Award to a study on the evolution of land property in Majorca
Lecturers Enric Tello and Ricard Soto, from the Department of Economic History, Institutions, Policy and World Economy of the UB, were awarded the Bernstein & Byres Prize in Agrarian Change 2018 together with researchers from the University of the Balearic Islands and the University of Girona. This prize is given by the science journal Journal of Agrarian Change. The prize was awarded for an article on the evolution of the land property in Majorca, from the feudal society resulting from the Catalan conquest of the island in the thirteenth century to the latifundist transition to agrarian capitalism, and in the nineteenth century, the banksʼ purchase of many lands.
Lecturers Enric Tello and Ricard Soto, from the Department of Economic History, Institutions, Policy and World Economy of the UB, were awarded the Bernstein & Byres Prize in Agrarian Change 2018 together with researchers from the University of the Balearic Islands and the University of Girona. This prize is given by the science journal Journal of Agrarian Change. The prize was awarded for an article on the evolution of the land property in Majorca, from the feudal society resulting from the Catalan conquest of the island in the thirteenth century to the latifundist transition to agrarian capitalism, and in the nineteenth century, the banksʼ purchase of many lands.
“From feudal colonization to agrarian capitalism in Mallorca: Peasant endurance under the rise and fall of large estates (1229-1900)” was considered the best article published in 2018 in the Journal of Agrarian Change. The jury considered this study to be the best article for the extension of the studied historical period and the way it combined the work of the authors with coherence. The jury also valued the approach of the study, ranging from political ecology, based on agrarian political economy and introducing it into the frame of class relations in land and labour and the trade patterns and financial circuits of taxation, credits, etc.
Among the authors of the study, apart from lecturers of the UB, are Ivan Murray, member of the research group on Sustainability and Territory of the University of Balearic Islands (UIB); Onofre Fullana, study of the doctoral program on History, History of Art and Geography at UIB and member of the Asociació de Productors dʼAgricultura Ecològica de Mallorca (Association of ecological agricultural producers of Majorca, APAEMA), and Gabriel Jover, from the Department of Economics of the University of Girona.
From the conquest to peasant defeat
Researchers present the Catalan contest and colonization of Mallorca in the thirteenth century to lead to a late feudal agrarian society which evolved into the capitalism on the basis of great noble lands. Therefore, nobles hired many workers among the small owners that lived in rural areas, and were the rest of dispossessed peasants due the defeat of peasant revolts. Majorca went through a latifundist transition towards agrarian capitalism similar to the one in the south of Italy and Spain, compared to the situation of the farmers in Catalonia or the Valencian Community. The agrarian crisis in the late nineteenth century ruined the Majorcan nobles and banks bought a great part of the lands to sell them in small parcels. This fact widened intensive cultures, which were limited to the outskirts of towns, and led to a new ʻpeasantizationʼ. Despite their subordination, Majorcan farmers had survived and created complex agricultural ecological lands with a rich biocultural heritage. Recently, the journal Sustainability published another study by Ivan Murray, Onofre Fullana, Enric Tello and Gabriel Jover, which continues the analysis up to early twenty-first century, when ecological agriculture became important in Majorca, unlike in other areas of Spain, dominated by industrial agriculture.
These studies were carried out within the frame of the international project “Sustainable farm systems: long-term socioecological metabolism of western agriculture”, with the support from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada and the State Secretary for Research, Development and Innovation of the Spanish Government.