Transformaciones agrarias y cambios en la funcionalidad de los poderes locales en la Alta Andalucía, 1750-1950

In this paper we analyze the role of the local political powers in High Andalusia between the years 1750 and 1945, the changes and the importance of the social groups of landowners controlling the keys of the local power. Our aim is to show how, in the spite of their changing forms, the local powers have fulfilled, at last, a double function: to fix (to assure) the agrarian oligarchy the control of the instruments that made possible the reproduction of the material conditions of the agrarian economy and to assure a privileged position to the dominant social groups. The different strategies used by the groups installed in the local power have continued still the beginning of the Second Republic’s regime, when a great part of the peasantry got to use the local power in their own benefit. The unchained fight, since that time, directed by the patrons to recover the “class” usage of local power can be considered an important precedent of the outburst of the Spanish Civil War in 1936. And last, Franco’s regime, to a great extent, rebuilt the local power as an important piece in the reorganization of the traditional rural order.