Asociación española de historia económica

Jaume Vicens Vives (Girona, 1910 - Lyon, 1960). He studied at the Jaume Vicens Vives high school in Girona, and Philosophy at the University of Barcelona (1926-1930), with the teachers, Antonio de la Torre and Pedro Bosch Gimpera. Later, he moved to Germany, without giving up teaching and research. He published regularly in Estudis Universitaris Catalans between 1931 and 1936. Specialized in the XV century, he presented his PhD dissertation, Ferran II i la ciudat de Barcelona (Barcelona 1936-1937, 3 volumes) in 1936, showing a vision of Fernando el Católico contrary to that the romantic historiography had previously reported.

He taught at the Institut-Escola (1932-1933) and was assistant professor at the Universitat Autònoma (1933-1937), obtaining the Chair of Geography and History at the high school of Figueras in 1935. After the war, he was sanctioned and removed from teaching until 1942, when he was allowed to teach in Baeza (Jaén). In those difficult years, he made his living writing about international politics in the weekly Destino, under the pseudonym Lorenzo Guillén, and publishing textbooks and minor works.

After returning to teaching, he continued research with Historia de los Remensas en el Siglo XV (1945), and obtained the Chair of Modern and Contemporary History at the University of Zaragoza. The following year, he obtained a Chair in Barcelona, where he performed important academic and historiography work, from the IX International Congress of Historical Sciences, Paris (1950). This Congress allowed him to contact the European historiography and, above all, he met the French school: Annales, whose main objective was the economic and social history and emphasized the importance of the statistical methods.

Resulting from new methodological approaches, despite the intellectual poverty of the dominant academic media, Vicens´works caused a historiographic renovation in Spain in the fifties. Selected publications: : Aproximación a la historia de España (1952), Juan II de Aragón (1398-1479): monarquía y revolución en la España del siglo XV (1953), El gran sindicato remensa (1954), El segle XV. Els Trastàmares (1956), además de trabajos colectivos, como los Estudios de Historia Moderna (1951-1959), el Índice Histórico Español (iniciado en 1953), la Historia social y económica de España y América (1957-1959) o la serie Biographys Catalanas.

His interest in economic history led him to teach Spanish Economic History at the Economic sciences College (Facultad de Ciencias Económicas) in Barcelona, and published the Manual de historia económica de España (1959), with the collaboration of Jordi Nadal. Also, he maintained his interest on the history of Catalonia that resulted in: Els catalans in segle XIX (1958), that, in collaboration with M. Llorens, led to Industrials i polítics del segle XIX– and Notícia de Catalunya (1960).

A terminal illness ended his life at age 50, at his plenty research activity. Among his disciples: Mario Hernández Sánchez-Barba, Jordi Nadal, Joan Rule, Emili Giralt, Josep Fontana, and Joan Mercader.