Abstract
This paper describes an historical case of management of common lands, and their survival and transformation through the great agrarian reforms of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The hypothesis is that the notion of community survived after the great rural changes caused by the emergence of capitalism and liberalism. However, the notion of community was very different after these great changes: the old community was based on the notion of equilibrium, whereas the new community is focused on equity.
Highlights
The Spanish language offers a paradox to those who are interested in communal property
This paper describes an historical case of management of common lands, and their survival and transformation through the great agrarian reforms of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries
The common institutions contributed to the enduring quality of these environments because their main function was precisely to maintain the delicate equilibria of a vulnerable society, equilibria that affected the sustainable use of resources in conditions of low productivity and provided continuing incomes to the feudal monarchy, nobles, and the Church
Summary
The Spanish language offers a paradox to those who are interested in communal property. Productive efficiency’’ (expressed as the increase in land and work productivity) and ‘‘class efficiency’’, defining the latter as the ability of the dominant class to ensure the favourable distribution of production This could explain the survival of a production-inefficient institutional structure providing it was classefficient The hypothesis offered here is that under conditions of low crop yields, restricted productive specialisation and the reproduction of family productive units under conditions of high mortality and the regular surplus extraction that characterised preindustrial economy, the communal institution would have allowed an optimal relationship to exist between both levels, that of class efficiency and that of productive efficiency (in Bhaduri’s terms), or between the private benefit rate and the social benefit rate (if one prefers the language of North and Thomas). The second describes their dismantling and defends the permanence of community values within a new context marked by the notion of equity
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