Royal Barcelona Board of Trade

After the suppression of the Consulate of the Sea and the universities under the Nueva Planta decrees, local merchants sought a new institution to regulate and support commerce, trade and agriculture and to represent them to royal authorities.

Although the Board mostly represented the interests of the big merchants, it also provided a lot of support to artisans and guilds as well as the petite bourgeoisie.

It established schools of sailing and navigation (1769), drawing and the fine arts (1775), shorthand (1775), trade (1787), bureau of machines (1804), chemistry (1805), botany and agriculture (1807), mechanics (1808) physics (1814) and economics (1814).

[3][4] Evening classes and free drawing and engraving courses for chintz factory workers was crucial to the growth of that industry[5] and helped to consolidate Barcelona as a city of manufacturing in the mid 18th century.

Outside Barcelona, the board set up a public school of drawing in Mataró, with Joan Barba as a drawing teacher from 1841 to 1851[6] The former seat of the Consulate of the Sea in Barcelona, the Llotja de Mar (Spanish: Lonja de Mar) which had been used as barracks since 1714, was granted to the Board of Trade in 1767.