Abstract
During the second half of the eighteenth century, Madrid was the most important city and the largest market of the Spanish Bourbon empire. Its mercantile sector was the most powerful in Spain, even more than those of Cadiz or Barcelona. One of the most significant features of this socioeconomic sector is that most of its members were immigrants from other Spanish regions. In this article, the author will study the importance of the family and paisanaje links that these immigrants used to integrate into the mercantile sector of Madrid as well as the consequences of their strategies for the society and economy of the imperial capital. The most important of these consequences are that these strategies created a closed system of social relations and that the network of family ties created complex exchanges between Madrid and other regions of the Iberian peninsula.
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