5

The decision of the king to disentail church properties added a new element to the equation. Our seven towns provide specific examples of its effects. We must keep in mind, however, that they are located in provinces where there was more than average transfer of property under the desamortización of Carlos IV, and within these provinces the seven towns were relatively active. On the other hand, they are not the most active towns in either province, and the difference between the effects of their disentail and that of most other places should be more one of degree than of kind.

The reformers saw in the freeing of property a solution to the evils of the countryside, believing that the peasantry would be more productive, more prosperous, and happier if it owned the land it worked. They were aware of the Ricardian trap and wanted the producers to be guaranteed a proper share of their produce. They tended to overlook the Malthusian trap, however, because they were populationists. They believed that if the land were properly distributed, there was plenty to support many more people than then lived in Spain. In some abstract sense they may have been right. The colonies of Sierra Morena, carved out of the barren hills of Baños, proved that there was fertile land not in use. But for com-

[15] See Appendix A.

munities in well-populated regions, property redistribution would not balance demographic pressure. Disentail in La Mata showed that even a very favorable redistribution could not compensate for the large number of people entering agriculture. Its muleteers offered a better promise for the future than its new small owners.

The reformers also wanted more foodstuffs to enter the market so as to feed the cities. Disentail was for them not only a way to increase the welfare of the peasants but to expand the economy. Here, however, there was a failing in their logic, for the produce that was assured to the national market was that taken by the large landowners, the church, the crown, and those who farmed their revenues for them. Local vecinos had to allocate their net product after seed, tithes, rent, and taxes between their own uses and what they sold. It was likely that some of the additional share accruing to them from newly purchased properties would be consumed at home, and so at first the marketable surplus would decline. We shall see later when we look at the despoblados of Salamanca that turning land over to peasants would in fact reduce rather than increase the share they exported. When the reformers argued that independent small farmers would both live better and feed the cities better, they were engaged more in wishful thinking than rational analysis.

When it came, desamortización was carried out by auctions, in order to solve the royal fiscal crisis. Jovellanos's reasoning established that free ownership of property would eventually place land in the productive hands of small farmers, but even he would have recognized that auctions gave an immediate advantage to the wealthy. As an added guarantee of acquisition by small farmers, the royal decrees called for large exploitations to be subdivided. Subdivision proved impossible at short notice, however, except for properties that consisted of a number of independent plots, and even these were usually sold in large batches, so that the size of exploitations changed little. The experience of the different towns indicates that disentail through auction usually accelerated economic processes already under way or reinforced existing patterns. It seldom produced radical changes.

The biggest buyers were attracted by properties oriented to commercial production, which they could tap either through rents, like the collections of arable plots of La Armuña, the coto redondo of Pedrollén, or the cortijos of Jaén, or by direct exploitation with cheap labor, like the olive groves that in Jaén were most desired of all. One could have predicted closely their pattern of purchases from the leasing practices of the

outside owners in the middle of the century. These patterns appear to have applied equally to the purchases of local elites and outsiders; the economic interests of landlords was much the same whether they lived in the town or not.

Among church properties there were many small parcels dedicated to relatively labor-intensive cultivation, which provided little to sell. These were more suitable for cultivation by peasant households, whose labor input could be increased with little additional expenditure, being more of the category of a fixed overhead cost than a variable labor cost, as the Russian economist A. V. Chayanov has shown.^[16] Such were the cortinas enclosed by stone walls in the north, and the irrigated huertas, tiny orchards, and small fields in the ruedos of Jaén. For big buyers they offered much bother and little profit, and the peasants got them, often after bidding against each other. Disentail through auction did not change the nature of the dual economy—subsistence and market. The market economy was primarily the realm of the powerholders, the subsistence economy of the peasants; when peasants bought grain fields, as they did in La Armuña, they most likely reduced the share of the harvest entering the market.

That the larger buyers sought commercial properties does not mean that they were bourgeois capitalists, as this term is commonly understood. Table 14.2 lists the occupation and residence of the largest buyer in each town. None was a vecino, and five resided at a distance. Only one was a merchant, don Francisco Alonso y Moral, grain dealer of Salamanca. One was the widow of a regidor of Salamanca city, and one a member of a royal council. Army officers had a prominent place, a caballero of the order of Carlos III resident in Madrid and a lieutenant colonel resident in Córdoba. Their example reveals that the army was already a powerful force in Spanish society under the old regime. Thus in three cases the economic basis for the purchase was evidently service to the crown, in the fourth to a royal city. (Some of the capital may have come from elsewhere, of course, such as an inheritance; one cannot tell from the sources for this study.) If these towns were typical, the power of the crown and the cities to redistribute wealth through taxation provided much more of the capital invested in disentail than commerce did. This money did not come out of value added, out of productive labor, except insofar as the government and armed forces offer a necessary ser-

[16] Chayanov, "Theory of Non-Capitalist Systems," and Chayanov, "Nature of Peasant Economy."

vice for any society. The process of disentail in these towns reflects a redistributive rather than a productive economy above the level of primary production. Seven people, however important locally, are too small a sample to be more than suggestive. Chapter 20 will examine how well the patterns they reveal hold up on a broader scale.

Comprehension of the process is advanced further by a comparison of the percentage of property owned by outsiders at the time of the catastro with that purchased by outsiders in the disentail (Table 14.3). In three cases (Villaverde, Pedrollén, and Baños) there is a rough congruence between the two figures. As one might expect if current ownership reflected current economic strength, where there was already much outside ownership, outsiders made most or all of the purchases (Villaverde, Pedrollén), and where they owned little, they bought little (Baños). The other four cases call for explanation.

The share of purchases made by outsiders in El Mirón was more than double their prior share of its property. (Here, nearby vecinos are considered outsiders because the transactions were all local.) El Mirón, we recall, was an isolated hilltop town, surrounded by more prosperous neighbors in the valley and on the through roads. Its position as cabeza de partido no longer served to protect it from the exploitation of its

lands by neighboring vecinos. Disentail hastened an economic and demographic decline long under way.

Vecinos of La Mata, Lopera, and Navas, on the other hand, acquired a much larger proportion of the disentailed property than the share they had previously owned in their towns. The pattern of disentail, in other words, implies that the economic forces of the vecinos were no longer limited by the pattern of landholding. In fact, as we have seen, La Mata had a growth sector in transportation, Navas in olive oil, Lopera in both. In La Mata and Navas, though not in Lopera, the peasant communities benefited from desamortización. These towns had broken the Ricardian trap, and this cushioned them, at least temporarily, against the Malthusian trap. The economic and demographic phase was right for them. The benefit of disentail to peasant communities depended on their having discovered a way of their own into the market.

Villaverde seems a deviant case, for its vecinos too had been expanding their harvests, yet they acquired only a small share. Part of the reason was the failure of the commissioners of the Consolidation Fund to break up large properties as instructed. The vecinos bought most of the lands of their parish church, but those belonging to outside foundations were put on sale in large blocks located in a number of towns, which were beyond their means. Furthermore, because their energies were engaged in a rapid expansion of farming in two neighboring despoblados,

they had correspondingly less incentive to reduce their rent at home by buying land.

The history of the seven towns shows that demographic pressure and rental pressure tended to equalize peasant communities, pushing everyone down toward the limit of subsistence, except for the local elites, who were alien to the peasant societies. Freeing a major factor of production through disentail had the opposite effect on the societies. It improved the lot of the higher socioeconomic levels, and within those the levels of the most venturesome individuals. By putting property in the hands of enterprising men and women, disentail fostered economic growth.

Socially, however, by increasing the holdings of some of the more affluent vecinos, desamortización tended to weaken community ties. Moreover, the royal order of 1803 removing the rent freeze on disentailed properties hurt the legal and customary defenses of the peasant producer. The historian can perhaps perceive these developments better than contemporaries did, although the labradores of La Mata who did not buy land and then discovered that their landlords preferred to switch their leases to the persons who did, must have resented their neighbors' success. Later critics would denounce desamortización and the reformers who conceived it, in large measure because of its effects on rural social structure, overlooking the economic growth it inspired at the national level and frequently at the community level as well. Like the reformers, they believed that disentail could produce an effect autonomously, whereas the examples studied here show that its effect on a given community was molded by existing conditions.

This chapter has tried to develop a coherent model of the forces at work in rural Castile and the directions in which they could lead rural communities both before and during the disentail. It finds that peasant communities were subject to the dual pressure of demographic growth and the exactions of large owners, the church, and the crown. The challenge facing them was to find a way to get into the market economy that would provide an escape from the dual trap of Malthus and Ricardo. Cottage industry, the solution turned to by many agricultural regions of Europe at this time, was not available to them because the merchants that could direct it were not present in Castile. Breaking new ground and planting olive trees offered temporary solutions; providing longdistance transportation was more promising. When disentail came, the extent to which the individual rural communities took advantage of it

showed how well they had responded to the challenge and thus inadvertently prepared themselves to meet the conditions of economic freedom. Seven scattered towns of secondary importance are, however, a small sample on which to base a general interpretation. Part 3, by observing two entire provinces, will provide added insight into the forces at work in rural Castile.^[17]

[17] Additional statistics of the seven towns are provided in Appendix N.