INEQUALITY, WELFARE, POLARIZATION AND SOCIAL MOBILITY IN SPAIN, 1750-1900. DATASET RESPUESTAS GENERALES FROM ENSENADA CADASTRE (Andalusia, Extremadura, Murcia and Castile La Mancha)

Summary:  View help for Summary At the beginning of the eighteenth century, Spain was a backward and politically weakened economy with respect to her European competitors. However, it still remained its American colonies maintaining its status as world power. The balance of the Bourbon politics during the eighteenth century is ambiguous. From a centripetal point of view, the reformist and centralist role of the enlightened state is reinforced looking for a higher administrative efficiency. In opposition to this point of view, we find a more peripheral view that highlights the lack of efficiency of the Bourbon state whose policies represent the origin of proto-national pressure groups – very homogeneous territorially – that conditioned the failure of the liberal state during the nineteenth century. After the Napoleonic Wars, Spain carried out important reforms that encouraged substantial changes in its institutions. From an economic point of view, the country experienced high growth rates that increased agrarian productivity and wages, improved terms of trade and made possible a significant growth of the industrial sector. It is within this transition to a nation-state and industrial society where this project is focused, studying globally the relationships that took place between inequality, welfare, polarisation and social mobility between 1750 and 1900.   The hypothesis of this project maintains that the growth and modernisation process of the Spanish economy, during its transition towards a market economy, was accompanied by an increase in inequality, social polarisation and social mobility. At the same time, we will analyse how the starting conditions at local level could have been important factors to explain this process. Until now, in spite of the advances in the research concerning the evolution of inequality/welfare in Spain during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, there is no integrated analysis of all these dimensions.   This project attempts to combine the historical work of compilation and analysis of primary archival sources from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries with the economic, econometric and spatially geo-referenced analysis. We will use the information from the Ensenada Cadastre (c. 1750) using information like names, occupations and incomes from heads of households, the information from parish and civil records for the period 1840-1870 with information of names and occupations and the records of personal taxes for the period 1869-70 with information of names and incomes. Using this information, we can obtain three cross sectional analyses for a group of locations that allow a diachronic comparison in the different dimensions of personal and regional inequality and polarisation. We will also use the extensive local information of the General Answers of the Ensenada Cadastre to analyse the causes of the different evolution in the long term of the measures for regional and local welfare. Finally, we will carry out a prosopographic analysis of a subsample of households identifying in parish records the descendants of the heads of households from the eighteenth century and the evolution of their families until we link them with the records of the nineteenth century. This will allow us to establish more precise hypotheses about the dynamics of households during the three periods.

Funding Sources:  View help for Funding Sources Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación. Convocatoria 2020 Proyectos de I+D+i - PGC Tipo B (PID2020-117468GB-I00, ayuda financiada por MCIN /AEI/10.13039/501100011033)

Subject Terms:  View help for Subject Terms welfare; preindustrial Spain; education ; health care facilities; charities

Geographic Coverage:  View help for Geographic Coverage Dataset South Spain: Andalusia, Extremadura, Murcia and Castile La Mancha

Time Period(s):  View help for Time Period(s) 1/1/1750 – 1/1/1759 (Respuestas Generales from Cadastre Ensenada)

Collection Date(s):  View help for Collection Date(s) 2021 – 2024 (https://pares.mcu.es/Catastro/servlets/ServletController?accion=2)

Universe:  View help for Universe Respuestas Generales (General Answers) of the Ensenada Cadastre to analyse the measures for regional and local welfare -education, health and charity- in South Spain (Andalusia, Extremadura, Murcia and Castile La Mancha).

Data Type(s):  View help for Data Type(s) aggregate data

Sampling:  View help for Sampling Data collection related to education, health and charity items correspond to 3,088 cities, towns and villages in Southern Spain.

Data Source:  View help for Data Source Respuestas Generales del Catastro de Ensenada