El Instituto Internacional de Agricultura: España y la «cuestión social», 1905-1923

In the agrarian context of the early 20th century, networks of experts and interest groups were created. These formed institutions across state borders to achieve prestige derived from their supranational character and ostensible technical and scientific capacity. The objective of this article is to analyse the impact in Spain of the International Institute of Agriculture (IIA), from the year of its creation until the advent of the Primo de Rivera dictatorship, through the lens of the “social question”: a concept that popularized the proposals and disagreements surrounding labour regulation. The research draws from the latest contributions in transnational history and internationalism, recent secondary sources about the IIA and primary sources that reflect how transnational IIA networks worked in and with Spain to address agricultural labour issues. The article concludes that the intensely transnational connections between agrarian elites, owners and technicians in the early 20th century transformed social relations in agriculture and agrarian public policies in Spain.

Book reviews - Crítica de libros - Crítica de livros (Historia Agraria, 85)

Book reviews - Crítica de libros - Crítica de livros Markus Lampe & Paul Sharp: A Land of Milk & Butter. How Elites Created the Modern Dairy Industry Carin Martiin Christopher Dyer, Erik Thoen and Tom Williamson: Peasants and their fields. The rationale of open-field agriculture, c. 700-1800 José Luis Martínez-González Juan Antonio Quirós Castillo (Ed.): Archaeology and History of Peasantries 1. From the Late Prehistory to the Middle Ages. Guillermo García-Contreras Ruiz Dietmar Müller: Bodeneigentum und Nation. Rumänien, Jugolawien und Polen im europäischen Vergleich Miguel Cabo Villaverde Fernando Collantes y Vicente Pinilla: ¿Lugares que no importan? La despoblación de la España rural desde 1900 hasta el presente Javier Esparcia Francesc Valls Junyent: La Catalunya atlántica. Aguardiente y tejidos en el arranque industrial catalán Llorenç Ferrer-Alòs Elena Catalán Martínez, Gabriel Jover Avellà y Enrique Llopis Agelán (Eds.): El delme com a font per a la història rural Pegerto Saavedra Jaume Torras Elias: Canvis i conflictes en el món rural català (segles xviii-xix). Onze estudis d’història econòmica i social Jesús Millán García-Varela Miguel Ángel del Arco Blanco (Ed.): Los «años del hambre». Historia y memoria de la posguerra franquista José Miguel Martínez Carrión Fernando Collantes: ¿Capitalismo coordinado o monstruo de Frankenstein? La Política Agraria Común y el modelo europeo, 1962-2020 Alicia Langreo Navarro Sergio Molina García: Una llave para Europa. El debate agrario franco-español y la adhesión de España a la CEE (1975-1982) Rafael Castro

Gender and Rural History: A Roundtable

The aim of this debate article is to promote a discussion of a historiographical nature (not ideological, not political) about the meaning, place and role of gender in both the rural past and the rural historiography. The discussion revolves around a variety of questions, ranging from the relevance, the opportunity and the very history of the use of gender category in rural history, to the analysis of gender (im)balances in the community of historians working in this broadly defined field of studies, not to mention the very definition of what is meant by gender. These and other related topics, for which there are no single or definitive answers, are debated here in a roundtable format.

Molinos hidráulicos harineros en Coquimbo (Chile, 1544-1750)

This paper examines the process by which the Corregimiento de Coquimbo become the main mill pole of Chile, when this kingdom was the largest wheat producer in South America. The evolution of hydraulic mills in this township from the foundation of La Serena (1544) to the middle of the 18th century is studied from original documents of the National Archive, especially Royal Audience and Notaries of La Serena. The importance of the legacy of indigenous peoples in the construction of irrigation canal networks for agriculture is detected. On this basis, the Spanish colonizers had advantages to install the European hydraulic mill culture. The role of specialized artisans, both indigenous and Afro-descendant and Spanish-Creole, is identified. It is detected that the mills operated as poles of consolidation of markets and benchmarks for the configuration of regional trade routes.

Anexo: Molinos hidráulicos harineros en Coquimbo (Chile, 1544-1750

Anexo: glosario e imágenes

Comunidad rural, poder local, politización y ciudadanía: Prácticas y aprendizajes políticos en el suroeste peninsular a principios de la contemporaneidad (1808-1823)

The first decades of the nineteenth century were crucial to shaping the new political practices that both disrupted the established public and social participation scenario and created the new liberal political culture. However, acquiring a more thorough understanding of these issues involves reassessing the disparity of the scenarios, the multiplicity of actors and the directionality of the processes. This work analyses practices that politicized and the rural political space, using local examples extracted from southwestern Spain. It emphasizes political practices and learning from 1808 to 1823, the years that marked the beginning and end of critical political transformations in the journey from the Old to the New Regime. The research verifies that local communities in rural areas were not passive agents within this scenario of politicization, but active participants. They implemented a rich, complex political practice based on a reading of the underlying political framework that was both broad and specific.

Trigo y política: El proteccionismo cerealista en el Parlamento, 1886-1890

This paper studies the channels through which the agrarian crisis (1886-1890) arrived in the Spanish Parliament and, once there, centered the economic debate until an increase of protectionism was passed. The analysis of the roll-call votes on agrarian customs that took place in those years allows to identify, narrative and quantitatively, the line-up of congressmen according to partisan guides, but, also, according to the economic interests, agrarian interests here, of the provinces that they represented. Interestingly, the Parliamentary dynamics that the agrarian crisis revealed supports the idea of those who see in the Bourbon Restauration a regime where decision-making resulted from the interaction between the economic and political powers.

Recampesinizando los usi civici: Estrategias socioecológicas tradicionales de manejo del territorio entre pastores en Baunei (Cerdeña)

Agrarian industrialization and new food regimes have radically changed socioecologies of local and global agrarian structures displacing traditional socioecological strategies of land use and management. This paper analyses this transformation from an agroecological perspective by raising the question of how the agrarian activities and the uses of commons have changed in the municipality of Baunei (Sardinia, Italy) with a special focus on livestock farming. Ethnographic research –through participant observation methods and open and semi-structured in-depth interviews– has enabled to reconstruct the traditional use of land and the strategies of its socioecological management as well as the changes produced by agricultural modernization and modernity at large, and finally, to unveil new perspectives of re-peasantization among Baunei’s shepherds to obtain more feasible and sustainable farms. This study highlights tendencies of re-peasantization in land management strategies and the seek for cooperative answers, including an internal reflection on the socioecological meaning of traditional strategies for managing the commons (in usi cicivi) and provides insights to the new potentials of such management and social cooperation practices together with new agricultural techniques and organizational structures in building more sustainable and just food and agricultural systems.

Memorias de una joven obrera: Actitudes sociales, catolicismo y poderes locales franquistas en una comunidad rural (Béjar, 1939-1960)

This article shows through a female worker life history in Béjar, named Lucía García Hernández, an ordinariness story during post-war time in a rural community located in Salamanca. Through this oral source interpretation and also through the historical events that happenned in the fourties and in the fifties in Béjar, this articles intends to explore how local authorities from Francoism and Catholic church imposed the representations of national identity. Straight ahead the dictatorship power, this paper examines from the history from below approach the different attitudes and social behaviours from the textile female workers in Béjar and also the Catholic female mobilization concerning to these ones, specially on morality issue. For that purpose, special emphasis is placed upon common experiences from gender, class, race and age notions. Finally, this article examines some of the sociabilities from the Catholic Workers Action, “grey places” where female and male labor force experienced a different way of religiousness and shared ordinariness happenings related to labour factories and fam-ily difficulties during the Spanish post-war.

Hombres de la villa y hombres de fuera de la villa en Piera durante la Baja Edad Media

Analysis of the unpublished documentation about Piera (Catalonia) between the 10th and 15th centuries to interpret the late-medieval organisation of the “man from outside the town” against the “men of the town” in fiscal and defensive matters. The agrarian landscape created in 10th-11th centuries where the disorganised frontier area was, saw an increase in the farmed area in the 12th and 13th centuries, creating farms in emphyteusis and with monasteries and urban investors accumulating direct domain. This increased tax burden on the peasants by the owners at the end of the 13th and early 14th centuries, led to the first complaint to the king by the men from outside the town against the men of the town. This would be repeated shortly after regarding the internal distribution of the Crown’s fiscal demands and in the second half of the century, for the defensive system. The difficulties arisen in the second half of the 14th century show the unviability of many of the farms created in the previous century and contributed to the accumulation of property among the urban investing elite. The urban influence on the countryside –for the town itself and for the bourgeoisie of Barcelona and their monastery of Pedralbes– favoured heavy pressure in the 15th century, the nullification of the rural capacity for organisation and a malaise that led to the negotiated reduction in the tax burden.