La distribución social de la tierra en el Bajo Miño (1600-1850), ¿Es posible el excedente campesino en comunidades minifundistas?

Abstract

Using differente sources such as postmortem inventories, collected from 61 notary´s offices from Pontevedra and Tuy, and taking the Catastro de la Ensenada´s royal books from three parishes, we mean to penetrate in the Bajo Mino´s society for almost three centuries. Before getting into the analysis of this society it was necessary to polish the sources which were being used, which might have been the most ardous part of the present work, and get close to the evolution of key variabilities such as income, yield or the cultivation evolution to delimitate the relation between gross product and average net product per Ha cultivated. The tendence of net productivity per Ha is climbing and, being thus produced in a foral income stability along with the progressive reduction of the seed needed by the growing corn imposition, ends up having the peasant exploiter as the biggest beneficiary. The evolutive study of this society puts us in front a small farming model which shows a deficit in the seventeenth century when the agricultural model, in spite of the impositice success over corn, was incapable of standing up to the growing population, generating a big flood of unsufficient peasents needed in the migratory exits on the quest for complementary resources. On the eighteenth century, in a setting of malthusian situation and the population on a standstill, our society reaches somewhat a maturity and balance, keeping its structures without a substancial alteration other than small advantages thanks to emigration, which reaches its peak, and a complementary cattle raising, with a more equal share than that of the land. On the nineteenth century having improved the productive model, already quite perfected, our shire already produces a surplus and it exports important quantities of cereal and wine. This evolutive march from the shire´s structural insuffiency to the real surplus exportation possibilities happened along with an increasing social polarization in a way that the dominant small farm went back a step but didn´t stop the consolidation and the enforcement of a privileged peasent minority able to accumulate, at the end of our overrun, a net surplus superior to the moderate income which this social model used to have.