Abstract
The permanence of slave labour until the 16th century was a lasting legacy of the late feudal colonization of the Mallorca Island. Through a large set of probate inventories and accounting books, we have documented the use of a great deal of slaves in farming large noble estates during the 14th and 15th centuries. The defeat of the peasant revolt of 1450–1454 offered to nobles and patricians the opportunity to seize much of the land previously colonized by Mallorcan peasants. This creation of a dispossessed peasantry, combined with new trade demands, led to a transition from slave-powered manorial farms to capitalist olive oil-exporting estates that took advantage of the low-wage workforce reserve. A peculiar feature was the massive use of women’s gangs as olive pickers when olive oil became the main cash-crop exported from the 16th century onwards. By linking changes in work and land uses, this study brings to Southern Europe the debate over the driving forces of the emergence of agrarian capitalism.
Highlights
The late Middle Ages (1350–1550) has been pinpointed from different historiographical approaches as the period when divergences in European agrarian development originated [1]
The exceptional permanence of slave labour until the 16th century explains why in some Mediterranean regions slavery was a first trial of the sugar plantation system, which was later moved by the European colonizers to Atlantic and African islands [21], and become established in the American colonies [22,23]
In the concluding remarks we summarise the reason why slave labour, as it had been known until 1500, declined rapidly on the island while it flourished in the Atlantic
Summary
Sources: Our own, data wages was taken from 1390 to 1430 from [40] (pp. 75–100) [41] (p. 43); and for 1441–1450 from ACM 1727–1733 (labourers’ and masters’ wages on a daily basis). From the second half of the 15th century onwards, the incorporation of new farming units increased the land possessed in terms of size, while the management remained integrated The aim of this process of land accumulation and concentration was to create extensive estates managed as large agro-pastoral complexes for animal husbandry, mainly devoted to itinerant sheep grazing. This process took an about-turn in the second half of the 15th century, with landowners fragmenting their estates into new individual farms destined for cultivating cereals and olive tree plantations [51,87,88,89]. The implementation of these new production strategies, and the changes in how the large estates were managed, ushered in important changes in the organization and exploitation of labour
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