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The 1770s, a lively decade for quality control: the case of the Royal Tobacco Factory of Seville

Universidad Pablo de Olavide de Sevilla, fguthid{at}upo.es

Domi Romero

Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, domi.romero{at}uam.es

It is generally agreed that management and accounting can only be understood in their organizational and social contexts (Miller, 1994). In this sense, several studies have addressed management techniques in specific eighteenth-century organizations with regards to the improvement of quality in the factory (Cox, 1990; Gutiérrez & Romero, 2001; Álvarez et al., 2002). This study shows several examples of quality decisions taken on an ad hoc basis in the Royal Tobacco Factory of Seville during the 1770s. The main contribution of this work is to show that quality was not only "a wish of the managers", expressed as a set of instructions. Rather, we also show that these decisions can only be understood within the Spanish Enlightenment context; that is, they can be rationalized in terms of the search for the efficiency of the production process in the royal factories, and in the Crown's desire to raise the royal incomes.

Key Words: accounting history • factory • management • quality history

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