At the end of the Ancien Régime, the town of Albacete experienced an important demographic growth which led it to exercise a great power of attraction over the migratory and economic networks in the whole of eastern La Mancha. From a meagre 2,500 inhabitants in 1700, it gradually recovered its number of inhabitants, reaching over 5,000 in 1750. The years between 1750-1850 were those which represented an important quantitative change, not without enormous ups and downs, but which quadrupled the population. For the first years of the 1760s, the demographic estimate for the town, villages and hamlets of Albacete was 5,776 inhabitants, with 4,588 in the town centre alone. This figure increased 26 years later in the Floridablanca census to 8,261 inhabitants in the villages and hamlets as a whole and 6,679 people in the town. At the end of the 18th century, through the Godoy census, the town as a whole with its hamlets reached the figure of 9,552 and in 1861 it reached 16,000 inhabitants. The demographic increase in the population of Albacete was reflected in the same way in all social groups. In the case of the merchants, the growth was quite significant from the middle of the 18th century until the first third of the 19th century. With the social and economic expansion of the town after the 1740s and 1750s, and with particular force from 1780 onwards, the social and economic diversification of Albacete’s merchant community became evident, coinciding with a period of withdrawal on the part of the families of the local oligarchy. Many of the merchant families acquired greater power in the first third of the 19th century, who came from small shopkeepers and retailers, as well as master craftsmen who had become wealthy at the end of the 18th century.
Collection: Graphics
Project: 3. Rural world and urban world in the formation of the European identity., 4. Family, daily life and social inequality in Europe.
Chronology: XVIII, XIX
Scope: Secondary Education, Baccalaureate, University
Resource type: Graph
Format: Line chart
Source: Gómez Carrasco, Cosme Jesús, «Capital comercial y burguesía agraria a finales del Antiguo Régimen. El interior castellano (1750–1830), Revista de Demografía Histórica, vol. 28, nº2, 2010, pp. 51–95.
Language: Spanish
Date: 2010
Owner: Álvaro Romero González (Modernalia)
Copyright: © Cosme Jesús Gómez Carrasco, © Revista de Demografía Histórica
Abstract: Comparative evolution between the number of families of the local elite and merchants in the town of Albacete since the second half of the 18th century
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