6Reinventing the Rio Tinto Company
Spain, Political Risk and Corporate Strategy Before and After the Second World War
Introduction
The intention in this chapter is to analyse the relationship between corporate strategy and political risk in the context of the Spanish mining operations of the British-domiciled Rio Tinto Company between the 1930s and the 1950s. In the first half of the 1930s, the company was forced to try to manage politically motivated strikes by its workforce. But, from 1936, the political risks faced by Rio Tinto then became extreme in nature: the rise of nationalism and Franco’s victory in the Spanish Civil War, the impact of the Second World War and the development of economic nationalism under the post-war ...
