Ildefonso Fierro: la aventura de un emprendedor (review)

In Ildefonso Fierro: la aventura de un emprendedor, Elena San Román examines the business life and times of Ildefonso Fierro, a well-known Spanish businessman involved in business activities in diverse industries such as mining, tobacco, match production, insurance, construction, perfume, oil, and advertising. Family-based enterprises are common business organizational structures in Spain, and Fierro’s management of his several factories, financial societies, and other economic activities from the beginning of the twentieth century follows this model. Business historians of Spain have consistently stressed the capabilities of growth and development of family-based businesses (an interpretation also made for the cases of Great Britain and Italy). San Román contributes to this scholarship showing that Fierro, who personally managed the majority of his enterprises, developed a dynamic business model that diversified over the years and also grew by integrating organizational activities within his own enterprises. When expanding abroad, Fierro’s enterprises engaged in a strategy similar to the one followed by other Spanish firms, which consisted of going to nearby regions or areas in which culture and language facilitated business contracts, such as Portugal, Northern Africa, and Latin America. Fierro’s businesses grew before and during Francisco Franco’s dictatorship, an aspect that the author emphasizes to demonstrate the uniqueness of Fierro’s experience, not as a dictator-privileged businessman, but as an entrepreneur who was able to maneuver and generally succeed within diverse political and economic contexts, both in Spain as well as abroad.

The first part of the book follows the family and Ildefonso Fierro’s business trajectory chronologically from 1870. The origins of Fierro’s empire were in northwestern Spain, in the highland of the province of León, a region based on agriculture and livestock where the arriero tradition developed since the tenth century to trade with the coastal region of Asturias. Within this merchant and shipping tradition, during the second half of the nineteenth century, the Fierro family, along with other families with whom marriages and other relations had been forged for decades, created its own companies usually registered in Asturias. The Fierro Hermanos (established in 1870) and the Toribio Fierro e Hijos company (established in 1907) focused on ocean transportation, trading fish, coal, and wood. The author highlights Ildefonso Fierro’s olfato para los negocios (business acumen) since his start in his father’s business. Even though Fierro had very limited business education, San Román demonstrates that he showed great business abilities and engaged the company in insurance and customs administration, as well as in a variety of trading opportunities, particularly during the First World War, when he took advantage of Spain’s neutrality.

During the 1920s and 1930s, Fierro embarked on a variety of business activities like the match industry, first in charge of advertising and distribution, later arranging sales and transportation of what was a state monopoly, and also in production until the 1960s. Fierro also founded his own construction company, an example that San Román uses to demonstrate the compatibility between family businesses and vertical integration as other activities such as the production of cement were incorporated within the firm. The author concludes the first part with Fierro’s business experience during the Spanish Civil War (1936– 1939). During the conflict, sparked after Francisco Franco’s military coup in July of 1936, his business suffered as any other. However, contacts and talks between Fierro and the Central Bank during the time, as well as his position in the Spanish war, benefited his business in tungsten production and trade during the Second World War and his presence in state-led industries and banking after the Civil War.

In the second part of the book, San Román focuses on these aspects by analyzing the various Fierro business sectors. From the 1920s, for businessmen in Spain participation in politics was common, and in the case of Fierro these political activities remained key for the growth...