Land tenure inequality, harvests, and rural conflict ... - e-Archivo

Mainstream narratives of the causes of rural conflict in 1930s Spain have
focused especially on the South of Spain, where inequality, landlessness and poverty
were endemic. There, it is argued, conflict was particularly acrimonious given the
privileged position of the landowning elites pitted against a mass of desperately poor,
illiterate landless laborers. Classic accounts of rural unrest in interwar Europe depict
inequal power relations and exploitation by the owners of land as the pre-conditions
for rural polarization and conflict. An exogenous shock like the First World War or
the Great Depression brought such an unstable system to conflict and collapse (for
example, Snowden, 1986: 33-34; Snowden, 1989: 150-57). In the case of Spain,
employers’ boycott practices, poor wheat harvests and a reduction in agricultural
output caused unemployment and falling living standards, resulting in conflict and
polarization.
However, narratives emphasizing explotation and falling living standards do
not square with the existing evidence: inequality fell quickly in the period (Prados de
la Escosura, 2008), poor wheat harvests in 1931 and 1933 alternated with
exceptionally good harvests in 1932 and 1934, olive-growing areas also experienced
high levels of conflict and did not experience similar levels of output volatility,
seasonal unemployment was not a new phenomenon in rural labor markets in dryfarming
areas of Spain, and real wages in agricultural labor markets held up pretty
well in the 1930s (Domenech, 2013). This paper aims at subverting mainstream
narratives of rural conflict during the 2 nd Republic by analyzing in detail the pattern of
conflicts in Andalusia, concentrating on the very active provinces of Córdoba, Jaén
and Seville (see map 1).
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