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

adical republicanism and did not elect Socialist mayors. Clusters of agrarian
development and thick labor markets explain the vitality of protest, part of a large
change in expectations and in bargaining power. The testimonies of several prefects
of the period show that despite the occasional bouts of repression against anarchosyndicalist
leaders, central authorities until June 1934 favored collective bargaining.
State support to collective bargaining led to a wave of strikes, which was not
correlated with any possible proxy of living standards, specialization or variation in
income. Workers in some towns protested more possibly because they had a longer
experience of strategic interaction with authorities. State intervention to stem riots and
rebellions in the large agro-towns of the South Spain had been going on since 19 th
century and it had been a natural step to negotiate working conditions with provincial
prefects or the Ministry of Labor. Most of this protest clustered in well-integrated and
fast-growing towns in which various social groups competed for rents from
agricultural development.
The results found here perhaps erradicate several myths about social relations
in Andalusia in the 1930s. Seasonal unemployment was a characteristic of rural labor
markets in cereal growing areas of Spain, not a new phenomenon in the 1930s.
Poverty and living standards were dismal in the 1930s, but the situation did not
deteriorate markedly in the early 1930s due to bad harvests or employers’ sabotage.
There was a profound change in social relations and in the governance of rural labor
markets, but nothing equivalent to a “latent” civil war caused by unemployment,
inequality and exploitation. In fact, violence, boycott and sabotage would be
incompatible with the very abundant harvests of 1932 and 1934. Perhaps, only the
fundamental political regime change of April 1931, pro-labor legislative change, and
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