Agricultural History Review, Volume 56 Part 1 (2008), p. 117

There are two major themes to this edited volume: enclosure and the consolidation of exclusive property rights over the centuries, and the initiation of an open debate (minus any strong conclusions) on the relationship between property rights and social change in the countryside. The papers included are largely based on presentations made to the Sociedad Española de Historia Agraria (SEHA) at two seminars held in Girona and Pamplona in 2002 and 2004. Among the aims of the participants was to bring out the diversity of the enclosure process in Spain and, to a lesser extent, other European countries and to emphasise the persistence of common lands until much later than is often admitted by historians and social scientists. English-speaking readers seeking some flavour of this debate should consult Rosa Congost’s excellent article ‘Property rights and historical analysis. What rights? What history?’, Past and Present, 181 (2003), pp.73–106.

As Congost informs us in her introduction to this book, all of the contributors are agreed on the need to revise the dominant historical focus on property rights, seeing them not so much as social constructions but as legal products. The studies published here are grouped into three blocks: a) Property rights and their historical significance, including contributions by Gérard Béaur on France and Guiliana Biagioli on central and northern Italy; b) Four case studies by Tine De Moor (Flanders), Jacinto Bonales (the Catalan Pyrenees), Fernando Esteve & Javier Hernando Ortego (Madrid), and Iñaki Iriarte and José Miguel Lana (Navarre), bringing out the complex relationship between communal property and the development of modern capitalism; c) Four studies on enclosure, consisting of an analysis of enclosure south of the Pyrenees as expressed in both the literature and legislation by Felipa Sánchez Salazar, followed by three case studies on Catalonia (Montserrat Pellicer) and Andalusia (Antonio Luis López Martínez and Juan Diego Pérez Cebada).

It is difficult to do justice to so many contributions in a brief review. Congost’s seminal chapter is, in essence, a summary of her magisterial 2007 book, Tierras, leyes, historia. Estudios sobre ‘la gran obra de la propiedad’, recently reviewed in the Review, in which she firmly rejects a ‘linear view’ of rural history as determined by changes in legal codes. For my part, I was much taken by Jesús Izquierdo’s splendid chapter on late nineteenth-century attacks, not least from the great Aragonese polymath Joaquín Costa, on ‘the excesses of liberalism’ in the Spanish countryside combined with a rejection of private property as it was set out in Spain’s civil code of 1889. As well as Costa, contemporary Spanish historians such as Rafael Altamira and sociologists like Gumersindo de Azcárate saw the ancien régime as ‘a stage of complex conviviality between communal and private property’. While the old order is often viewed by scholars as a mere link in the long evolutionary chain towards a modernity dominated by private property, Izquierdo stresses that the peasantry in particular was profoundly interested in the survival of communal property. In their chapter on the ‘moral economy’ of the ancien régime in early modern Madrid, Esteve and Hernando Ortego emphasise the vitality of peasant communities along with their resistance to change within the communal regime. Iriarte and Lana nicely outline the state of the debate on public versus private property in Spain. Whereas in the 1980s most studies tended to focus on civil disentailing, the following decade witnessed a proliferation of studies on public property, including forests, which escaped privatisation. In their opinion, both lines of research have become far too compartmentalised.

With its detailed bibliography and providing much new data, this is one of the most interesting and stimulating collections of essays I’ve read on the agrarian history of modern Spain. Let’s hope that it serves as a springboard for further research.