Agricultural History Review, Volume 68 Part 1 (2020), p. 136

The subject of this book, written in Catalan, is ‘the making of enclosures (procés de tancament de finques) and the social construction of rural property in Catalunya during the second part of the nineteenth century’ (back cover). It covers a rural southern European society in the period up to 1910, the year after the protests known as the ‘tragic week’ (25 July to 2 August 1909) took place in Barcelona, the capital of Catalunya and industrial stronghold of the rural Kingdom of Spain. Across the entire ‘long nineteenth century’, Spain was a predominantly rural kingdom, like much of southern Europe. One of the merits of this book is how it contextualizes practices of rural property in Catalunya in the ‘longue durée’ (p. 25) preceding the First World War. Elsewhere in Europe, enclosures existed long before the unprecedented industrialization of the post-1850 period, which emerged in industrial outposts surrounded by persistently rural societies. As such, the author makes explicit reference to Marc Bloch (p. 11), the founder of Annales, who studied the ‘agrarian individualism’ and enclosures of pre- Revolutionary France which undermined feudalism and its privileges by favouring democratizing reforms involving land redistribution and republican citizenship.

Tancar la terra stems from a doctoral dissertation defended at the University of Girona in 2015, and investigates ‘the discourses of the enclosure decrees in the Official Journals (butlletins oficials) of the four provinces of Catalunya’ (p. 9), Barcelona, Girona, Lleida and Tarragona. The book is divided into seven chapters and includes several statistical charts and maps. Serrano Jiménez begins by introducing his main source and approach (the Official Journals and their discourses), and then surveys the ‘socio-professional categories’ (p. 79) linked to landed property, highlighting the importance of the aristocracy (p. 86). Then he uses the Official Journals to analyze how poor peasants were prevented from accessing increasingly privatized rural spaces. The focus then moves on to the legal enforcement of these prohibitions, and how they served dominant private interests. These interests also shaped the juridical dimensions of enclosure, itself deeply linked to ‘the idea of exclusive and excluding property’ (pp. 142, 165). In chapter 5, Serrano Jiménez examines how these dominant interests also took control of paths, which were progressively swallowed up by this ‘more exclusive right of property’ (p. 195). The penultimate chapter, on Catalunya’s pioneering promotion of armed groups for ‘the vigilant protection of private property’ (p. 197), is particularly interesting and will be the subject of the remainder of this review. Finally, the author demonstrates that in rural Catalunya hunting rights largely remained a privilege of elites enjoying a period of unprecedent industrialization.

One of the finest historians of Catalunya, Pierre Vilar (who is repeatedly quoted in this book – on pp. 10, 16, and so on), highlighted the industrialization of this rural part of Spain. He collected empirical evidence which showed that, ‘for the Catalan economic elites’, the more rural rest of Spain never ceased to appear as ‘a sort of colonial market to be artificially reserved for Barcelona’ (‘La vie industrielle dans la région de Barcelone’, Annales de géographie, 1929). Integrating this industrial dimension would bring new insights for agricultural history, especially since it emerged during the period under examination in this book, involving complex phenomena of external and internal colonization. Moreover, our knowledge of differently industrialized European societies could be empirically deepened, enlarged and nuanced by considering the great property concentration that characterized the rural worlds of Southern Europe in this period. José Álvarez Junco recently highlighted how Edward Malefakis’ Agrarian reform and peasant revolution in Spain: Origins of the Civil War, a ‘masterpiece’ written half a century ago, remains perennially fashionable because its empirical analysis of the rural worlds in Spain during the Second Republic (1931–36) deals ‘in fact with all the great economic and political problems’ (El País, 23 August 2016).

The anti-republican Coup d’État of 1936 used nationalist violence to bypass the complex problems related to the concentration of rural property in Spain and any democratizing reforms to rural property Their longue durée roots have to do with what the author calls ‘the so-called Liberal Revolution’ (p. 17), especially in the Spanish context so persistently marked by caciquismo (clientelism) within and beyond the rural worlds. Indeed, while the universal rights of political liberalism (freedom of conscience, etc.) were bloodily repressed by Francoism, avoiding democratizing reforms, the laisser faire laisser passer system of economic liberalism based on property was reinforced as never before. Thus, Catalunya fortified its dominant industrial position in the Spanish Kingdom, whose regime was established anew through the brutality of dictatorship. The relationship between violence and the ‘silent revolution’ (p. 26) of ‘the great work of property’ (p. 21) studied here, has then to be approached through a flexible chronology straddling both the nineteenth and the twentieth centuries. It would also be useful to compare Catalunya with other regions of the Kingdom.

In the sixth chapter, ‘Vigilance, Repression and Rural Guards’, Serrano Jiménez interestingly points out that, as early as in 1846, the Barcelona Association of Large Landowners (Asociación de Propietarios de Barcelona) ‘asked the Queen to confer on their rural guards a public character’ (p. 198). Comparisons with the rural Kingdom of Italy and especially with its Northern regions, where industrial nuclei emerged in another mostly rural space marked by clientelism and aristocratic big landowners, could shed new light on how self-serving dominant groups co-opted institutions and official roles in the name of the public good. A good way to avoid ‘the great narrative of the development of the North’ (p. 8), could be to demonstrate how and why the appropriation of power in this manner in Mediterranean Europe so often appears as a process operating in small fiefdoms, which mechanically reproduced local privileges in its rural and dominant worlds and beyond. As such, the question of ‘property’ in Catalunya, which is interestingly analysed by Serrano Jiménez, could be deepened and enlarged by adding to it the concepts of ‘capital’ and ‘field’, as the sociology of Pierre Bourdieu invites us to do.