Agricultural History Review, Volume 51 Part 1 (2003), p. 129

This weighty edited volume offers a number of new and valuable insights into the recently-initiated debate on the standard of living in rural Spain from the eighteenth century down to the Franco era. Following an excellent introduction by José Miguel Martínez Carrión, the work is divided into four sections on agricultural wages and the cost of living, consumption and reproduction, health and stature, and child labour and education. Perhaps the main conclusion of the dozen contributions is that, notwithstanding modest advances that were made during the first third of the nineteenth century, the living standards of Spanish peasants and agricultural labourers deteriorated significantly over the period 1840–70, while further notable progress was achieved between 1900 and the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War.

Traditionally, Spanish scholars have emphasized the poverty of the rural population in the contemporary period which was seen as a consequence of the backwardness of Spanish agriculture. The disentailing legislation of the mid-nineteenth century and the failure of the Second Republic’s agrarian reform legislation in the 1930s are frequently portrayed as lost opportunities to improve the welfare of the nation’s downtrodden peasantry. Spanish farmers, James Simpson informs us, indulged in a ‘long siesta’ from the 1760s to the 1960s. That said, agricultural historians south of the Pyrenees point out a number of positive factors at this stage including the adaptation of Spanish farmers to new opportunities provided by the market, the versatility of individual sectors and the emergence of regional specialization. Most commentators, moreover, now accept the revisionist picture of significant advances in Spanish agriculture during the early twentieth century, above all in horticulture and livestock farming.

The various contributors to this volume agree on a number of points. Firstly, it is not possible to speak of ‘Spanish agriculture’ as such, but rather of a variety of different ‘agricultures’ based on dissimilar environments and different types of labour organization, etc., all of which influenced the standard and quality of rural life. Secondly, while market integration undoubtedly brought about an improvement in peasant living standards in the long term, in the short and medium terms it could also lead to a widening of the gap between social groups. Many rural Spaniards lost out. For them, the development of markets entailed an increase in debt as usury became a common feature of rural society. This was partly due to the requirement to buy in farm inputs such as tools, machinery, seeds and livestock. Hence we arrive at the seemingly paradoxical situation where the 130 the agricultural rise of agrarian capitalism in the middle decades of the nineteenth century resulted in falling consumption amongst the rural population – as a greater part of the harvest was directed towards the market in order to pay off debts – worsening diets, malnutrition and higher mortality rates. Thirdly, institutional factors had an important effect on the quality of life. For example, the parcelization of land in Atlantic Spain was to prove a serious obstacle to agricultural development and the welfare of peasant families while, in the case of Catalonia, the practice of sharecropping resulted in higher-than-average living standards.

Among the many interesting findings of these studies are new data on the height of different social classes and education levels. New research demonstrates that children born in rural districts before the 1880s were on average three centimetres shorter than their urban counterparts. Not until the 1920s and 1930s was there any significant convergence in the height of Spanish children thanks to a combination of more widespread economic growth and the appearance of welfare institutions. On the thorny question of truancy and high levels of peasant illiteracy, one writer argues that the increasing need to supplement family incomes, together with pitiful education facilities, led parents to keep their children away from school. In addition, an impoverished state made little provision for the education of girls. Overall, this pioneering work reflects the beginnings of a real debate on the standard of living in rural Spain in its widest sense. It also contains a useful statistical appendix on agricultural wages by province and an exhaustive bibliography.