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Commons and the standard of living debate in Spain, 1860–1930

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Abstract

Biological living standards stagnated or even declined during the transition to modern economic growth. Although income per capita was increasing, other indicators, such as mortality rates or heights, portrayed a completely different image. This paper adds to the standard of living debate by analysing the potential effect of the privatisation of common lands. Although highly controversial regarding its impact on the modernisation process itself, its contribution to human welfare has somewhat received much less attention. Focusing on the Spanish experience, this paper exploits geographical variation over time by collecting a panel data set at the provincial level on three different periods: 1860, 1900 and 1930. The empirical analysis shows that the persistence of these collective resources is related with higher life expectancy and heights, particularly during the second half of the nineteenth century. Biological human welfare also seems to have been negatively influenced by the progressively decreasing role that local communities played on the management of these resources. The survival of common lands in some regions provided peasants with mechanisms different from the market, thus making the transition to a market economy more socially sustainable.

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Notes

  1. Contrary to Hardin’s (1968) belief, historical commons across Europe were not open access resources doomed to overexploitation, but were subject to clear regulations, thus preserving their social and ecological sustainability (De Moor 2009, pp. 4–10).

  2. This view, nonetheless, has been contested by Clark and Clark (2001).

  3. Grupo de Estudios de Historia Rural.

  4. Regional and local studies in diverse areas of the Iberian Peninsula confirm these trends (Colomé et al. 2002; Moreno-Lázaro 2006; Cámara 2009; Ramón-Muñoz 2009; García-Montero 2009; Hernández-García and Moreno-Lázaro 2009; Martínez-Carrión and Puche-Gil 2009).

  5. Inequality in income distribution between professional groups showed the expected sign but was not significant, perhaps due to multicollinearity problems (Quiroga 1998, p. 378).

  6. See Martínez-Carrión (2002), Escudero and Simón (2003, p. 550) and Gallego (2007) for exceptions. For regional analyses, which explicitly link the liberal land reforms with declining biological living standards see Cámara (2009) and Ramón-Muñoz (2009). Likewise, recent research on the commons, mostly at the regional or local level, has strongly pointed out the negative economic and social consequences that the privatisation of common lands involved (Iriarte 1998; Moreno 1998; Linares 2001; Ortega-Santos 2002; Serrano 2005; Lana 2008). However, their conclusions have not yet found their way into the wider literature.

  7. According to Rueda (1997, p. 61), around 6.7 million hectares became private between 1855 and 1924. Although less known, the end of the eighteenth and the first half of the nineteenth century also witnessed an important privatisation process, the ‘silent disentailment’, which may have affected around 5.3 million hectares.

  8. The explanation for this regional diversity on the persistence of common lands has been attributed to the social and environmental context, together with the level of market penetration that characterised the different rural societies. See GEHR (1994), Iriarte (2002) and Beltrán Tapia (2014).

  9. The possibility of using land as collateral in the credit market would reinforce these advantages (Deininger and Feder 2001, p. 299).

  10. The testimonies of the contemporaries on this issue are plentiful. An official report about the province of Teruel in mid-nineteenth century is highly eloquent: ‘every first-quality land is already under cultivation; […] and even some plots which should only be employed as pasture or waste land have unfortunately been ploughed and now they are useless for either of them’ (quoted in Del Moral Ruiz del Moral Ruiz 1979, 35). See also Sánchez Salazar (1995) and Gómez-Urdañez (2002).

  11. Furthermore, the income arising from the renting of common lands did frequently not appear in the municipal budgets, so these figures would be a minimum approximation (Del Moral 1986, p. 746). In addition, commons were not only a source of revenues to municipalities but could be used as a guarantee when applying for credit (Bernal 1978, p. 307; Iriarte 2003, p. 245).

  12. In the province of Seville, for instance, despite being one of the areas that most suffered privatisation prior to the Disentailment Act of 1855, the income generated by the commons still provided the 100 % of the ordinary revenue in 66 % of the municipalities in 1849 (Bernal 1978, p. 307). In the four municipalities studied by Iriarte (2003, p. 243) in Navarra, the importance of the commons in the local budget ranged from 20 to 59 % in the period 1926/35.

  13. According to the legal text, 20 % of the sale value would directly go to the state, while the remaining 80 % would belong to the municipalities now transformed in perpetual and inalienable public debt yielding a 3 % annual return. Although these rents were intended to compensate municipalities for the loss of these resources, the debt quickly depreciated and the payments were not often honoured (García Sanz 1985, p. 28).

  14. The Treasury set the state’s fiscal needs, which were then apportioned between regions and municipalities. If the municipal budget did not meet these requirements, local taxes had to be increased. This outcome was by no means unexpected for contemporaries. The parliamentary debates carried out between 1835 and 1855 about the convenience of privatising common lands reflect the concern that depriving local communities from these resources would necessarily force municipalities to increase local taxes, negatively affecting the lower classes (Gómez-Urdañez 2002, p. 144).

  15. I would like to thank the authors for kindly sharing their data.

  16. Low heights in Galicia could also be the result of extremely high desertion rates since around one-third on the conscripts deserted (Cusso and Nicolau 2000, 544).

  17. Migration rates are measured as net migration flows. The available data do not perfectly fit the time periods employed here. The flows between 1878 and 1887, 1888–1920 (average of three different sub-periods) and 1921–1930 are employed to account for 1860, 1900 and 1930, respectively.

  18. Given the hybrid nature that characterised the concept of the ‘commons’ in nineteenth-century Spain, this article identifies common lands as those lands that were collectively managed at the local level in spite of being legally owned by the state, the municipalities or the village neighbours themselves (Iriarte 2002). Also in Gómez-Urdañez (2002), Serrano (2005) and Gallego (2007). See Beltrán Tapia (2014) for a more detailed explanation of this issue. Unfortunately, data are not available for the Basque Country.

  19. In order to avoid unexplained short-run variations in the data, the average proportion of collective practices over the periods 1861–1870, 1903–1913 and 1920–1932 is used to account for the years 1860, 1900 and 1930, respectively. These data should be nonetheless taken with caution. On the one hand, in contrast to 1860, the data for the period 1900–1930 only apply to a restricted set of common lands, the so-called montes de utilidad pública (GEHR 2002). On the other hand, the Disentailment Law itself introduced incentives for villages to misclassify those resources depending on their interests regarding privatisation. The law forced municipalities to sell their commons with the exception of those, which had been enjoyed collectively in the past. Villages could thus apply to except “comunales” from the sales. However, regardless of the actual use of the commons, municipalities cheated both ways depending on their interests either by pretending that commons had been used collectively in order to prevent sales or by pretending that they had been individualised in order to put them on the market.

  20. I am grateful to Julio Martínez-Galarraga for kindly sharing the data. Population figures are taken from Nicolau (2005).

  21. The lack of consistency between censuses regarding female working population advices to rely only on male workers when accounting for the importance of agriculture, a usual procedure in Spanish historical literature (Erdozáin and Mikelarena 1999; Nicolau 2005; Pérez-Moreda 1999; Prados de la Escosura 2008). Consistency between censuses also recommends using data of 1877 instead of 1860. It seems nonetheless that the population distribution did not change much between 1860 and 1877, while there was enough variation between 1877 and 1900. Likewise, the strange figures found in some provinces in 1930 also recommend to employ an average between 1920, 1930 and 1940 to account for that date. See also the comments of Erdozáin and Mikelarena (1999, pp. 107–108) on this issue.

  22. Unfortunately, data on land ownership are only available for 1860 and 1920. Therefore, linear interpolation is employed to estimate that figure for 1900 and the data on 1920 are used for 1930.

  23. The coefficients of the migration variable are significant and have the expected negative sign: higher migration rates are related to lower life expectancy and heights, suggesting that migration is positively selected. Regarding the other control variables, the share of agricultural population and literacy rates have the expected positive sign, while the remaining controls turn out to be statistically insignificant.

  24. It is worth mentioning that, in the highly unstable first half of the nineteenth century, the liberal movement was well aware of the advantages of the civil disentailment to increase the number of land owners and thus widen the social support to the revolution against absolutism (Gómez-Urdañez 2002, pp. 139–140).

  25. Moreover, plots were not parcelled up and payments were required in cash, thus preventing small farmers from participating in the bids (García Sanz 1985, p. 28; Jiménez Blanco 2002, p. 150). Likewise, the use of public auctions also facilitated that foreigners could participate in the sales. Sales were carried out through simultaneous public auctions both in Madrid and in the village where the plot was located (Linares 2001, p. 26).

  26. Although life expectancy and heights are related because both are influenced by the nutritional status and the disease environment, the relative impact of each of these elements on these different measures of health is likely to be different. See Arora (2001, pp. 703–705) for a discussion on these two indicators.

  27. Holding the influence of the commons fixed.

  28. While life expectancy increased by an average of around 5 years between 1860 and 1900, it grew by around 16.2 years between 1900 and 1930.

  29. According to these estimates, the role of the state accounts for around 11.3 of the 21.3 years by which life expectancy increased between 1860 and 1930 (column 4). Given that the control variables account for all the 5.05 years of increase between 1860 and 1900 (column 3), it can be concluded that increasing government intervention accounts for more than two-thirds of the improvements between 1900 and 1930.

  30. Iriarte (1998, p. 133) stresses that this process undermined the social consensus over the management of the remaining common lands and increased both social conflict and the illegal use of these resources.

  31. My translation. Quoted in Gómez-Urdañez (2002, p. 139).

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Acknowledgments

This article has greatly benefited from comments made at conferences and seminars in Oxford, Zaragoza, Utrecht, Vancouver and Banff. I would also like to thank the editor and two anonymous referees for their useful comments and suggestions. Special thanks to Robert Allen for his invaluable advice and his long standing support and generosity. This research has benefited from financial support from the ESRC, Nuffield College and the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation (Projects HAR2012-30732 and ECO2012-33286).

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Table 3 Biological living standards in Spain, 1860–1930

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Beltrán Tapia, F.J. Commons and the standard of living debate in Spain, 1860–1930. Cliometrica 9, 27–48 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11698-014-0107-9

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