Of Firms and Captives: Railway Infrastructures and the Economics of Forced Labour (Spain, 1937 – 1957)

This article deals with the main economic keys that explain the evolution in the deployment of prisoners and prisoners of war on extending and reconstructing the railways. The first part presents a list of the works carried out during the Spanish civil war and the Francoist dictatorship. Subsequently, an analysis is made of the three main variables of work according to institutional change and the business structure of the Spanish railway. Thanks to this variety of situation, we can better understand to which extent labour supply and productivity levels are on the basis of the evolution of enterprises strategies towards this kind of labour in different situations, such as war economy, after-war reconstruction, and dictatorship, until 1957.