Desamortización - History Lab

Evolution of the economic organisation of the Chapter of Barcelona in the 17th century

ad_hlab_min — Sat, 19 Feb 2022 16:29:41 +0000

During the Modern Age, the Catholic Church was one of the main owners of movable and immovable property in Spain. This resource deals with the economy of ecclesiastical institutions through the Cathedral Chapter of Barcelona. Its economic administration was divided into nine bodies, each with its own legal personality and its own sources of funding. The bodies were: the Caritat, dedicated to the control and payment of the canons; the Pia Almoina, oriented towards charity through two subsections, the Administració General and Majordomia; the Beneficis Units, which helped the financial endowment of the canons; the Sacristy and the Obra de la Seo, whose functions were the sacramental administration (the former) and the maintenance of the building (the latter). The income derived from the performance of funerals corresponded to the Manna, and the distribution of bread rations among the staff was the task of the Passtrim. For its part, the chapter did not collect the rents directly; rather, it leased them as a way of obtaining economic benefit or in kind, and each administration was responsible for negotiating its leases. Throughout the 17th century, a process of administrative centralisation took place and progress was made in the professionalisation of management, with a more efficient system which, together with the system of leases, further reduced the organisational infrastructure. The centripetal ecclesiastical economy, with the conception of “dead hands” land ownership, clashed with the new forms of private property that appeared in the transformation from the Ancien Régime to the bourgeois state, and the lands were subject to subsequent confiscations.

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Andalusian heritage privatised between 1750 and 1852

ad_hlab_min — Sat, 19 Feb 2022 16:29:25 +0000

When analysing the process of appropriation and privatisation of Andalusian lands – centred in this case on Antequera, Archidona and Malaga – attention must be paid to the different ways in which public lands were alienated, such as the Carolinian distributions, usurpations, the fragmentation of boundaries and finally the liberal disentailments.
The documentation records the highest proportion of usurpations during the first half of the 19th century, especially during the War of Independence and the Liberal Triennium. The method followed by the usurpers was to extend private plots with some municipal lands -under an average of 3.7 hectares per plot-. Among the causes of this land-grabbing fever may have been the demographic increase and the deficit in cereal production, which made it impossible for the most disadvantaged social groups to have access to foodstuffs.
In addition to encroachment, the neighbours adjacent to each area caused the deforestation of many areas due to the felling of trees and the introduction of livestock in these hitherto forbidden places, leading to a drastic reduction in the communal area to the benefit of privatised agricultural uses. The resource shows the process of alienation of territorial patrimony through five distinct phases, with the one corresponding to 1835-1852 as the maximum exponent of the trends that had been observed almost a century earlier.

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Disentailed assets sold in Castile-La Mancha (1836-1844)

ad_hlab_min — Sat, 19 Feb 2022 16:28:27 +0000

In the liquidation of the Ancien Régime system, three major agrarian reforms were carried out by the liberal governments. The three disentailments had a great socio-economic impact, as the primary sector was the hegemonic sector in the Modern Age: the disentailments of Godoy (1798), of Mendizábal and Espartero (1836-1844) and the General Disentailment (1855-1895). But what were the disentailments? They were measures that put assets belonging to the Church, the municipalities and the aristocracy that could not be bought or sold up for auction. The aim was to liberalise the agrarian sector by changing the ownership of land and to increase the Treasury’s accounts with the auctions. The reality was that the auctioned land was bought back by the same people who owned it, without changing the ownership structures. Moreover, the disentailed collective and communal lands became private property. Wage-earning peasants, for their part, saw their traditional rights eroded as the concept of land ownership changed.
In Castile-La Mancha, the disentailment of 1836 particularly affected the province of Toledo, with 10,586 estates affected, which were valued at 66.9 million reales and sold at auction for 159.8 million reales. These figures for Toledo accounted for 5% of the national total. The province that contributed the least was Albacete with 772 estates valued at 6.7 million and sold for 11.9, a lower percentage improvement than the rest of the provinces (Ciudad Real 3,370 estates valued at 21 million and sold for 54.4; Cuenca 1,463 estates valued at 13.5 and auctioned for almost double that: 24.2; and Guadalajara with 10,354, valued at 20.6 and sold for 36.6). In sum, the disentailed Castilian-La Mancha lands were valued at 129 million and sold for almost 287 million, 9% of the national total.

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