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Land reform and conflict before the Civil War: landowner response to tenancy reform in 1930s Catalonia
Author(s) -
Domenech Jordi,
Herreros Francisco
Publication year - 2018
Publication title -
the economic history review
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.014
H-Index - 49
eISSN - 1468-0289
pISSN - 0013-0117
DOI - 10.1111/ehr.12614
Subject(s) - leasehold estate , land tenure , property rights , land reform , status quo , agrarian reform , wage , land law , agrarian society , land titling , asset (computer security) , security of tenure , economics , business , market economy , development economics , political science , geography , law , agriculture , computer security , archaeology , computer science
This article studies the impact of insecure property rights on the behaviour of owners of land before the Spanish Civil War. The theoretical literature on land reform argues that legal threats to the status quo determine agrarian organization, with owners selling land and moving to other asset classes or engaging in large‐scale substitution of sharecroppers and tenants with wage labourers. This study, which uses municipal data on tenant evictions in Catalonia in 1934–5, does not find that uncertainty over property rights in the 1930s meant that owners tried to substitute tenants with wage labourers, especially in the case of the controversial rabassa morta contracts on vineyards. Here it is argued that after 40 years of organizational adjustment to shocks related to phylloxera infestations, legal changes, urbanization, and changes in relative prices, by the 1930s the margin for adjustment was small.