CATALAN CONTRIBUTIONS

Cat­alo­nia has a thou­sand-year his­tory as a Eu­ro­pean na­tion. De­spite being a rel­a­tively small coun­try through­out its long his­tory it has made re­mark­able break­throughs be­yond hav­ing had the first par­lia­ment, in the Mid­dle Ages, as Pau Casals said at the United Na­tions in 1971. Nowa­days if you ask some­one about uni­ver­sal Cata­lans, artists like An­toni Gaudí or Sal­vador Dalí will prob­a­bly be men­tioned. How­ever, Cata­lan con­tri­bu­tions to the progress of hu­man­ity cover vir­tu­ally all facets of human ac­tiv­ity to a greater or lesser de­gree. Nev­er­the­less, there are those who have been hid­den or at­trib­uted to Spaniards, es­pe­cially as a re­sult of cen­turies of op­pres­sion, and sub­ju­ga­tion of the Cata­lan na­tion since 1714 by Spain.

In the book Out­stand­ing Cata­lan Con­tri­bu­tions, pub­lished in Eng­lish in 2015, there is a col­lec­tion of more than two hun­dred Cata­lan con­tri­bu­tions to the ad­vance­ment of hu­man­ity. Within sci­ence and tech­nol­ogy some stand out: the in­ven­tion of the tele­scope by Joan Roget in 1590, the sci­en­tific mea­sure­ment of the chem­i­cal com­po­si­tion of the air by An­toni de Martí in 1790, the anaer­o­bic sub­ma­rine by Narcís Mon­tu­riol in the mid­dle of the 19th cen­tury and the first jet en­gine for air­planes by the en­gi­neer Ramon Casanova in 1917! But there were also im­prove­ments to the pro­ce­dure for ob­tain­ing qual­ity iron in the 10th cen­tury, to the con­struc­tion of spin­ning ma­chines, steam en­gines, elec­tric telegraphs, silk vel­vet looms and cof­fee dry­ers, among many oth­ers later.

Med­i­cine de­serves a spe­cial men­tion. Thus, the dis­cov­ery of pul­monary cir­cu­la­tion and oxy­gena­tion of the blood by Miquel Servet in 1553, a new method of op­er­at­ing on the crural her­nia in 1772, mod­ern tox­i­col­ogy, ad­vances in im­munol­ogy, bac­te­ri­ol­ogy and phys­i­ol­ogy, the re­moval of cataracts by pha­co­here­sis, the first blood bank, the viral eti­ol­ogy of some can­cers and the sur­gi­cal treat­ment of war frac­tures stand out. In the 21st cen­tury, many pro­gresses have con­tin­ued to be made, es­pe­cially within the frame­work of the fight against can­cers.

On the other hand, in the mid­dle of the 14th cen­tury the Lli­bre del Con­so­lat de Mar was the ref­er­ence law code for mar­itime trade and nav­i­ga­tion in the Mediter­ranean Sea and in Eu­rope. Also, the Taula de Canvi was opened in 1401 in Barcelona, which can be con­sid­ered the first pub­lic bank in Eu­rope. Cur­rently, the Cata­lan econ­omy is char­ac­terised by its di­ver­si­fi­ca­tion. Notwith­stand­ing, it is es­pe­cially strong in some clus­ters, such as bio­med­ical and chem­i­cal, which are based on a long tra­di­tion of sci­en­tific and tech­no­log­i­cal re­search, as noted above.

Still, the cur­rent sit­u­a­tion of colo­nial de­pen­dence of Spain is in­creas­ingly lead­ing the Cata­lan econ­omy to de­cline. De­spite the vol­ume of the Cata­lan econ­omy, there are prac­ti­cally no big com­pa­nies. The rea­son is clearly po­lit­i­cal: the hyper-cen­tral­ist Span­ish state does not allow it. In Oc­to­ber 2017, it pushed for the few that re­mained to move their head­quar­ters out of Cat­alo­nia in a new episode of a long his­tor­i­cal se­ries, and it suc­ceeded par­tially.

In spite of that, the Cata­lan econ­omy has great po­ten­tial. The ef­fec­tive in­de­pen­dence of Cat­alo­nia will mean not only the end of the plun­der of 8% of the Cata­lan gross do­mes­tic prod­uct an­nu­ally, but also the re­lease of pro­duc­tive and cre­ative forces that now are la­tent due to the cur­rent sit­u­a­tion of colo­nial treat­ment by Spain. The his­tory of global Cata­lan con­tri­bu­tions in­di­cates that Cat­alo­nia can be­come a dy­namic eco­nomic hub in South­ern Eu­rope and con­tribute more vig­or­ously to the de­vel­op­ment of mankind.