Abstract
Robert Brenner left a passing claim that Catalonia had experienced an agrarian transition to capitalism in parallel to England; a claim that has been dismissed by Catalan historians and forgotten by his followers. The purpose of this chapter is to revisit the question of the Catalan transition while teasing out its broader implications for the Transition Debate. It is argued that the Catalan transition demonstrates the distinct importance of changing subjectivities around production and labor, showing that capitalist production ought to be socially constructed. Contra Brenner’s claims, this chapter argues that pre-capitalist social property relations persisted in Catalan agriculture throughout the period of transition. Instead, the locus of the capitalist breakthrough will be rather situated in the proto-industrial textile sector that thrived in the eighteenth century. Here, the clothiers, the section of the guild in charge of organizing the production process, began to style themselves as “manufacturers” and to subordinate their weaving workforce in an explicit attempt to produce more competitively. This gave rise to a pocket of competitive producers that successfully weathered the crisis of the turn of the nineteenth century and laid the foundations for Catalonia’s early industrialization, an anomaly in the entirety of the Mediterranean Basin.
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Notes
- 1.
Sydney Pollard, Peaceful Conquest: The Industrialization of Europe 1760-1970 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981).
- 2.
James Thomson, “Explaining the ‘take-off’ of the Catalan Cotton Industry,” Economic History Review 4, no. LVIII (2005): 701–735.
- 3.
Jaume Torras, “Small Towns, Craft Guilds and Proto-Industry in Spain,” Jahrbuch Für Wirtschaftsgeschichte / Economic History Yearbook 39, no. 2 (1998): 253–265.
- 4.
Robert Brenner, “Agrarian Class Structure and Economic Development in Pre-Industrial Europe,” Past & Present 70 (1976): 63–64.
- 5.
Jaume Torras, “Class Struggle in Catalonia: A Note on Brenner,” Review (Fernand Braudel Center) 4, no. 2 (1980): 253–265.
- 6.
Ellen Meiksins Wood, “The Question of Market Dependence,” Journal of Agrarian Change 2, no. 1 (2002): 50–87.
- 7.
Robert Brenner, “The Origins of Capitalist Development: A Critique of Neo-Smithian Marxism,” New Left Review I, no. 104 (1977): 25–92.
- 8.
Ellen Meiksins Wood, The Origin of Capitalism: A Longer View (London: Verso, 2002), 2–3.
- 9.
Robert P. Brenner, “The Low Countries in the Transition to Capitalism,” Journal of Agrarian Change 1, no. 2 (2001): 169–241; Wood, “The Question of Market Dependence”; Charles Post, “Comments on the Brenner–Wood Exchange on the Low Countries,” Journal of Agrarian Change 2, no. 1 (2002): 88–95.
- 10.
Wood, “The Question of Market Dependence,” 52–59; 69–70.
- 11.
Perry Anderson, Lineages of the Absolutist State (London: Verso, 2013), 66.
- 12.
Julie Marfany, Land, Proto-Industry and Population in Catalonia c.1680–1829: An Alternative Transition to Capitalism? (Farnham: Ashgate, 2012), 7.
- 13.
Sheilagh Ogilvie, “Social Institutions and Proto-Industrialization,” in European Proto-Industrialization (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 23.
- 14.
Wood, “The Question of Market Dependence,” 68.
- 15.
Torras, “Small Towns, Craft Guilds,” 81–82.
- 16.
Brenner, “Agrarian Class Structure,” 63, emphasis added.
- 17.
Ibid., 66.
- 18.
Torras, “Class Struggle in Catalonia,” 255–259.
- 19.
Marfany, Land, Proto-Industry and Population, 26–31.
- 20.
In the meantime, the Catalan aristocracy had evacuated the countryside to focus on the scramble for public office. The high nobility relocated to Castile, where many of their lines became extinct as they blended with those of the local aristocracy. The resident nobility became dominated by a lower gentry drafted from an urban patriciate (ciutadans honrats) that would perform tax farming functions in Catalonia’s self-governing institutions until their abolition after the War of Spanish Succession (after, tax collecting functions would pass on to Castilian-style corregidores that were overwhelmingly drafted from the ranks of the Castilian military). See Pere Molas Ribalta, “Noblesa Absentista i Retòrica Catalana,” Butlletí de La Societat Catalana d’Estudis Històrics, no. 12 (2001): 27–41; Miquel Pérez Latre, “Nobleses i Generalitat: La Classe Dirigent i l’exercici Del Poder Des de Les Institucions (Segles Xvi–Xvii),” Acta Artis: Estudis d’Art Modern 3 (2015): 27–39.
- 21.
Jaume Torras, “Especialización agricola e industria rural en Cataluña en el siglo XVIII,” Agricultura, industria y actividades urbanas en la España moderna 2, no. 3 (1984): 113–127.
- 22.
Belén Moreno Claverías, “La rabassa morta y la defensa de su carácter enfiteútico,” 2013, http://webfacil.tinet.org/usuaris/turesplu/Belen_Moreno_20130906110309.pdf.
- 23.
Josep María Oliva Melgar, “Los intercambios en la Cataluña del siglo XVIII,” Manuscrits, no. 11 (1993): 199.
- 24.
Ramón Garrabou, “Sobre la formació del mercat català en el segle XVIII. Una primera aproximació a base dels preus dels grans a Tàrrega (1732–1811),” Recerques: Història, economia i cultura, no. 1 (1970): 83–121.
- 25.
Ramón Garrabou, Jordi Planas, and Enric Saguer, Un capitalisme impossible?: La gestió de la propietat agrària a la Catalunya contemporània (Barcelona: Eumo, 2001), 225.
- 26.
Marfany, Land, Proto-Industry and Population, 5–9; 44–49; 175–178; 183–185.
- 27.
See Marfany, 93–121. Paradoxically, testators had the legal freedom to allocate 75 percent of their testaments at will, and the children (eldest included) were only legally entitled to the remaining 25 percent. Yet the strength of primogeniture traditions was such that the allocation 75–80 percent of the parents’ property to the eldest son was virtually universal. The legal transfer of property was settled upon the marriage of the heir.
- 28.
Llorenç Ferrer i Alòs, “Agricultura i agricultors,” in Pierre Vilar i la Història de Catalunya, ed. Joaquim Albareda et al. (Barcelona: Base, 2006), 109.
- 29.
Marfany, Land, Proto-Industry and Population, 33–41; 141–143.
- 30.
Ramón Garrabou, Jordi Planas, and Enric Saguer, “Sharecropping and the Management of Large Rural Estates in Contemporary Catalonia,” Journal of Peasant Studies 28, no. 3 (2001): 94–95.
- 31.
Josep Fontana, Cambio económico y actitudes políticas en la España del siglo XIX (Barcelona: Crítica, 1975), 73.
- 32.
Moreno Claverías, “La rabassa morta”.
- 33.
Garrabou, Planas, and Saguer, “Sharecropping and the Management,” 100.
- 34.
Although this brought some instances of increased relative surplus extraction (e.g. indications on the use of fertilizer), landowners mostly acquired new capacities to increase the rate of exploitation through distinctively pre-capitalist means. These usually involved (1) an extension of absolute surplus extracted (e.g. by claiming greater shares of the yield or by specifying distances between rows of vines in order to prevent tenants from growing wheat for themselves) or (2) a relapse on “extra-economic” means of exploitation (e.g. tenants were forced to perform periodic labor dues). Overall, Catalan agriculture continued to bear a greater resemblance with feudal agrarian practices than with competitive capitalist agriculture. For more details, see Marfany, Land, Proto-Industry and Population, 52; Moreno Claverías, “La rabassa morta”.
- 35.
Garrabou, Planas, and Saguer, “Sharecropping and the Management,” 96.
- 36.
Pierre Vilar, La Catalogne dans l’Espagne moderne. Vol. 1, 2, 3 (Paris: Flammarion, 1992). The perspective underpinning Vilar’s monolithic work on Catalonia was inspired by his intervention in the early stages of the transition debate, during the famous dispute between Maurice Dobb and Paul Sweezy. Although Dobb had argued that feudalism unravelled when market dynamics creeped into the countryside, and Sweezy stressed that the impetus of change came from the external shocks of urban-based long-distance trade, Vilar reformulated the antimony between these “endogenous” and “exogenous” factors as a problem of finding the right synthesis between the two, himself emphasizing the rise of the Atlantic economy. See Pierre Vilar, “Problems of the Formation of Capitalism,” Past & Present 10, no. 1 (1956): 15–38. For a discussion of Vilar’s intervention in the Dobb-Sweezy debate, see Francesc Valls Junyent, “Indústria i industrials,” in Pierre Vilar i la Història de Catalunya, ed. Joaquim Albareda et al. (Barcelona: Base, 2006).
- 37.
Vilar quoted in Valls Junyent, “Indústria i industrials”.
- 38.
See Ramon Grau and Marina Lopez, “Empresari i capitalista a la manufactura catalana del segle XVIII. Introduccio a l’estudi de fabriques d’indianes,” Recerques: història, economia, cultura 4 (1974); Fontana, Cambio económico.
- 39.
James Thomson, A Distinctive Industrialization: Cotton in Barcelona 1728–1832 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 50–89, 230.
- 40.
Thomson, 230.
- 41.
Álex Sánchez, “La era de la manufactura algodonera en Barcelona, 1736–1839,” Estudios de historia social, no. 48–49 (1989): 65–113; Thomson, A Distinctive Industrialization: Cotton in Barcelona 1728–1832; Thomson, “Explaining the ‘take-off’ of the Catalan Cotton Industry”; James Thomson, “Consideracions sobre la indústria cotonera i la seva evolució a Barcelona, 1730–1840,” in La industria de les indianes a Barcelona, 1730–1850, ed. Álex Sánchez, 17 (Barcelona: Ajuntament de Barcelona, 2012), 317–330.
- 42.
Llorenç Ferrer i Alòs, Els Orígens de La Industrialització a La Catalunya Central (Barcelona: Rafael Dalmau, 1986); Josep M. Benaul, “Los orígenes de la empresa textil lanera en Sabadell y Terrassa en el siglo XVIII,” Revista de Historia Industrial 1 (1992): 32–62; Albert García Balañà, La fabricació de la fábrica: Treball i política a la Catalunya cotonera (1784–1874) (Barcelona: L’Abadia de Montserrat, 2004); Marfany, Land, Proto-Industry and Population in Catalonia c.1680–1829: An Alternative Transition to Capitalism?; Thomson, “Consideracions sobre la indústria cotonera i la seva evolució a Barcelona, 1730–1840”.
- 43.
Torras, “Especialización agricola e industria rural en Cataluña en el siglo XVIII”; Jaume Torras, “La ‘protoindustrialización’: balance de una peripecia historiográfica,” Areas: Revista internacional de ciencias sociales 10 (1989): 83–88; Jaume Torras, “From Craft to Class: Cloth Manufacturing in a Catalan Town,” in The Workplace before the Factory: Artisans and Proletarians 1500–1800, ed. Thomas Max Safley and Leonard Ronsenband (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993); Torras, “Small Towns, Craft Guilds and Proto-Industry in Spain”; Jaume Torras, Fabricants sense fábrica: els Torelló, d’Igualada (1691–1794) (Vic: Eumo, 2007).
- 44.
Torras, “La ‘protoindustrialización’: balance de una peripecia historiográfica”.
- 45.
Francesc Valls Junyent, La Catalunya atlántica: Aiguardent i teixits a l’arrencada industrial catalana (Barcelona: Eumo, 2003), 27–34.
- 46.
Torras, Fabricants sense fábrica, 103–121.
- 47.
Josep M. Benaul, “La industria en vísperas de la industrialización, 1750–1813. Manufactura tradicional e industria moderna,” in Atlas de la Industrialización en España, ed. Jordi Nadal (Barcelona: Crítica, 2003), 25–56.
- 48.
See Rosa Ros, La Industria Textil Lanera de Béjar (1680–1850) (Valladolid: Junta de Castilla y León, 1999). Béjar underwent a process of transformation similar to that of Terrassa in the first decades of the eighteenth century. However, as explained, a “guild reaction” from 1765 eschewed these advances.
- 49.
Torras, “Small Towns, Craft Guilds,” 87.
- 50.
Torras, Fabricants sense fábrica, 49; Thomson, A Distinctive Industrialization, 34–49.
- 51.
Benaul, “Los orígenes de la empresa,” 32–62.
- 52.
Benaul: 40–44; Torras, Fabricants sense fábrica, 147–157.
- 53.
Benaul, “Los orígenes de la empresa,” 40–44.
- 54.
See Torras, “From Craft to Class”.
- 55.
Ferrer i Alòs, Els Orígens, 20–25.
- 56.
Quoted in Marfany, Land, Proto-Industry and Population, 75. The clothiers of Sabadell raised similar arguments, citing the example of Barcelona’s cotton manufactures, where “owners rule absolutely and do not depend in any way from the weavers or the other employees”. See Benaul, “Los orígenes de la empresa,” 45.
- 57.
Benaul, “Los orígenes de la empresa,” 40–45.
- 58.
Pere Molas Ribalta, Los Gremios Barceloneses Del Siglo XVIII (Madrid: Confederación Española de Cajas de Ahorros, 1970), 386.
- 59.
The calico industry emerged in the age of Philip V (1700–1746), a period marked by the founding of Colbertian state manufactures. Although Barcelona’s calico industry was left to the private sector (no cotton manufactures were ever founded by the state), private investment always depended on remarkable opportunities for import-substitution. The bulk of their sales were geared at the heavily protected Spanish market and supplemented by exports to the captive colonial markets. See Thomson, “Explaining the ‘take-off’,” 703–716; Oliva Melgar, “Los intercambios”.
- 60.
Thomson, “Consideracions sobre la indústria cotonera,” 703–716.
- 61.
Thomson, A Distinctive Industrialization, 185.
- 62.
Thomson, “Explaining the ‘take-off’,” 722.
- 63.
Ibid., 716–718.
- 64.
Torras, Fabricants sense fábrica, 147; Molas Ribalta, Los Gremios Barceloneses, 388.
- 65.
Belén Moreno Claverías, “El aprendiz de gremio en la Barcelona del siglo XVIII,” Revista Internacional de Ciencias Sociales 34, no. Gremios y corporaciones laborales en la transición del feudalismo al capitalismo (2015): 709.
- 66.
Sánchez, “La era de la manufactura,” 99.
- 67.
Thomson, A Distinctive Industrialization; Thomson, “Explaining the ‘take-off’,” 725.
- 68.
James Thomson, “Olot, Barcelona and Ávila and the Introduction of the Arkwright Technology to Catalonia,” Revista de Historia Económica 21, no. 2 (2003): 302.
- 69.
Ferrer i Alòs, Els Orígens, 302.
- 70.
Benaul, “Los orígenes de la empresa”.
- 71.
Thomson, A Distinctive Industrialization: Cotton, 294–301.
- 72.
Thomson, “Consideracions sobre la indústria cotonera,” 322–328.
- 73.
Marfany, Land, Proto-Industry and Population, 82–83; García Balañà, La fabricació de la fábrica, 331–337.
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Moreno Zacarés, J. (2019). The Transition to Capitalism in Catalonia. In: Lafrance, X., Post, C. (eds) Case Studies in the Origins of Capitalism. Marx, Engels, and Marxisms. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-95657-2_6
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