Blanco and, mainly, by Francisco Parejo Moruno.. It is almost consensus in the Portuguese economic historiography that industrial development in Portugal in the nineteenth century was not deficient, with an average annual growth of 2.5%.60 This meant a higher rate of increase than that of Great Britain, France, and Spain, still below many European countries, especially those that, like Portugal, had begun their process of industrialization later..
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