This paper presents a unique database that explores how industrialisation affected municipalities' incomes, expenditures and education spending. Using the importance of the mines and steelworks in Biscay in northern Spain between 1860 and 1910 as indicators of industrialisation, the findings show that there was a positive relationship between these dimensions and towns' incomes, which was indirectly transmitted to municipalities' expenditures, showing that municipalities were able to benefit from industrialisation. However, the thriving mining and metallurgy sectors did not support an increase in education spending. The lack of short-term results from spending on education may have led town councils to divert the revenues of industrialisation into more urgent areas, or those that could deliver faster results.

In 1790, the Revolutionary government expropriated most property owned by the Church and its entities, and sold it by auction. This effectively ended the centuries-old participation of the Church in wine production in France. Focusing on Burgundy, this article sketches the contours of the sale of vineyards and other wine-related property owned by the Church. It shows that auctions fetched prices well above the assessed value of the properties that were sold and speculates on the reasons.

In this paper, we present a series of environmental policies that were implemented by the city-state of Athens during the Classical period (508–323 BCE) through a specific set of environmental institutions. They included: waste management, the implementation of a recycling process regarding animal manure as well as hygiene practices. Special administrative bodies were set up for this purpose with the power to impose heavy fines to offenders, and the actual job of environmental protection was contracted out to private operators. We argue that the success of the Athenian environmental institutions should primarily be attributed to the economic stimuli that the Athenian state provided to their staff so as to perform their duties efficiently, as well as to the imposition of fines and/or other penalties if they provided subpar services. We finally provide proposals as to how the Athenian environmental policies may be seen as an inspiration for our modern societies.

The privatisation of communal assets tends to be presented as an irreversible linear movement that was driven from above. Based on a case study (Navarre, nineteenth century), this article seeks to give greater prominence to local players and their response to changing circumstances. The process thus appears less linear and compact by revealing certain anomalies, such as the reversibility of certain sales or the alienation of partial ownership rights that were compatible with the preservation of rights of use in favour of local councils and households, as an example of institutional bricolage. Against a backdrop of war and municipal bankruptcy, the privatisation of collective lands between 1808 and 1860 followed various paths, each one benefitting different social classes. Borrowers, outside investors and wealthy individuals accumulated large estates, but there was also a chance for peasants and local people to become property owners. The recovery of part of these lands on the back of social conflicts from 1884 onwards confirms that privatisation was not a fait accompli.

In this paper we show that Portugal benefitted from comparatively low-interest rates from the 13th century onwards, well before the generalised drop in interest rates in Europe. Contrary to the thesis that frontier economies struggle with high-interest rates and scarcity of capital, we find that the country's low and stable interest rates can be explained by its wide availability of land, combined with monetary stability and a favourable institutional network. These conclusions are built upon an entirely new dataset of interest rates and returns on capital for Portugal in the period 1230–1500.

Most of the Catalan vineyards were cultivated by means of sharecropping contracts that granted the sharecropper ownership rights over the land. This paper maintains that the “bundle of rights” view of property is not the most appropriate for analysing situations of this kind. It shows that, from around 1900 onwards, sharecroppers’ rights became insecure, which gave rise to a series of dysfunctions that resulted in the contract no longer being optimal. It concludes that the removal of the inefficiencies arising from shared ownership was a sufficient reason to justify the agrarian reform that the Catalan Parliament sought to introduce in 1934.

In the early 20th century, governments not only used trade policy to protect domestic agricultural markets, but they also introduced regulations affecting quality, quantity and prices. In this article I assess the differences in the state intervention in wine markets in two major wine-producing countries, France and Spain, and try to explain the reasons for them. To do so, I examine the specific features of their markets and productive systems, the winegrowers’ collective action, and the political framework in each country. I argue that the differences are related to (a) the strength and cohesion of the winegrowers’ lobby, (b) the winegrowers’ relationship with political parties and (c) the state’s ability to respond to their demands.

Land reform and its financial arrangements are central elements of modern Irish history. Yet to date, the financial mechanisms underpinning Irish land reform have been overlooked. The article outlines the mechanisms of land reform in Ireland and the importance of land bonds to the process. Advances worth over £127 million were made to tenant farmers to purchase their holdings. These schemes enabled the transfer of over three-quarters of land on the island of Ireland. The article introduces a new database on Irish land bonds listed on the Dublin Stock Exchange from 1891 to 1938. It illustrates the nature of these bonds and presents data on their size, liquidity and market returns. The article finds a high level of state banking in Ireland: large issues of land bonds were held by state-owned savings banks.

The essential aims of this article are: (1) to measure the magnitude of the crisis of 1803-1805 in the two Castiles; (2) to analyse the causes and consequences of this crisis. Among the main conclusions of this essay we would like to underline: (a) the 1803-1805 crisis led to a fall in the population of Castile of about 15 per cent; (b) the severe rise in the price of grains in those years was due to the bad harvests and the sparse working capacity of the municipal grain stores, but more than anything else it was the collapse of the market for this produce as a result of the prohibition of removing grain; (c) government measures to deal with the crisis were numerous and relatively bold, but not very effective; (d) the strong mobilisation of the people disrupted the working of some of the basic institutions of the Ancien Régime.

The impact of the privatisation of the commons remains a contested topic throughout the social sciences. Focusing on the Spanish case, this article reviews the literature and provides an overall assessment of this historical process based on recent research. Common lands appear to have been reasonably well managed and their dismantling did not foster agricultural productivity. Instead, the privatisation process negatively affected the economic situation of a large proportion of rural households and local councils, as well as deteriorating the stock of social capital. Therefore, the long-standing belief in the existence of a trade-off between equity and efficiency actually turns out to be misleading.

The aim of this article is to measure the advance of agricultural productivity in South Navarra between 1780 and 1900. The construction of several indices of agricultural commodities and factor prices allows us to apply the methodology of Total Factor Productivity (TFP). As distinguished from the thesis of stagnation, our estimate of the annual rate of TFP growth in the long run is close to 0.42 %. This rate was particularly high between 1817 and 1850, in a context of deflation and institutional change. During the second half of the century the cyclical evolution of the curve reveals the obstacles derived from the capital resources supply, especially fertilizers and animal traction.

This article examines a case study of profound agricultural transformations along the Early Modern Age. Around the protoindustrial town of Alcoi there was an intense process of substitution of cultivations that altered the physiognomy of the rural activities of an area traditionally considered as poor from the agrarian point of view. The catalogue of these changes is substantial: the substitution of wheat for barley, the early introduction of corn and its strong spread, the advance of the cultivation of vine, and, finally, the adoption of crop rotations in the irrigable area that was part of a limited extension of land, though significant for a mountainous area. Throughout the text these changes are described and explained, keeping in mind the proto-industrial framework in which they appear, as well as their context in the Valencián and Spanish environment.

This work explores the management of public forests in Spain at the beginning of the twentieth century, in an effort to evaluate its effectiveness. For this purpose the article examine why and how the State made public forest management concessions to private enterprise, and analyzes the specific clauses of the contracts. The main conclusion is that those clauses were inefficient and although they accelerated forest product extractions, they did not achieve a constant growth of forest productivity. This could have had a negative effect on the sustainability of the forests being managed.

A very low demand elasticity for wheat –the so-called King's Law– is one of the most commonly accepted assumptions made by cliometricians. But there is little and contradictory evidence to contrast this. In fact, Robert Fogel's estimates confirm the hypothesis whereas Karl Gunnar Persson's reject it. The aim of this article is to shed new light into this debate through an improved version of Fogel's procedure, using price and production data for several Western European countries in the Premodern Age. The results confirm Persson's estimate.

Miguel de Cervantes placed some passages of his masterpiece in Catalonia. Nevertheless, the features he uses to approach the Catalan reality -halfwaybetween 16th and 17th centuries- are obviously influenced by Don Quixote's personality. At that time, the Catalan economy was making its way in every sphere of activity which could operate at a profit. Far away from that magnificent Middle Ages, agriculture had to be rearranged and it was necessary to promote the most competitive products and to try to find markets for them. New generations devoted themselves to this purpose, people who were equally distant from the old patrician oligarchies and from the fickleness of the marginal nobility. They were laying, perhaps without knowing it, the path to modernity.

This article tries to establish the chronology and dynamics of the 17th century economic depression in the region of Evora, in Southern Portugal. By examining a set of key variables –vital statistics, prices of foodstuffs and farm rents– the onset of the depression is located in the last decade of 16th century, and its continuation up to 1660 is attested. A number of attempts to recovery are detected, but all of them were checked by poor harvests, sometimes joined by plague and war. On the whole, high prices of foodstuffs appear to be associated with signals of depression in the behaviour of other variables. This seems to indicate that these price increases were supply-driven, rather than demand-driven, weighting heavily on the incomes of most families, whereas small farmers were unable to take advantage of these seemingly favourable conjunctures.

This article studies the proceedings used by the Spanish public finances to deal with the unpaid taxes during the last decades of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th. The connections between the concerned public institutions, and between these and the taxpayers, are analysed using the statements of tax collectors. The great amount of land seized by the State, as a consequence of unpaid taxes, are a sign of the changes that the Spanish rural areas were suffering. This phenomenon became a serious source of conflict and it made evident the important structural problems of the Restauration Administration.

The aim of this paper is to study the water market in Canaries in the long run and to show how this resource was managed in the Canary Islands. In the first section, a theoretical model of operation is presented and then is tested to examine the evolution of water prices. We show that the evolution of waterprices is conditioned by the fact that the property of water has been concentrated only in few hands. Finally, we discuss if in the Canary Islands the water has been efficiently managed during XXth century.

Through the case of one family from the regional nobility, this paper examines the adaptation of the old landowner elites to the new board carried by the Liberal Revolution. Despite the large struggle against the manorial power and other contingencies, the Magallón procured to repair their fortune on a new basis. With a double strategy such as lessors and husbandmen, their incomes rose during the second half of the XIX century. Indeed, they were very far from the arguable Spanish stereotype of the absent landowner.

This paper deals with the role played by the Maritime Guilds in the development and management of the fisheries conducted from the Basque shore until the first half of the 20th century. It contends that thanks to a particular institutional framework Guilds were able to build up a management model based on the exclusive use of the fishing resources. The character of this regime of use stems from the behaviour of the fishing resources and from the characteristics of the fish markets in Spain before the 20th century, but it is also related to an historical model of organisation and relationship between society and nature. Finally, the social and economic consequences of the process of institutional change that eliminated the legal basis of the exclusiveness are analysed.