From 1919 to 1923, Barcelona experienced unprecedented levels of social conflict. The growth of the anarcho-syndicalist National Confederation of Labour (CNT) had awakened the spectre of social revolution among the city's conservative classes, and a broad constellation of reactionary forces lined up against it, the Sindicatos Libres (free trade unions) being the most formidable among them. Created in 1919 by Catholic workers, the Sindicatos Libres were able to capitalize on the exhaustion that had set in among certain working-class groups who had grown wary of reckless strike action. Using violence to fight back against the CNT, the Libres could claim 175,000 members by mid-1922. They mobilized the religious, corporatist, and regionalist sentiments harboured by sectors of the city's workforce and, by adopting a modern repertoire of action, they bypassed the traditional aversion to mass mobilization that had characterized the Catholic labour movement and Spanish conservative parties until then. In many ways, the ideology and tactics of the Libres adumbrated fascism, but their success was short-lived. In late 1922, an upswing in strike action and an abatement of state repression allowed the CNT to recover at the expense of the Libres. This article explores the rise and fall of an organization the study of which has been neglected, situating it in a European context of political polarization whereby the traditional right attempted to modernize its tactics and adapt them to a rising challenge from the revolutionary left. It will also serve as a window through which to examine the complex relationship between workers’ trade union affiliations and their political and cultural identity.

The cultivation of maize for human consumption started to spread through the Cantabrian region around the end of the sixteenth century. The adoption of the new crop was encouraged by the advent of the Little Ice Age, and the resulting crisis of subsistence, which forced Cantabrian peasants and farmers to search for alternatives to wheat. The importance of maize increased steadily and by the nineteenth century it had become the most important crop grown in the region. This had a number of economic and demographic consequences. In particular, it allowed peasants to produce a surplus that enabled them to become more involved in local and regional markets, providing an essential profit for otherwise precarious farm economies; and it encouraged such markets to become more integrated and more flexible in character. This article explores these issues by focusing on the case of Gipuzkoa, an area with a large amount of previously unused documentary sources.

It can be argued, based upon a limited range of surviving evidence, that the land-locked centre of Buchan formed a distinctive upland zone functioning alongside and interwoven with the surrounding lower lands during the thirteenth century. The area can be characterised as less densely settled and engaged in extensive pastoral farming regimes that contrasted with contemporary arable farming of a more intensive nature on the lower-lying lands. Subsequent demographic and agricultural changes have rendered that former environment invisible and the limited documentary sources of the thirteenth century have compounded its mystery. Although a relatively remote upland area, its economy was at least as successful per capita than the rich grain lands surrounding it. Rather than representing a place of secondary importance, it may well have been instrumental in fuelling Aberdeen’s rich thirteenth-century export trade of sheep products to the Low Countries and, perhaps, shared a symbiotic relationship with the lower, arable lands.

The research presented in this article concerns common rights to cattle grazing on common lands and manorial properties in nineteenth-century Austrian Galicia. The findings – obtained by analysing sources from archives and libraries in what is now Ukraine – shed light on the right of peasants and townspeople to graze cattle, along with the circumstances and sources of mass social antagonisms. The rich archival resources permitted a representative group of sources concerning each type of existing conflict to be chosen. The key research problems addressed in this article are the sources for a variety of disputes and their impact on relations between the main social groups and people’s standard of living, the processes of pauperisation and modernisation, and the consequences of abolishing these common rights.

In the second half of the nineteenth century, the Romanian provinces of Wallachia and Moldavia experienced a series of modernising reforms, some of them concerning the agrarian regime. The enforcement of the Organic Statues in the 1830s attempted to reform the political and economic life of the principalities, but it favoured the big landowners, at the expense of the peasantry. The agrarian reform enacted in 1864 put an end to serfdom and granted the right to own land to former corvée peasants. It was soon followed by the appropriation for the newlyweds, a law that offered land to newly married peasants in order to settle them in low populated rural areas. Population growth triggered a new demand for agricultural land because the big landowners still controlled approximately two thirds of the arable land. As a result, in 1881 and 1889 the state passed two laws concerning the sale of public domains to the peasantry, attempting to improve their standard of living. This article focuses on the process of rural colonisation, which took place at the end of the nineteenth century after the sale of state-owned estates to the peasants. Using data extracted from official statistics the article analyses, from a spatial point of view, the creation of a series of new settlements in low populated but fertile regions of the country. Finally, the article investigates how, at that time, this rural colonisation was perceived by peasants, politicians and rural sociologists.