Introduction: A Lost Text in the British Library

After an unsuccessful attempt at creating a great library in his residence at Ashridge, Francis Henry Egerton, the eighth Earl of Bridgewater, in 1825 ceded to the British Museum a large number of books and manuscripts from a variety of French, Italian and Spanish authors, which he had acquired over a period of several years. Upon his death in 1829, he bequeathed a sum of 500 pounds to the library for future bibliographic acquisitions.

This made it possible for the British Library to acquire the so-called Yriarte [sic] collection in 1835, which included several manuscripts from Bernardo de Iriarte, a Spanish politician and economist exiled in 1813 for having sided with the Napoleonic government after the French invasion of Spain and the “War of Independence” (Cotarelo, 1897). Iriarte died the following year in the city of Bordeaux without leaving any direct descendants, and his niece—his only heir—sold his manuscripts, which were added to the Egerton collection under the name of the Yriarte [sic] collection.

Afterward, the erudite Spaniard Pascual Gayangos, who had established his residence in London, between 1875 and 1893 drew up a catalog containing all the Spanish manuscripts he had found in the British Museum's library (Gayangos, 1875– 93), an undertaking that allowed Aragonese historiography expert Eduardo Ibarra to select from that catalog those manuscripts that came from Aragonese writers, and he included them in an appendix to a work on social economic history studies in Spain (Ibarra, 1934).

The two aforementioned works include a set of texts written by the Spanish author Juan Polo y Catalina, which contained a study on the factories and industry in Spain, written in 1804 but unpublished, together with statistics from the kingdom of Aragon and other interesting texts of an economic nature (Gayangos, 1875– 93, vol. 2: 128; Ibarra, 1934, 77– 78). The first of these texts, which consisted of 80 pages, was entitled “Introduccion a las descripciones historico-politicas de las Fabricas e Industria de Espana en la que se desentranan los principales puntos de la Economia civil sobre esta materia y se expone el metodo seguido en estos trabajos” (Polo y Catalina, 1804).