Agricultural History Review, Volume 55 Part 2 (2007), p. 329

The nineteenth century was a time of great prosperity for Catalan agriculture. This region of north-eastern Spain witnessed not only a significant increase in the total surface area under the plough, following the disentailing of church and common lands, but also a much more intensive use of the soil. Farmers tended to specialize in the most profitable crops, partly directed towards lucrative export markets, prominent among them the vine. Along with many other regions of western Europe, the good times came to a dramatic halt in the last two decades of the century when the ubiquitous ‘agricultural depression’ made its appearance. Fortunately for Catalonia, thanks to its growing specialization in viticulture, the initial impact of the crisis there was felt later than elsewhere in Spain. Significantly, the destruction of French vineyards following the outbreak of the phylloxera virus heralded a boom in wine sales to the neighbouring country. By the late 1880s, however, the disease had spread across the Pyrenees frontier, whilst in the 1890s the French authorities imposed a ban on imports of foreign wine.

As Jordi Planas recounts in this revised version of his doctoral thesis, the first reaction of Catalan farmers to their own variant of the agricultural depression was mainly defensive. Spanish governments were urged to introduce higher tariff barriers, whilst farmers also protested against the level of taxation. Even so, in recognition that such measures could at best provide only temporary relief for the long-term structural problems of regional agriculture, farming organizations throughout Catalonia played an active role in lobbying the politicians in Madrid for the establishment of agronomical stations and agricultural colleges, together with the promotion of cooperatives and rural credit. At the forefront of the campaign to encourage improved techniques and increase productivity on the land was the venerable Institut Agrícola Catalá de Sant Isidre (IACSI), the most important association of landowners in late-nineteenth-century Spain. This elitist body had been founded in Barcelona in 1851. Although IACSI clearly lacked the organizational capacities of its north European counterparts, such as the Belgian Broerbond or the Bund der Landwirte in Germany, it endeavoured to mobilize rural society, at both local and national levels, against a general background of mounting social conflict in the countryside, the diffusion of revolutionary ideas, and the rise of class-based peasant unions. In Planas’s opinion, one of the main reasons why the ruling classes of rural Catalonia embarked on this high-risk attempt to strengthen vertical solidarity was to stave off their own economic and social decline. Indeed, such an argument fits in nicely with the doomed inter-class strategy adopted by the right-wing nationalists of the Catalanist Lliga Regionalista – with whom many (although not all) of IACSI’s leadership were connected – over the same period. Before long, however, in the face of peasant violence during the so-called Bolshevik triennium of 1918–20, and again during the ill-fated Second Republic (1931–36), Catalonia’s large landowners abandoned any idea of class collaboration, redirecting their efforts instead towards a backs-to-the-wall defence of private property.

Planas’s well written and detailed study builds on earlier accounts on the problems of the Catalan countryside in the early twentieth century by, among others, Emili Giralt, Albert Balcells, Ramon Garrabou and, more recently, Montserrat Caminal and Klaus-Jürgen Nagel. With its excellent appendices, it will be an important source of reference for both political and agricultural historians.