Terms like “late” in history are always relative adjectives, there is no absolute rule that determines when or how historical processes should occur.
If you talk about a industrial Revolution late in Spainit is in relation to the socioeconomic field in which it was related to other countries.
As Europe entered the XIX century in an accelerated industrialization with strong liberal institutions, both at the political level (liberal democracies or constitutional monarchies) and at the economic level (predominance of laissez-faire), Spain took refuge, with the restoration of the absolute monarchyin an anachronistic enlightened despotism.
In it, ministers such as Ballesteros or Cea Bermúdez despaired the bourgeoisie and made the king happy at the cost of losing foreign credit and leaving the Treasury in a dire state.
Enlightened despotism in the typical century of the free trade had to mean protectionism. Protectionism towards cereals, broken only when the subsistence crisis was so serious that there was no other solution but to import grain.
protectionism to the textile industry Catalan, which was a condition sine qua non of Catalonia’s support for the government.
protectionism to the steel industry Basque and Asturian, the only way, then, to alleviate the technical backwardness.
Protectionism was one more expression of the structural weakness of the spanish bourgeoisie. Communications and transportation were based on muleteers and highways, the slowness and precariousness of these means of transportation compared to modern railway held by the other nations was a very serious handicap.
When the governments progressives trying to go too far in their liberal programs not only had to confront the most reactionariesbut also had to avoid appearing in the eyes of the popular class as an even worse alternative.
Let us think that the clients of the textile industry (the only one that deserved that name in the first half of the century) were essentially the mass of the population that, directly or indirectly, provided them with raw materials.
It is quite clear that the first half of the XIX century elapsed, in general terms, between the attempts of the bourgeoisie for coming to power and his failure to do so. Undoubtedly, he was achieving important economic spaces, but he was unable to present a clear bourgeois political program that would institute a democratic society, which slowed down the process of industrialization with the instability of tariff and administrative laws that did not finish effectively instituting the opening to the free trade.
the decade of 1840however, saw some progress in the hands of the growing Catalan textile industry. Between 1836 and 1840, 1,229 machines were imported to Catalonia, and by 1845 the use of steam in the textile industry was normal.
In 1848, the first railroad track of Spain, the railway Barcelona to Mataro, 28.25 kilometers long. In 1847 there were 28,000 looms and 97,000 workers in the industry and since then the numbers have been growing, along with the population of Barcelona, which in 1857 had 183,787 inhabitants.
In the north of Spain, on the other hand, another of the typical bases of the industrializationiron and steel furnaces, with the factory of Trubia in 1840.
Refering to mining, until 1839 there was not even any law that regulated the use of the subsoil. From then on numerous mining companies were formed, in Catalonia above all, but the coal industry remained stagnant, since the scarce steel industry at that time did not use coal until 1848.
Broadly speaking, we see, then, a long period of industrial stagnation, which coincides with the absolutist period of Ferdinand VII. During this stage there are hardly any appreciable changes in the Spanish economy; this period breaks around 1834, but slowly and timidly: the first signs of industrializationthe first confiscation laws are drawn up and the capital.
Around 1850 it begins to develop in Spain the process of industrial Revolutionbut unlike the European industrial countries, in Spain this process does not have the same meaning, nor is the political evolution parallel: while 1848 it is for all of Europe a year of revolutions and total triumph of liberalism, in Spain Then a moderate period opens until 1868 where there will be no liberal revolutions.
Source: Bergeron, L.: The European Revolutions and the Division of the World, The World and its History, vol. VIII, Argos