The growth of the state during the 1840s provoked fierce criticism of fiscal irresponsibility from the government’s opponents. Consequently, a series of spending cuts followed the overthrow of the July Monarchy in 1848, focusing most heavily on public works, which were to be delegated to the private sector to a greater degree than under the Orleanists. The expansion of public works continued apace in the 1850s, but with less government investment than in the 1840s. Indeed, the pressure for public amenities was made all the more intense by the advent of universal suffrage in 1848, which increased the need for the government to promote widespread prosperity. At the same time, the government continued to pursue the enhancement of French prestige abroad, participating in the Crimean War in 1854–6. Financing the war relied heavily on credit, prompting an overhaul of government borrowing as the state issued loans by public subscription, realising on a large scale what previous regimes had only envisioned and reshaping the way that the government contracted loans in subsequent years.

The Second Republic sparked considerable enthusiasm concerning the possibilities that a large-scale permanent redistribution of landed property could resolve the social problems in southern Spain. Yet, as this chapter argues, land reform failed because there was insufficient uncultivated land that could be brought under the plough, and labour-intensive agriculture was not feasible under dry-farming conditions. Indeed, cereal cultivation was becoming increasingly capital intensive, especially on the heavy, fertile Campiña soils. The slow and limited progress of settlements under the 1932 Reform Law contrasts with the land invasions in the spring of 1936, which resulted in over a hundred thousand peasants receiving almost immediately over half a million hectares. However they failed to solve the overriding problem of insufficient land and, because weak state capacity implied that land settlements could not be implemented impartially, they simply changed which authority decided who was to benefit, and who was to be excluded.

This chapter examines how different political groups organized the rural sector during the Second Republic. Socialism remained heavily influenced by orthodox Marxism, and their policies centred almost exclusively on improving the living standards of the landless labourers, a group that represented just 5 per cent of Spain’s active population. Both large and small family farmers had to pay higher wagers at a time of weak farm prices and technical difficulties to increasing farm output.The legislation of the first republican-socialist coalition governments of 1931 and 1932 threatened traditional property rights and religious privileges, finally drawing both the Church and rural elites into mass party competitive politics. While a small but influential sector never accepted either the 1931 Constitution or a democratic republic, a new conservative party (CEDA) attracted support from across the country in defence of property rights, the Church, and Spain’s political unity. By 1933, it claimed around 800,000 members. The chapter ends by showing how the significant regional land-tenure regimes helped develop strong regional political movements in Galicia and Catalonia.