Suchergebnisse

After the crisis of the late nineteenth century, the role of the state in European agriculture expanded to many new areas: education and technical innovation; commercial policies and market regulations; farm support policies, and sometimes interventions in property rights. The development of these policies was a difficult and costly process, without the intervention of intermediary organisations like agricultural cooperatives and farmers' associations. This article analyses the early agricultural policy in Catalonia (Spain) and the role of cooperatives in its implementation. It argues that this regional case was quite exceptional in the early twentieth-century Spanish context, where state intervention in agriculture was extremely limited. In 1914, an autonomous government was set up in Catalonia, and a modern agricultural policy was introduced in which technical education and cooperatives played a crucial role, as well as politics. The agricultural policy promoted and developed by the Catalan government was part of a state-building project based on a regionalist ideology.

In the early 20th century, governments not only used trade policy to protect domestic agricultural markets, but they also introduced regulations affecting quality, quantity and prices. In this article I assess the differences in the state intervention in wine markets in two major wine-producing countries, France and Spain, and try to explain the reasons for them. To do so, I examine the specific features of their markets and productive systems, the winegrowers' collective action, and the political framework in each country. I argue that the differences are related to (a) the strength and cohesion of the winegrowers' lobby, (b) the winegrowers' relationship with political parties and (c) the state's ability to respond to their demands.

Com explicar l'alineament dels petits pagesos europeus amb les forces dretanes que en el període d'entreguerres van aca­bar liquidant la democràcia? Per què van acabar donant suport a la instauració de règims feixistes, en comptes de defensar la democràcia? Aquest llibre pretén res­pondre aquesta pregunta per mitjà d'una anàlisi comparativa de les trajectòries de França, Alemanya, Itàlia i Espanya entre 1870-1939.

This article analyses the contribution of the State to the expansion of wine cooperatives in Spain over the course of the twentieth and the early years of the twenty-first centuries. We examine the legislation that created the institutional framework for their development, and the role of the State in providing both financial and technical assistance. We show that the State's contribution was critical to differences not just in the rate of their expansion but also in their distribution throughout the main winegrowing regions of Spain. Finally, we assess the consequences of State intervention on their overall performance, highlighting a lack of involvement as the main reason for the slow development of wine cooperatives in the early period, but also the dangers of excessive State intervention later.

The rabassaire struggle of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries represented the most intense unrest in the Catalan countryside since the peasant rebellions of the fifteenth century, and it was one of the main social movements in ruralWestern Europe in this period. In this article we examine the rabassaire struggle over a period of roughly 150 years. Following Charles Tilly, we understand this social movement as a form of political action, which began in the late eighteenth century, reached maturity in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and came to an end with the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War. Beyond the organizational changes arising from the shifting social and political circumstances, a new longterm overview can shed light on the continuities of the movement, especially in terms of building a social identity and legitimating its claims and its struggle.