SPAIN'S IRON AND STEEL INDUSTRY.

By Ronald H. Chilcote '57. Austin:Bureau of Business Research, the University of Texas, 1968. 174 pp. $5.

Dartmouth men familiar with Ronald Chilcote as Professor of Political Science and as the Coordinator of the Latin American Research Program for the University of California, Riverside, may be surprised that he has written a book about Spain. Chiefly interested in the development of industry and emerging nations, he was led to Spain's iron and steel industries by his studies in Portugal, Chile, and Argentina.

Readers may be struck by his extreme brevity. His book on Spain's iron and steel industries runs to only 174 pages including ten of index, no fewer than 17 of highly specialized bibliography, 11 tables of statistics and charts, and seven maps.

A reader may be considerably taken aback by the author's enormous ambitions. Within a few pages he would like to treat what older and more sedate scholars would call the impossible: (1) Developments from the early beginnings, (2) The struggle between the government-controlled industry and private firms, (3) The location of raw materials and markets affecting production, (4) The changing domestic and world markets for raw materials and finished products, (5) The impact of new policy changes, (6) Complex problems in heavy industry and ensuing stagnation when industry cannot keep pace with economic and political changes. The author wants no less than to show how Spanish iron and steel problems are historical, geographical, economic, social, and most important, political.

In so ambitious a monograph as this, the flavor is that of an extended magazine article heavily freighted with statistics. With efficient speed for so extensive a "geopolitical analysis," the field research was completed between January 1960 and August 1961 when Mr. Chilcote visited the integrated iron and steel plants and interviewed company officials there and in Madrid offices.

It is clear that Spain has emerged from the economic stagnation bogging down many underdeveloped nations with low income, chronic mass poverty, and obsolete methods of production and social organization. With statistical richness and analyses so succinct as to be almost overrefined, Mr. Chilcote spells out why Spain is fortunate in her iron ore resources.