Rural Change and Royal Finances in Spain at the End of the Old Regime
922
Rural Change and Royal Finances in Spain at the End of the Old Regime
922eBook
Available on Compatible NOOK devices, the free NOOK App and in My Digital Library.
Related collections and offers
Overview
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780520324909 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of California Press |
| Publication date: | 11/15/2023 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 922 |
| File size: | 23 MB |
| Note: | This product may take a few minutes to download. |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Rural Change and Royal Finances in Spain at the End of the Old Regime
By Richard Herr
University of California Press
Copyright © 1989 Richard HerrAll right reserved.
ISBN: 0-520-05948-4
Chapter One
Agrarian Conditions and Agrarian Reform in Eighteenth-Century SpainUntil recently agriculture has been Spain's main domestic economic activity, and agrarian policy has always been an issue of major concern to its governments. Nevertheless, they did not take up the idea of a planned redistribution of land until the second half of the eighteenth century, when changing conditions forced the royal advisers to envisage the relationship between the countryside and the country as a whole in a new way.
During the seventeenth and much of the eighteenth century, their main domestic concern was to increase the king's revenue. Their attention focused on the unequal weight of taxation borne by the different regions and social classes. At the beginning of the seventeenth century, the people of Castile contributed far more heavily to the revenue of the monarchy than those of Aragon or Portugal. The Conde-Duque de Olivares under Felipe IV and Josef Patiño under Felipe V sought to equalize taxes and military service among the various realms that formed peninsular Spain. Olivares's attempts led to a revolt of Catalonia and the secession of Portugal from the Spanish crown, but Felipe V succeeded after the War of the Spanish Succession in imposing direct taxes on the realms of the crown of Aragon in place of the niggardly subsidies formerly voted by their cortes. The new taxes, called equivalente in Valencia, catastro in Catalonia, and real contribución in Aragon, represented a fixed percentage of the income from land and occupations.
Land belonging to nobles as well as commoners and land acquired in the future by the church was subject to the new impositions.
The new taxes on the eastern kingdoms embodied the principle that everyone should contribute equitably to the needs of the state. For half a century after the reforms in Aragon, the search for a further redistribution of levies held the attention of royal policy makers. Felipe V and Fernando VI struggled with the church to establish their right to tax ecclesiastical properties, finally obtaining papal recognition of it in the Concordat of 1753. The kingdom of Castile posed a different kind of problem. Here the major royal taxes, the rentas provinciales, weighed heavily on the poor, and their complexity meant that the expenses of collection absorbed an inordinate part of the proceeds. The new system in the eastern realms proved so successful, especially in Catalonia, that Felipe V's advisers recommended that Castile's system be replaced by a similar one based on a single tax. The única contribución would be divided between a "real" sector that taxed income from property and a "personal" sector that taxed income from labor, professions, and commerce. The real property tax would be proportional to the income from land and buildings and be paid equally by nobles and commoners. As in Catalonia, a prior survey, or catastro, of property and personal income would be needed. The aim was to establish a less regressive tax structure as well as a more efficient one.
In 1746 Fernando VI, on the urging of his secretary of hacienda (finance), the Marqués de la Ensenada, ordered an experimental survey in the province of Guadalajara, using the Catalan catastro as a model. It showed that a 7- or 8-percent tax on income from land of commoners and nobles and on commoners' personal income would produce the same amount as current taxes at less cost to the state. If the real property of the church were included, the tax could be reduced to 5 percent.
In 1749 Ensenada obtained a royal order to extend the catastral survey to the other twenty-one provinces of Castile. To carry it out, the king established the office of provincial intendant. Intendants had been created in 1718 on the model of the French officials of this name, but they had soon been discontinued. The order of 1749 was the origin of a new, permanent set of royal servants who were to become the key figures in the provincial administration of the kingdom. The intendants began the survey in 1750, setting about obtaining a full list of the properties and sources of personal income in all the cities, towns, and villages of Castile. By 1756 they had completed all twenty-two provinces. The result is commonly known as the catastro of the Marqués de la Ensenada.
The returns revealed how unfair the existing tax system was. The income from the property of the church represented 19 percent of the total income from real property in Castile, but the subsidio it paid annually to the crown was equal to only 3.6 percent of the rentas provinciales collected from the rest of the population. According to the information collected, an equitable single tax of 4 percent on income from all sources would produce as much as all existing taxes. Such a reform would obviously benefit the poor, while the religious orders, secular clergy enjoying benefices, and wealthy nobles would lose some of their privileged status.
Although Fernando VI approved the single tax in 1757, it never went into effect. Ensenada had been dismissed in 1754, and Fernando became despondent and nearly insane after the death of his queen in 1758, succumbing himself a year later. His successor, Carlos III, and the new minister of hacienda, the Marqués de Esquilache, took up the matter, but they lost time by ordering the towns to review their original surveys and bring them up to date. Now fully aware of the significance of their returns, the petty municipal oligarchies dragged their feet, raising malicious questions and delaying their responses. The reassessment took four years, and when it was done, the towns had discovered that their incomes were far lower than those stated in the original surveys. Two years later riots in Madrid and many other places drove Esquilache from power and marked a major turning point in plans for reform. Pedro Rodríguez de Campomanes, a fiscal, or advisory attorney, of the Council of Castile, became the most influential adviser in economic matters, and he had serious doubts about the practicality of the única contribución in regions whose agricultural economy was not monetized. Still, a royal junta continued to discuss the single tax for another decade. In 1770 Carlos III ordered it put into effect as soon as provincial quotas could be assigned. Six years later this had still not been done, and the matter was dropped.
All the work was not in vain, however. The idea of replacing the rentas provinciales by a single tax on income remained to inspire later ministers and became the basis for a sweeping revision in 1845. Meanwhile, the thousands of volumes of the catastro of Ensenada containing detailed information on the ownership of property throughout Castile were stored in the offices of the intendants, ready at a moment's notice to reveal the entailed estates of the church and the nobility. They are today one of the most remarkable sources anywhere of information on the society and economy of a preindustrial state.
2
In the 1760s a new worry drew attention away from the need for tax reform: the apparent disparity between the increasing food requirements of the country and the harvests from its soil. In recent decades historical scholarship has devoted much attention to the relation between the supply of food and population levels in early modern European countries. As a general rule, the prices of basic foodstuffs like wheat or other grains were far more elastic than those of nonagricultural goods. Europe as a whole in the early modern period followed a short fallow system, the two- or three-field rotation of grains, pulses, and fallow familiar to historians. Ester Boserup has shown that this system of cultivation is particularly susceptible to bad harvests. The resulting impact of famines on real incomes directly affected demographic trends. In the extreme situation a bad harvest would cause the price of bread to rise precipitously, and many people would be unable to buy the food they needed to survive.
Two common demographic responses to declining per capita food supplies can be related to Malthus's identification of "preventive" and "positive" checks to the growth of population. In the "preventive" case, a rise in food prices resulting in lower real incomes discourages marriage and thus induces a decline in fertility. Although the resulting demographic response is sluggish, it nevertheless preserves a relatively high standard of living for a preindustrial society. A "positive" check, on the other hand, exists among populations that live close to the margin of subsistence, whose lower classes suffer a constant condition of malnutrition. Here a disastrous grain harvest or, worse, a series of bad harvests will cause the weakest members of the society to die off, victims of starvation or diseases that attack the debilitated society. In their impressive history of English population, E. A. Wrigley and Roger Schofield have labeled these two demographic responses respectively a "low-pressure system" and a "high-pressure system." As per capita food supplies decline in a high-pressure system, increased mortality lowers the level of population, while in a low-pressure system reduced fertility keeps the population from straining the subsistence resources except in unusual circumstances.
According to these two authors, England enjoyed a low-pressure system from the early seventeenth century to the industrial revolution, with the consequence that it was socially and economically better prepared than continental Europe to take advantage of technological innovations. From the evidence that has been produced by historical demographers who have looked at France, Wrigley and Schofield conclude that during most of the old regime this country approached a high-pressure system. Present information indicates that France suffered severe crises of mortality in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, usually associated with poor harvests, although a recurrence of the plague and the ravages of war also played important parts in these catastrophes. We still do not know if the severity of these crises reflected a society that was less prudent than England's in making decisions to marry, or if the famines were extraordinary events that resulted from a monoculture of wheat, more susceptible to meteorological vagaries than the English mix of winter and spring grains, or from a poorer communications network that caused French regions with harvest failures to suffer with little outside help. Recent work has brought into question whether France or any other early modern European society let its population rise to levels that would entail near starvation when crops were normal. Nevertheless, France was more liable than England to suffer from bad harvests, and this may be our best definition of the difference between a high- and a low-pressure demographic system. Historical demography is in a period of rapid advance, and future research should clarify our understanding of the situation in early modern countries.
Less historical work has been done on the demography of Spain than on that of England or France, but the knowledge we have at present indicates that in the seventeenth century the interior of Spain, like France, labored under a high-pressure system. It suffered three major crises of mortality in 1630-32, 1647-52, and 1684, all three following immediately upon famines. The "little ice age" of the seventeenth century, known to have affected agriculture adversely in northern Europe, appears also to have reached Spain, accentuating the irregularity of harvests. Outbreaks of the plague affected the Mediterranean coast, but no evidence has been uncovered that it ever became virulent in the interior, where the major killer has been identified as typhus. In central Castile high grain prices and increased mortality went hand in hand, although the population decline experienced by various regions of the interior may also have been the result of a flight of people from a countryside overburdened by royal taxes. During the War of the Spanish Succession, a series of bad harvests between 1704 and 1709 led to famine prices for grain, which reached their apex in 1710. Death rates were also high during these years, especially near the Portuguese frontier where the demands of rival armies intensified the suffering of the countryside. It is worth noting that the four major Spanish demographic crises of the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries were experienced in France as well, evidence that we are observing a condition that was common to western continental Europe.
With the end of the War of the Spanish Succession, the close association between harvests and mortality disappeared in Spain, as it did in France. No serious famines occurred between 1711 and midcentury, and local mortality crises appear to have been caused by influenza or typhus, not associated with food supplies. No simple explanation has been found for this change, but it is one feature of a general European economic growth that began about the turn of the eighteenth century. In France more effective royal authority put an end to much of the civil turmoil that marked the seventeenth century. Production of grain for export increased in England, Prussia, and other regions, and European cities that could be fed by sea trade grew in size. Inland regions were more susceptible to shortages, but central and local governments improved roads and built canals and thereby facilitated the shipment of food into areas whose normal supplies had failed. Even a high-pressure demographic system like the French became insulated from the worst effects of crop failures. Agricultural catastrophes recurred in the eighteenth century without the earlier, devastating mortality. Poor harvests in 1788 and 1789 were instrumental in inducing popular violence in the early French Revolution, but they did not produce excessive deaths.
Spain was a somewhat different case. The periphery of the peninsula-the provinces of the northern coast, Catalonia, and Valencia-followed the developments of the European maritime community. The economies of these regions began to recover from the national crisis of the seventeenth century around 1680, and after 1700 they experienced a fairly steady growth. The periphery imported grain by sea from France, Sicily, North Africa, and other sources of supply. Animals for slaughter crossed the Pyrenees to Catalonia and the Basque provinces, while north European maritime nations provided salt cod. The prices of wheat and other basic foodstuffs followed the same curve in these areas as in the rest of maritime Europe, convincing evidence of their integration into the Atlantic economic world.
Continues...
Excerpted from Rural Change and Royal Finances in Spain at the End of the Old Regime by Richard Herr Copyright © 1989 by Richard Herr. Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.