[372] The resurgence of Spain in the eighteenth century is shown most clearly by the demographic statistics. During the first half of the century the population grew only slightly. The Succession War did not cause great loss of life, largely because both sides were eager for popular support and comparatively respectful of civilians. There were, however, bad weather conditions between 1708 and 1711, and economic revival remained comparatively slow throughout the generation that followed the war. All this discouraged any rapid advance in population, but growth subsequently accelerated, and the population increased by about one-third during the second half of the century. The most rapid rise occurred during the two peaceful, fairly prosperous decades of 1748 to 1768. That was also a time of sustained emigration to Spanish America, averaging for several decades as many as 15,000 a year of the most vigorous inhabitants of the peninsula. Approximate figures ⁽¹⁾ for the years 1717-1797 show the following growth in population:
 

1717	7,500,000
1768-1769	9,308,000
1787	10,409,000
1797	10,541,000

 [373] The increase in urban population was only slightly more rapid than that of the country as a whole, the bulk of the expansion coming among the peasantry in the countryside and villages. Swollen Madrid may actually have declined, totaling little more than 200,000 in 1800. Barcelona tripled its size between 1714 and 1800, reaching 115,000, followed by Seville (95,000), Valencia and Granada (80,000), Cádiz (70,000) and Málaga (50,000). This distribution underscores another feature of the period--the demographic and economic rise of the coastal peripheries. Not only were nearly all the large cities on the coast, but the densest rural populations were also found in the outer regions (Galicia, Valencia, the Basque region). During the second half of the century, after the threat of Muslim pirate attacks had finally been overcome, depopulated regions of the eastern and southern coasts were reinhabited. The Castilian heartland did not itself make a real demographic or economic comeback, and the weight of demographic and economic power shifted outward.

The balance between social classes finally began to change during the reign of Carlos III, as a much more stringent effort was made to define hidalguía and to remove the tax barriers and exemptions which had stimulated the desperate striving after aristocratic status. Growth of economic opportunity and administrative reform removed injustices, made taxation somewhat more equitable, spurred precise economic records, and made it less useful to seek special exemption. This helped reduce the proportion of the population identified as nobleza from at least 7.5 percent in 1768 to only 3.8 percent or less by 1797.

It should be understood that the decline of the Spanish aristocracy in the eighteenth century involved only shrinkage in the numbers of lower-rank hidalgos, and that the power and influence of the high aristocracy was curtailed in the political sphere alone. The upper nobility retained most of its social prestige and economic power. It still held seigneurial jurisdiction over slightly more than half the land in Spain. Indeed, aristocratic seigneuries probably contained about 65 percent of the cultivated land in Spain, since mountainous and waste land was disproportionately concentrated on royal domain. In most cases, the upper aristocracy's income increased during the second half of the century with the rise in food and cattle production and in agricultural prices.

According to a land survey of 1811, legal jurisdiction over the lands of Spain near the end of the old regime was divided as follows [375]:
 

Señorio laico	28,306,700 aranzadas
Realengo (royal domain)	17,599,900
Abadengo (church domain)	9,093,400

(an aranzada equals about one acre)
 

Thus local land jurisdiction was divided in rough proportions of 3:2:1 between the aristocracy, crown, and church. The church held particularly large proportionate jurisdictions in certain regions such as Galicia and Extremadura. The best-balanced region jurisdictionally was Catalonia, where as a result of eighteenth-century changes, aristocratic jurisdiction was less than half the total. ⁽²⁾ The region freest of private seigneuries was the Balearics, where most land was under the royal domain. But in areas such as La Mancha, Guadalajara, and Valencia aristocratic jurisdiction was overwhelming. At least three different kinds of seigneurial jurisdiction might be defined: full administrative and juridical control with the right to name local judges, priests, and town officials; limited administrative and juridical power, such as the right to confirm elections or other acts of local concejos (deriving from old behetría jurisdiction); and mere economic lordship to collect rents or other fees, leaving local townships or concejos autonomous. More than 25 percent of the villages and towns of Spain were administratively controlled by and had their own officials appointed by seigneurs. The only practical restriction upon their jurisdiction in these areas was a decree of Carlos III reserving for the crown the appointment of a public attorney in each town under señorío.

In general, the Spanish aristocracy showed itself somewhat disaffected from the cause of Felipe V in the Succession War, evidently fearing the imposition of a strong and centralized Bourbon monarchy. But after 1714, there was no general purge of the nobility save in Catalonia. The special rights of grandes to be tried only by the royal council and to keep their heads covered in the presence of the king were maintained. The upper aristocracy remained especially powerful and numerous in the central and southern regions and in Valencia. Felipe V also created many new titles. A total of 200 were established in his reign, compared with the 215 created in the equally long reign of Felipe IV.

At the beginning of the century, the hidalgo class of petty nobles [376] and pseudo-nobles remained concentrated in the north. The entire population of Guipuzcoa claimed the status of hidalguía in 1700, and the pretension was almost equally extensive in Asturias. One-half the population of Vizcaya, one-eighth of Alava, and one-twelfth of Navarre laid claim to hidalguía. In Old Castile and León there were common sheepherders who insisted on their hidalguia. It was these marginal elements that were peeled off the aristocratic rosters by economic change and fiscal reform.

The most serious thing that happened to the upper aristocracy between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries was that although it had retained wealth and status it had slowly been losing its utility. The nobility was no longer needed for military protection, since the army had become fully institutionalized and professionalized. It was not as necessary to government, because of the extension of organized administration. The change was gradual, but was speeded up during the second half of the eighteenth century. A not insignificant proportion of nobles still served in government, but even by the beginning of the century so many had abandoned military activities and horsemanship that in 1725 the government had created a Junta de Caballería del Reino to encourage cavalry activity. The nobles retained great social prestige and wealth, but they were losing the practical role in society that they had to some extent played even under the Habsburgs in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

No serious conflict developed between court and aristocracy or between the aristocracy and the third estate. Many of the rural landholding nobility reacted with varying degrees of hostility to the reforms of Carlos III, but such feeling was diffuse and did not usually take the form of organized factionalism. Educated aristocrats in fact constituted the principal support of the enlightenment in Spain. Such liberal noblemen were more prone to form voluntary associations than was any other social stratum, and at first they formed the backbone of the secret Masonic societies. If the bulk of the aristocracy was sunk in indulgence, conformity, and routine, a minority actively promoted the changes that proved a precursor to the alteration of the structure of society itself. Moreover, the nobility narrowed the social and cultural gap somewhat, as the century wore on, by tending to adopt plebeian styles in speech and aspects of dress and amusement, a form of sentimentalism and bored "campish" styles.
 

At the beginning of the eighteenth century, the Spanish church was still at the height of its wealth and influence, and the proportion of [377] clergy was as high as in the seventeenth century. Yet though the authority of the Catholic religion was never challenged during the course of the century, subtle changes began to take place in the structure and property of the clergy that foreshadowed the momentous alterations of the nineteenth century.

It would appear that at mid-century between 15 and 20 percent of the gross national income of Spain went to the church. Over half of this came from church properties, and the remainder from tithes and primicias (a portion of which had to be accorded to the crown and to local seigneurs). Three-quarters of all censos (agrarian loans) in Castile were made by the church, and Toledo continued to be the second richest diocese in the Roman Catholic world. Church wealth remained a major source of royal taxes. The church was also the principal, almost the sole, dispenser of charity in the country and the chief educator; most of those who held positions in higher education were clerics.

A significant shrinkage in the number of the clergy began by midcentury, increasing during the reign of Carlos III and accelerating slightly more in the l790s:
 

Year	Number of Clergy	Percent of Population
1768	226,187	2.5
1787	191,101	1.9
1797	172,231	1.6

This relative decline was a result of a change in the temper of society. Economic and social opportunities were much greater in the late eighteenth century than a hundred years earlier, and a more critical spirit was stirring among those in school. While strongly Catholic, their personal emphases were beginning to shift.

Despite such numerical decline, the proportion of clergy to population was still higher than in any other European country save Portugal. During the last years of the century there were about 60,000 monks and friars and 25,000 nuns. By that time the meditative orders were in a state of general decadence, but those engaged in teaching and charity remained fairly popular.

During the course of the century the structure of the Spanish clergy grew somewhat less democratic as the proportion of prelates of plebeian background declined, but there was no particular increase in aristocratic influence. High prelates tended to be segundones from the hidalgo class, perhaps reflecting the vigor and ambition of the new hidalgo and middle class elite forming in some regions.

Some of the clergy became notably more liberal in outlook. Feyjóo, [378] father of the Spanish enlightenment, was a monk. While the great majority remained traditionalist and culturally xenophobic, a significant new progressive strain was developing that played a brief but prominent role in the early nineteenth century.

The regions of the peninsula were still served quite unevenly in the proportion of churches and priests available for religious work, reflecting inequities of endowment established in the Middle Ages. The ratio of priests to population was highest in the areas of Burgos, Avila, and surprisingly, Almeria. It was lowest in mercantile, materialist Cádiz, which had only one parish priest for each 5,000 people. The region in which resources were distributed most equitably within the church was Catalonia. One-fourth of that region's land was held by the church, but a greater part of it was devoted to the lower clergy and prelates there were proportionately less wealthy.

In general, clerical mores and training improved, but there was still a certain amount of concubinage and the educational qualifications of Spanish priests continued to be low.
 

There was a significant increase in agricultural production during the eighteenth century. This was stimulated by the growth of population, loosening of regulations, and a rise in food prices, resulting in an expanded market. It encouraged increased output of the three chief grains--wheat, barley, and rye--and by the early nineteenth century, grain occupied three-quarters of the land under cultivation. There was also expansion of maize and potato production. Severe crop failures occurred in 1709 and 1750, but there were none of such severe intensity during the second half of the century.

Cattle, on the other hand, became less important, and the Mesta continued to decline. Some slight restrictions were put upon it by a decree of 1758 and more severe ones by a decree of 1786, but its deterioration came more from the natural processes of economic change than from government restriction.

There was little improvement in technique or intensification of agriculture during the eighteenth century. Productivity remained low, and grain sown rarely brought a ratio of return higher than three to one. As in the sixteenth century, increased production was brought about mainly through extension of the amount of land under cultivation. This, along with a string of fairly good harvests, raised food production at a rate equal to or slightly exceeding the growth of population, but there was nothing approaching the technological transformation of modern agriculture occurring at that time in England [379] and Holland. Improvements in technique and productivity were always difficult in Spain because of deficiencies in soil and climate, and because of a variety of social and legal obstacles as well. Among these were disputes over tenure rights and joint exploitation of municipal and council lands, the start of modern development of latifundia in the south, and the tendency of the peasants there to live crowded into large villages and towns. Transport facilities improved slightly but were nevertheless still insufficient and extremely expensive, especially in central Spain. Failure to achieve technological development meant that Spanish agriculture was not building the productive base for broader economic modernization. Elsewhere, in much of western Europe, a technical transformation in eighteenth- or nineteenth-century agriculture preceded the urban industrial revolution.

What was occurring, however, during the second half of the eighteenth century, was a social and commercial transformation from traditional usufructual, semi-subsistence agriculture to greater production for the market. This movement toward market agriculture in turn brought important changes in land cultivation and tenure. In most regions, there was a general effort to revise terms of rent for peasant properties, taking advantage of the price rise and increase in land values. The big decade of the rent squeeze in Andalusia was the l760s. This had especially severe effects in the most overpopulated peasant region, Galicia, where rents were raised and cultivation units persistently subdivided until thousands of relatively high-priced but uneconomic minifundia had been created. Holders of censo mortgages and foro landleases among the middle classes and more prosperous peasants tended to buy up rental properties held by the aristocracy as the movement toward a more capitalist agriculture developed. Others speculated on long-term leases that were divided up, sometimes microscopically, into numerous subforos for a perpetually land-hungry peasantry that was now beginning to emigrate in increasing numbers. A government decree of 1763 endeavored to hold the line of forero rents but was not fully successful.

In the southern and south-central regions, where aristocratic domains were large, there began a trend to evict peasant renters in order to form single bloc cortijos and carry on large-scale cultivation. Property was also rented in larger blocs in subarriendo to astute peasants who sublet it on their own terms to poorer peasants or hired laborers to cultivate large tracts for them. This encouraged further concentration of the rural population of Andalusia, Extremadura, and New Castile. The formation of a capitalist, not merely rentier, agricultural class laid the basis for the rural elite or oligarchy of the large-estate districts of southern and south-central Spain--also of [380] certain northwestern regions such as Galicia and to some extent Salamanca. District leaders and economic overlords formed the background for the nineteenth-century system of rural bosses, known as caciques (from a Mexican word for tribal chiefs), a term that first began to gain usage in the 1770s. The new elite was composed of aristocratic landholders, middle class investors able to buy land, and the more prosperous labradores (landowning farmers), who could take advantage of the new system.

Land remained by far the chief source of wealth, and enterprising aristocrats, as well as some monied middle class elements, took advantage of reform attempts of Carlos III's ministers to snatch off a further portion of common and municipal or council lands from the towns or concejos. Mayorazgos continued to spread during the eighteenth century, especially in Castile and Navarre. The entailed estate remained the dominant socioeconomic ideal, not merely of the aristocracy but of the successful new upper middle class as well. A great deal of money made in commerce was invested in land, and some wealthy middle class people even established legal entailment of family heirlooms such as jewels. Thus the agricultural expansion of the eighteenth century was fit into the traditional status-oriented value system of upper class society. There was no serious attack on secular entailment by any eighteenth-century government.

Social and economic categories in eighteenth-century censuses were notoriously inexact, but even at the end of the century more than 75 percent, and probably more than 80 percent, of the Spanish population were peasants. The census of 1797 listed 1,677,172 peasant households (probably an undercalculation). Of these, nearly half-- 805,235--were without land of their own and classified as jornaleros (laborers). Only a little more than 20 percent were listed as property owning peasant farmers (labradores proprietarios) but nearly one-third--507,423--were categorized as renters (arrendatarios). Since there were no usable agrarian censuses before the late eighteenth century it is impossible to compare these categories with earlier periods, but it may be inferred that they reflected considerable change during the second half of the century.

The property structure of peasant society fell generally into three categories: a) areas in which less than 25 percent of the peasants were landless; b)areas in which between 25 and 50 percent fell into that category; and c) areas in which more than 50 percent were without land. Category a embraced the Basque region and the districts of Santander, Soria, Asturias, and Galicia. Category b included most of the rest of Old Castile, León, Aragón, Navarre, Guadalajara, Cuenca, and Valencia. Category c was made up of the entire southern half of Spain, as well as Palencia, Catalonia, and the Balearics. The largest [381] proportion of absolutely landless peasants were in the districts of Seville, Córdoba, and Jaén.

Yet that sort of categorization can be misleading, for distinctions should be made between the stable, long-term renters and the precariously situated short-term renters. In Catalonia, the great majority of peasants were technically propertyless, but a majority also held fairly secure, long-term emphyteutical tenure. Such leases were also common in Valencia, and long-term rents were the norm in Vizcaya, Navarre, and parts of Aragón. Rental conditions were somewhat more precarious in Old Castile and Asturias. The most inequitable property distribution was found in the region of La Mancha, where only one of every fifty-four peasant families was an owner. On the other hand, the situation was worse than it appeared in Galicia. That region had the highest proportion of peasant owners -- 91,759 peasant smallholders, 57,571 renters, and only 31,500 laborers, according to the 1797 census -- but the peasant owners were mostly dwarfholders who also rented other strips or worked as laborers. During this period the number of peasant renters may have declined in the south, while increasing in the north.

Overall, peasant living standards seem to have improved somewhat. This was reflected in new (though frequently unsuccessful) efforts by rural townships under señorío to buy up their obligations to their lords. Even for those with little or no land, the rural system provided some benefits. Though common lands had been reduced during the seventeenth century, and again by the decrees of 1767 and 1770, they remained extensive in most of the center and north. Almost no district was without some collective property, much of it used to relieve the wants of poorer peasants. Most rural laborers lived at least above the subsistence level, and their real wages may have been a trifle higher in the late eighteenth century than in 1900. Moreover, a well-endowed church made not insignificant provisions for charity in many areas, and peasants frequently supplemented their income by their artisanry.

Many rural municipalities were better off financially in the eighteenth than in the nineteenth century, because income from their lands provided funds for charity, village schools, and a degree of medical assistance. These provisions contributed to the stability of the Spanish countryside in the eighteenth century. Yet though there were more rural or small-town schools supported by the church or local endowments in the eighteenth than in the nineteenth century (after the seizure of church and common lands), rural educational opportunities may already have begun to decline in the late seventeenth century, when the first major reduction in charity funds took place. [382] At any rate, it has been argued that there was more general illiteracy in 1760 than in 1660.

In general, the Spanish peasantry suffered less than that of France from efforts by the aristocracy to squeeze as much as possible out of new seigneurial exactions in the eighteenth century. Relations between overlords and peasants on many domains were fixed by custom and could not easily be changed. The domains of grandes and large church holdings were still, in many cases, administered on easy terms, and the overseers of the huge properties of the crown-dominated crusading orders were reputed to permit the easiest terms of all. But the movement toward creation of latifundia and the raising of rents was particularly strong among lesser aristocrats, middle-class owners, and some of the more compulsive monastery administrators. Conditions on land under aristocratic and church domain had changed considerably by the last decades of the century, and it was no longer generally true that peasants could expect easier terms and lighter taxes under señorío, than under royal domain. Tension over the raising of rents seems to have been particularly strong in the districts of Avila and Valencia. These changes in land relations were not the result of an increase in "feudal" dues, but of pressures being created by a capitalist market agriculture geared to more extensive production. Despite resentment over higher rents, however, the Spanish countryside stayed relatively calm and peaceful. It presented a picture of social unity and cohesion; no serious social splits occurred during the course of the century.
 

The second half of the eighteenth century was a time of expanded economic activity for the middle classes. Their proportion in the population increased somewhat, but it would be altogether mistaken to see this as a time of general embourgeoisement or the beginning of a social and economic "bourgeois revolution" in Spanish affairs. The growth of manufactures, save in Catalonia and in a few particular towns, was slight, and the mercantile middle classes were concentrated in the capital and a number of thriving ports. There existed a second stratum, the provincial middle classes in the smaller inland towns, whose economic existence was much more precarious and who had less thrust and vigor. If skilled artisans as a lower middle class are excluded, the socially and economically intermediate Spanish middle classes were only a slightly larger group proportionately than the aristocracy--a middle stratum of 5 to 6 percent compared with a remaining aristocracy of 3.8 percent.

[383] There was no bourgeois ideology in eighteenth-century Spain as there was in England and France during the same period. Political ambition in the Spanish middle classes before 1800 hardly existed, and monarchist paternalism was fully accepted. Aside from those in Catalonia and a few towns, the middle classes tended to wait for economic ideas and incentives from government reformers rather than developing their own goals. While not ignorant, they were almost untouched by the enlightenment. They had no sense of being the social equals of the aristocracy and they continued to feel their inferiority acutely. Throughout the eighteenth century, the great goal of nearly all wealthy middle class Spaniards was to rise to the nobility.

The psychology of the status society--status based on position, not on achievement--was only slightly altered during the eighteenth century. Society remained highly dependent on external opinion. The dependence for security on appearance and social artifice, the lack of a personal sense of worth coming from a feeling of uniqueness or accomplishment, continued almost unchallenged. Honor, status, and group remained the primary categories of social value, and the eighteenth century was full of lawsuits and quarrels of all manner over social status, by the middle classes as well as by the aristocracy.

Economically expanding Barcelona, for example, still retained its society of four estamentos (estates): nobles, clergy, ciutadans honrats or nonmilitary oligarchs, and a fourth estate of merchants (mercaders), professional men (artistes), and artisans (menestrals). All of society accepted this, and upward-striving was defined exclusively in terms of these categories. Petty shopkeepers or artisans wanted to be artistes, and prosperous merchants hoped to establish themselves as rentier, oligarchic ciutadans honrats. In 1770, the most potent private association of merchant entrepreneurs in Spain, the Junta de Comercio of Barcelona, refused trading privileges to a merchant whose brother had been condemned by the Inquisition.

In Cádiz, the attitude and psychology of the prosperous merchants battening off the Spanish American trade could scarcely have been called bourgeois. The most visible goal was to buy land and obtain aristocratic status. Much money was wasted on conspicuous consumption; little was saved for productive reinvestment. There was a spirit of profit abroad in late-eighteenth-century Spain, but less interest in creative economic enterprise.

The comparatively small population of urban artisans and laborers was by and large a stable and orderly group at a time when the people of London and other western cities were showing a propensity to Riot. The major disturbance of this quiet was the "motín de Esquilache" of 1766 in Madrid, which came as a great surprise but was in [384] fact in part a political ploy by certain upper-class elements. There were accompanying bread riots in a number of other towns, riots that would never be repeated on such a scale. The only disturbance of the time worth noting was the greatest bread riot of the century, the rebimboris de pa in Barcelona in 1788, which kept the whole city in turmoil for three days. In general, the urban economy was less given to fluctuation than that of the countryside, and life in the Spanish towns of the eighteenth century was quite peaceful compared with either the seventeenth or nineteenth century. In a few regions there were, however, distinct social tensions between town and countryside, and at least two town-and-country riots occurred in the Bilbao district during the latter part of the century.

The traditional Spanish or Castilian prejudice against physical or "mechanical" labor persisted, and there was great concern among artisans to show that their work was not vil or mecánico, but intellectual or artistic. Nevertheless, there was little sense of servility in the Spanish lower classes, rural or urban, and common people continued to hold a fairly high opinion of themselves. Formal respect for women was normal, but even among the middle and upper classes there was not at all the concern for the education of women that could be seen in France.

In the larger cities the gremio or guild system of skilled labor (and of part of commerce) remained little altered. Great concern was shown by merchants and artisans for guild rights. Gremios continued to expand but their rigidity was more of a restraint on production than ever, and edicts of the l770s and 1780s reduced their authority. In the smaller towns, however, there were frequently no guilds at all. Moreover, the major new manufacturing undertakings of the period--the royal textile factories that were begun at Guadalajara, Avila, Barcelona, and Valencia--were established completely outside the guild network. The first modern strikes or labor stoppages in Spain occurred at several of these factories, beginning at Guadalajara in 1729, when wages were cut.

Eighteenth-century Bourbon reformism was especially concerned to improve or eliminate the dregs of society. The proportion of vagabundos (bums and vagrants) had notably increased during the seventeenth century, and the Succession War had added to the ranks of the disorderly and criminal. Felipe V had at one point decreed the death penalty to try to control thieves. The government of Fernando VI attempted draconian measures against gypsies, without success, and a law of 1775 declared that all vagos between the ages of seventeen and thirty would be drafted into the army. This proved impossible to enforce, and by 1793 there were said to be 6,000 vagabundos in the Granada district alone. There was considerably less semi-organized banditry or delinquency during the greater part of the eighteenth century than in the preceding or following periods, however.

Numerous eighteenth-century reforms contributed to the growth of Spanish manufactures. Among them were reform of taxes, suppression of most internal customs between 1714 and 1717, establishment of pilot factories for textiles and arms, attraction of foreign craftsmen to Spain, and a more extended program of protection and prohibition of raw material exports. Domestic manufactures increased considerably in volume, but this increase was accompanied by comparatively little technological development, except in the case of Catalan textiles toward the very end of the century.

In general, Spanish commerce abroad rose greatly from 1745 to 1755, fell off a bit for the next two decades, then increased very rapidly after 1778. France was the principal European customer, but the main axis of trade was between Spain and Spanish America. After the second and broader decree of 1778 liberalizing terms of commerce, the colonial trade increased approximately four times within a decade and remained very high throughout the l790s. This encouraged further expansion of domestic manufactures, which reached a high in 1804 before the export market was ruined by the full impact of the Napoleonic wars. America was crucial not merely as a commercial outlet but also because its silver production increased during the second half of the century. This helped to balance what would otherwise have been large trade deficits between Spain and western Europe, although the influx of silver also contributed to the inflation of the period.

Beginning with the steady expansion of the l760s, the price of industrial products rose more rapidly than did that of agricultural products, as shown in table 1. Moreover, in key regions urban wages [386] lagged considerably behind the price rise. Between 1751 and 1790 urban prices increased nearly 22 per cent in New Castile and almost 32 per cent in Valencia, while nominal wages declined by approximately 18 per cent, indicating a great loss in purchasing power. Population increase may have been a factor in permitting the depression of urban wages. Prices shot up even more rapidly after 1780, while wages lagged far behind. Real wages probably hit their peak under Fernando VI, declined slightly under Carlos III, then fell drastically during the 1790s. Statistically, the real wages of a Madrid worker in 1800 were only 60 percent of those in 1726, though that was due in part to abnormal wartime conditions.
 

The region that benefited most from eighteenth-century reformism and expansion was Catalonia, even though it lost more politically to the Bourbon regime than any other part of Spain. Though taxes increased considerably, they were levied on a more proportional basis. In creased tariff protection after 1717, the reduction of internal restrictions, and the beginning of a broadly national market for the first time in Spanish history were all major stimuli. Nearly thirty years were required to overcome the losses of the Succession War, but the level of 1700 was far surpassed during a major growth phase from 1745 to 1760.

Catalan commerce and industry could not have developed as vigorously as they did had not the region's economy been based on a strong agricultural system. Though it may be something of an exaggeration to call eighteenth-century Catalan agriculture prosperous, there was a significant extension of cultivated land as well as some improvement in technique, and the rise in production was an important stimulus to the region's economy.

The two main exports of Catalonia were textiles (increasingly cotton textiles) and one popular rural product, aguardiente (brandy). The first modern "factory" in Spain, aside from the several new royal textile mills, was Esteban Canals' cotton textile factory established in Barcelona sometime before 1738. The partial prohibition of foreign textiles enacted in 1717 was reversed in 1760, but protectionists won out in a new decree of 1771 banning all cotton textile imports. By 1772 there were about twenty-five cotton cloth factories in Catalonia, and Catalan producers were making significant advances in new textile dyes. Modernization of the textile industry got under way about 1780 when new machines were imported from England, and later from France. A major wave of importation of textile machinery [387] in 1803-1804 helped raise productive capacity, but the ensuing ravages of the Napoleonic wars halted any further gains for Catalan industry until the l840s.

The expansion of Catalan commerce became so aggressive that in 1742 tariff barriers between Catalonia and the rest of the peninsula had to be raised again to protect merchants elsewhere. After 1778 more than half of all Spanish trade with America originated in Catalonia, and a sizable Mediterranean commerce had also been developed. The Catalan fishing industry expanded even though Spanish fishing in general languished during the eighteenth century. Moreover, the Catalan towns were perhaps the only ones in Spain where wages kept pace with prices. The disparity between the real wages of Barcelona and Madrid workers was very noticeable by the close of the century.

The other regions making significant economic progress were the northern coastal districts from the Basque country to Asturias, and to some extent, the Levant. The Basque region and Navarre retained their special fiscal systems, which were a definite advantage, and the Basque region and Santander also retained a differential tariff, which stimulated their commerce. The advance of the Basque region in the late eighteenth century was second only to that of Catalonia. Its economic leadership proved vigorous and resourceful; the first of the creative Sociedades de Amigos del Pais was formed in the Basque country in 1765. Basque agriculture was more productive than the Spanish norm, and the Basque custom of transmitting a family farm intact to a single heir perpetuated efficient productive units. The Basque shipbuilding industry continued to be the first in Spain and it expanded considerably. Yet during the course of the century Basque metallurgy made few advances and in fact barely held its own. It might have failed altogether had it not been for sweeping government action in 1775 to protect the entire iron industry. The rural economy also expanded in Santander, where the peasants were able to rely upon the broadest system of common lands that had been preserved anywhere in Spain. In Asturias, the local hidalgos and urban middle classes also showed initiative, in government as in the local economy. Though there were fewer peasant owners there, rental conditions were perhaps the best in Spain. Improved transportation assisted the beginning of the modern Asturian coal export industry.

The only area besides Catalonia where textiles expanded was Valencia, which greatly developed its silk industry as well as increasing its commerce. The Madrid region, by contrast, remained essentially nonproductive, an administrative, social, and cultural center. Its commercial elite were the members of the Cinco Gremios Mayores, the [388] five big merchant guilds that controlled the wholesale trade of the capital.

Before the end of the eighteenth century, the two contrasting social and economic Spains of modern times had begun to take clear shape: on the one hand a fairly prosperous, commercially expanding protoindustrial north center and northeast, with a stable peasantry; on the other, an almost exclusively rural center and south, lacking industry, its commerce limited almost exclusively to an archaic colonial trade, its peasantry poor, backward, in large proportion landless, and socially unincorporated.
 

Gonzalo Anes has suggested that the Spanish economy between 1700 and 1789 might be divided into five periods having the following general characteristics:

 1. 1700-1715. The War of Succession and its aftermath. The war provoked a crisis in food production and consumer goods, which reached its height in a great agrarian crisis in 1709. The resulting mortality checked population growth, though some merchants prospered from the war and expanded their capital.

2. 1716-1735. Agrarian expansion and low prices. After the war the area under cultivation increased considerably. This came partly from population growth and increased demand. Though that pushed up land rents and dues, the increase in area of tillage held prices down. The major exception was the higher price of wine, which encouraged extension of vineyards. The greatest increase in agricultural production came in Catalonia, where the level of investment was highest.

3. 1735-1753. General price increases and lowered consumption, retarding population growth. Redistribution of income benefiting landowners, merchants, and manufacturers. Land rents increased while wages tended to drop.

4. 1754-1774. Proportionaly lowered food production resulting from bad weather, backward technique, and greater use of marginal land. Sharp price increases accompanying rapid population growth, leading to higher land rents and vocal peasant discontent. Increase in commerical activity and manufacturing along the periphery.

5. 1775-1789. Rapid population growth accompanied by higher prices and further increase in land rents. Great increase in commerce along the periphery and in Catalan manufacturing.

Traditional Spanish society and its economic system reached their apex during the reign of Carlos III. Population and the volume of economic activity expanded greatly. The improvement in the standard of living was much slighter, however. Though the bulk of the population was lifted out of such depths of misery as they had suffered in 1680-1682 and 1709 and mortality was reduced, the actual income of the poorer peasants increased little during the century.

The traditional structure of society underwent only limited change. The sole indication of the emergence of a modern capitalist entrepreneurial society was in Barcelona. On the other hand, the ranks of the lesser nobility were greatly reduced and the transition to a modern capitalist market agriculture was begun, even though accompanied by very little improvement of technique. While Spain had not achieved the basis for social and economic modernization on the northwest European model, some progress had been made. Continued state unity and enlightened administration were preconditions for sustaining and accelerating this process. During the following generation, a combination of royal ineptitude, internal division, and overwhelming foreign pressures destroyed the Spanish state and completely disrupted the economy. Such progress as had been made proved insufficient to meet the catastrophic challenges brought by the Revolutionary and Napoleonic era.
 

[701] The outstanding account of administrative and financial changes in the Succession War is Henry Kamen's The War of Succession in Spain 1700-1715 (London, 1969). For military developments, see Arthur Parnell's still useful The War of Succession in Spain during the Reign of Queen Anne, 1702-1711 (London, 1888, 1905).

The most compact and balanced study of eighteenth-century Spanish reformism, also dealing extensively with Spanish reaction to the French Revolution, is Richard Herr, The Eighteenth-Century Revolution in Spain (Princeton, 1958). Much detail, not all of it accurate, is given in Desdevises du Dézert, L'Espagne de l'Ancien Régime, 3 vols. (Paris, 1897-1904). Luis Sánchez Agesta, El pensamiento político del Despotismo llustrado (Madrid, 1953), is a useful work on political theory. The principal historian of the realignment of Catalonia is Juan Mercader, who has written Felip V i Catalunya (Barcelona, 1968), and Els capitans generals (Barcelona, 1957), which provides an excellent brief account of eighteenth-century Catalonia. Pedro Voltes Bou has written three works on Catalonia and Valencia during the Succession War: El archiduque Carlos de Austria, rey de los catalanes (Barcelona, 1953); Barcelona durante el gobierno del archiduque Carlos de Austria (1705-1714), 1 vols. (Barcelona, 1963); and La Guerra de Sucesión en Valencia (Valencia, 1964). The pressures of the Bourbon regime against Basque fueros are chronicled in two works of Francisco Elías de Tejada, El [702]señorío de Vizcaya (hasta 1812) (Madrid, 1963), and La provincia de Guipúzcoa (Madrid, 1965).

The most detailed account of the reign of Carlos III is Antonio Ferrer del Río, Historia del reinado de Carlos HI en España, 4 vols. (Madrid, 1856). Vicente Rodríguez Casado, La política y los políticos en el reinado de Carlos III (Madrid, 1962), is a recent brief treatment of the politics of the reign. Some of the better biographies of leading eighteenth-century government and reform leaders are: Felipe Alvarez Requejo, El Conde de Campomanes (Oviedo, 1954); Marcelin Defourneaux, Pablo de Olavide (Paris, 1959); C. Alcázar, El Conde de Floridablanca (Murcia, 1934); Jesús Casariego, Jovellanos (Madrid, 1943); and Patricio Peñalver, Modernidad tradicional en el pensamiento de Jovellanos (Seville, 1955). F. Aguilar Final's La Sevilla de Olavide, 1767-1778 (Seville, 1966), gives a broad portrait of Seville in the reformist period.

The broadest treatment of the Spanish enlightenment is Jean Sarrailh, L'Espagne éclairée de la seconde moitié du XVIIIe siècle (Paris, 1954). G. Delpy, L'Espagne et l'esprit européen: L'Oeuvre de Feijóo (1725-1760) (Paris, 1936), deals with its beginnings. There are several studies of the universities and leading intellectuals and scientists: A. Alvarez de Morales, La 'Ilustración' y la reforma de la universidad en la España del siglo XVIII (Madrid, 1971); George M. Addy, The Enlightenment in the University of Salamanca (Durham, N.C., 1966); Vicente Peset, La Universidad de Valencia y la renovación científica española (1687-1727) (Castellón de la Plana, 1966); El Padre Feijóo y su siglo, 3 vols. (Oviedo, 1966); Ignacio Casanovas, Finestres y la Universidad de Cervera (Barcelona, 1953); Leandro Silván, Los estudios científicos en Vergara (San Sebastian, 1953); Alejandro Sanvisens, Andrés Piquer (Barcelona, 1953); E. Moles, El momento científico español 1772-1825 (Madrid, 1934), which deals especially with physics and chemistry; Hans Juretschke, Alberto Lista (Madrid, 1951); Juan Mercader, Historiadors i erudits a Catalunya i a Valencia en el segle XVIII (Barcelona, 1966); and André Mounier, Jerónimo de Uztáriz (Bordeaux, 1919).

Vicente de la Fuente, Historia de las universidades, colegios y demás establecimientos de enseñanza en España, 3 vols. (Madrid, 1884-1889), provides a lot of disorganized data on education, and E. Luzuriaga, Documentos sobre la historia escolar de España (Madrid, 1916), is useful on the state of elementary education. On the development of Spanish journalism in this period, see Henry F. Schulte, The Spanish Press, 1470-1966 (Urbana, 1968), and L. M, Enciso Recio, Nipho y el periodismo español del siglo XVIII (Valencia, 1956). On relations with Italy, see V. Cian, Italia e Spagna nel secolo XVIII (Turin, 1896).

The religious history of the period is treated in La Fuente's Historia esclesiástica de España, vol. 6 (Madrid, 1875), See also M. Miguélez, Jansenismo y regalismo en España (Madrid, 1905), and R. Eguía, Los jesuitas en el Motín de Esquilache (Madrid, 1947).

The best study of Spanish society in this period is Antonio Domínguez Ortiz, La sociedad española del siglo XVIII (Madrid, 1955). Part of the agrarian economy is surveyed by Gonzalo Anes, Las crisis agrarias en la España moderna (Madrid, 1970), but the title is grossly extravagant for a [703] book which primarily studies eighteenth-century price fluctuations. Pierre Vilar, La Catalogne dans L'Espagne moderne, 3 vols. (Paris, 1963), constitutes a monumental study of the eighteenth-century Catalan economy. Mi-guel Capella and A. Matilla Tascón, Los cinco Gremios Mayores de Madrid (Madrid, 1957), deal with the merchant aristocracy of the capital. The problem of tax reform is treated in Matilla Tascón's La única contribución y el catastro de Ensenada (Madrid, 1947). Rudolf Leonhardt, Agrarpolitik und Agrarreform in Spanien unter Karl III (Munich, 1909), is still basic on agrarian reform. The state textile mills are studied in J. C. La Force, Jr., The Development of the Spanish Textile Industry, 1750-1800 (Berkeley, 1965). A. Rumeu de Armas's Historia de la previsión social en España (Madrid, 1944) contains useful material on the struggle against the guilds. Rafael Labra, Las Sociedades Económicas de Amigos del Pais (Madrid, 1904), remains the only general study of the economic societies. The backward transportation facilities of central Spain are scrutinized in David Ringrose's Transportation and Economic Stagnation in Spain, 1750-1850 (Durham, N.C., 1969).
 

1. Based on recent adjustments of incomplete censuses taken in those years. The figure for 1797 is low, and should probably be adjusted upward.

2. According to Salvador de Moxó, La disolución del régimen señorial en España  (Madrid, 1965), division of jurisdiction in 1811 was as follows, in terms of aranzadas:
 

	senorio laico	abadengo	realengo
Galicia	2,677,734	1,519,988	264,460
Extremadura	2,149,898	1,506,306	741,510
Catalonia	1,671,744	1,020,688	1,068,390