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Changing Identities over Commons during the Process of Agricultural Industrialization: The Case of Galician (NW Spain) since 1960
(2017) Fernández, David Soto
"In this paper, our aim is to explore the importance of cultural identities to understand the viability of common institutions. The idea developed here starts with a dialogue with Ostrom thesis that, for institutional analysis, although the analysis of the rules has a central role, the same theoretical range of variables, which are exogenous to any situation of action, is occupied by another two elements: the attributes of the community and the biophysical and material conditions. The role of identities, central for understand the attributes of the community, has been examined much less by historians despite the enormous development of Cultural History in recent years. Our case study is the so-called Neighborhood-Owned Common Lands in North West Spain. In a economic context of agricultural industrialization, and in the political context of Spanish democratic transition, the perception of the local communities on the meaning of commons has changed. From a common interpreted as an essential resource for family reproduction, managed collectively but exploited individually, many owners start to think in a common understand as a public good, as an institution that can replace local governments. This changes play a central role in assure sustainability of common institutions today."
Collective Resources, Human and Social Capital: The Emergence of Agricultural Cooperatives in Early 20th Century Spain
(2011) Tapia, Francisco J. Beltrán
"The emergence of Spanish agricultural cooperatives from the end of the 19th century was a narrative of uneven regional development. It has been claimed that the cooperative movement succeeded in those areas where a relatively significant group of small and middle-sized farms was present. This paper seeks to complement this explanation by analysing the role played by the pre-existing stock of human and social capital. The results show that the social networks built around the use and management of collective resources, such as common lands and irrigation communities, were a key element, together with relatively high levels of human capital, in facilitating the emergence of the cooperative movement in rural areas. It is also argued that the social capital formed around common lands was channelled either to promote agricultural associations or to migrate depending on the economic conditions faced by rural communities. Lastly, common lands may have also indirectly contributed to these processes by promoting higher levels of human capital."
Commons and Village Communities in the 'Tierra de Madrid' in the Ancient Regime (XIVth - XIXth Centuries)
(2006) Hernando Ortego, Javier
"The subject of this paper is to study the evolution of the common rights and resources in the rural area of a city in pre-industrial times. In order to fully understand the process of historical change experienced by the commons and rural communities situated around Madrid, it is necessary to undertake a long term analysis. Despite the fact that the fundamental transformation was centred upon the progressive exclusion from common use and the privatisation of the common land, there survived a number of communal rights and usages which, for the villagers, had an important economic and social significance. "Since the Middle Ages, the commons included in the 'Tierra de Madrid' (that is, the rural areas surrounding Madrid), played an important role for the villagers, providing them with vital resources such as pastures and fire-wood from the forest and also land for cultivation that enabled them to increase the productive area; those lands were managed directly by the peasants communities. "After the establishment of the 'Corte' in Madrid in 1561, and the subsequent demographic explosion in that city, there arose a number of different processes which transformed the agrarian environment. The availability of a large city market fuelled an increase in commercial production. In parallel to this, there was an intensification of the tendency to establish and increase vast land-holdings by the nobility ('señoríos') and by the ecclesiastical institutions, both of which were, by now, well-established in the city. These changes exerted a pressure on the village communities and on the commons which led to the privatisation of certain land resources but also provoked an adaptation of land usage and management which permitted the social and economic functionality of the commons. "In order to fully understand this evolution, one has to consider, first of all, the economic importance of the commons, by determining their components and the resources which they provided for the local peasants. Their quantitative evaluation permits an assessment of the significance they had within the agrarian system, in much the same way as their utility in maintaining peasants and their capacity for resistance against the large landownership of the urban groups. "A second level of analysis is that of the institutions who were given the task of managing the common land. Access and usage of the commons was determined by the fact that the potential user was a neighbour of the village (rights of vicinity); from this the importance to analyse the self-government municipal institutions of Madrid and of the surrounding villages. The rural communities had a key role to play in the management of the common, having as their prime objective to secure the continuance of their own community through the provision of resources which contributed to the subsistence of their members. The disintegration of the rural community caused the parallel erosion of the common lands, which developed in an uneven process throughout the diverse countryside and villages surrounding Madrid."
Destroying the Commons: The Evolution of the Enclosure Movement in Spain before the 'Bourgeois Revolution'
(2006) Perez Cebada, Juan Diego; Sanchez Salazar, Felipa
"The surface of common lands in Spain considerably decreased in the 'Ancien Régime'. Its evolution was extraordinarily diverse, but the privatising and enclosure of common property, the last phase of this process, frequently took place before the pass of property rights lands laws during the 'Bourgeois Revolution' in the19th C. However, in spite of the great interest with which Spanish agrarian historians have examined in the last decades the questions related to the modernization of agrarian structures, the role of enclosure in this process has been scarcely researched. As a matter of fact, the informal and improvised nature of enclosure in many areas of Southern Europe, may explain the limited number of academic work on this topic. On the other hand, the dominant trend in these analysis seems to be precisely the very diversity of a country with marked differences in its agrarian structures. The difficult adaptation of those types of enclosures to the classic model was not helpful in order to define this phenomenon either. That initial disadvantage could be considered today as an advantage, especially if we take into account the criticism to the rigidity of the traditional English model, and the variety of situations that researchers, outside and inside Great Britain, are pointing out. It is in this theoretical context that our essay revises the research done during the last 30 years in Spain and points our some lines of analysis, which can be classified in three groups of questions: 1. The formation of enclosure. Some basic questions have to be posed such as: what socioeconomic, political or environmental factors have an impact in its formation? What kind of enclosure is practiced and what are the causes of those variations? Or, moreover, when does enclosure take place? 2. Social and economic consequences of enclosure. We not only need to know the social costs and the different strategies of resistance devised to confront it, but also if the enclosure process promoted the rise of a class of active landowners that became the key players in agrarian change. And, for that reason, we need to know what was the role of enclosure in the change of agrarian structures. Besides their economic and social effects, enclosure had an impact on the environment and on a way of managing the community resources which has currently become an interesting topic for researches. 3. The intense debate on enclosure also questions the very definition of land property rights. The most recent research in Spain evidences the need to revise with new investigations the concept of full and absolute property, supposedly a legacy of the bourgeois revolutions."
Durability in Diversity: Survival Strategies in the Himalayan Country-Side
(2004) Chakravarty-Kaul, Minoti
"This paper maps changing patterns of communal forest control and management in the Punjab during the 19th and 20th century with a view to document how graziers and farmers mutually used the shamilat forests held jointly by communities of land-holders as buffers to stabilize and sustain their natural ecosystems. As against shamilat forests, Reserved and Protected forests were created and held categories of a forest department.Three case studies exemplify how state interactions beginning in the mid-19th century affected traditional communal resource use agreements and practices. The outcome has frequently been an erosion of confidence in local management capacities and conflict with the state. But the discussion concludes by observing how communities have survived in contemporary times by constantly integrating communal management traditions to emerging situation and policies such as those of joint forest management initiatives."
Institutions and American Indian Farmers: Indian Land Tenure and Farming Before the Dawes Act
(1992) Carlson, Leonard A.
"The failure of American Indians to become farmers in the twentieth century despite allotment and other federal policies designed to encourage farming is often blamed on the incompatibility of Indian institutions, including land tenure, with the requirements of settled farming. This paper tests this hypothesis by examining the nature of Indian land tenure and the division of labor between men and women in farming before and after the dates that Indians were placed on reservations. "Traditional Indian land tenures reflected the relative prices and environment in which they lived. For example, eastern agricultural tribes recognized a person's use right for land which was tilled but no one had a claim to land which was not cultivated. In the Southwest, where good land was scarce, agricultural tribes recognized rights to land even when it was not cultivated. Farming was usually done by women, with men specializing in hunting. Once tribes were placed on reservations, individual use rights to land were recognized even among nomadic tribes which had not done so previously. Census data for 1900 show that this system of land tenure allowed a number of Indians to make progress as small scale subsistence farmers prior to the implementation of the Dawes Act and that men did learn to farm. While Indians were beginning to farm prior to allotment, as I discuss in other work, Indian farming was actually discouraged by federal policies nominally designed to encourage farming and these partly account for the failure of Indian farmers after 1900."
Village Byelaws and the Management of a Contested Common Resource: Bracken (Pteridium Aquilinum) in Highland Britain, 1500-1800
(2006) Winchester, Angus
"Village byelaws (used here as a shorthand for the agrarian rules formulated and enforced by local seigniorial courts in Britain) formed the framework governing the exploitation of common land in Britain in the later medieval and early modern periods. This paper seeks to illustrate the sophistication and sensitivity of village byelaws, as local communities sought to negotiate the conflicting demands placed on a common resource in the face of economic and technological change from the 16th to the 18th century. Bracken (Pteridium aquilinum) is used to illustrate the strategies available to local communities to manage a common resource in changing circumstances. "Bracken, viewed as a noxious weed by modern hill farmers, was a vital resource in the early-modern agrarian economy of upland Britain. Growing extensively on the deeper soils of the hill commons, it was jealously guarded and its exploitation strictly controlled by byelaw. It had three principal uses, which placed different and sometimes incompatible patterns of demand on it between 1500 and 1800, namely: -- as litter for livestock when kept indoors, a use which probably remained more or less constant across the centuries; -- as thatch for roofing, a use which declined from the 17th century as slate and other stone roofing materials became more readily available; -- for burning into potash for sale, a use which developed rapidly, reaching a peak in the 18th century. "The contrasting chronologies of these uses reflect economic change, and the byelaws formulated by local courts illustrate the pressure to which this particular resource was subjected. The allocation of bracken on particular sections of the common to individual commoners; seasonal restrictions; socially selective regulations and quantitative limits were all used in an attempt to ensure equitable access to this valuable resource and to enable conflicting demands to be reconciled. The paper will question whether village byelaws succeeded in achieving sustainable management of common resources and will touch on the management of surviving commons after the collapse of local courts in the 18th century."

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Browsing DLC by Subject "agriculture--history"