When Growth Reached the Poor: Occupational and Marriage Mobility in the Balearic Islands, 1841-1870

This paper addresses to what extent the growth that Spain experienced around the midnineteenth century reached large shares of the local population or was mainly captured by a few. We use the Balearic Islands as a case study and analyse the changes in occupational mobility and social homogamy between 1841 and 1870. Using an original dataset created from civilregistry marriage records, we reconstruct the occupational status of the grooms, their fathers and their fathers-in-law across seven municipalities. We transcribe the occupations using HISCAM and HISCLASS to estimate the patterns of upward and downward mobility, as well as persistence and patterns observed in the marriage market. Our results show that occupational mobility increased during the central decades of the nineteenth century and that this was mainly a consequence of the high levels of upward mobility estimated in 1870. However, this process was not systematic in all the islands. We observe that more urban and commercially connected municipalities, particularly Mahón, offered more opportunities for upward mobility and also showed a more socially heterogeneous marriage market. On the other hand, Alcudia presented worse conditions in mobility patterns, consistent with its long-term demographic, sanitary and port-related problems. The analysis of homogamy shows that local marriage markets and migration status influenced the direction of social distance between families, with migrants not necessarily accessing higher-status marriage alliances even when geographical mobility could have helped them gain access to such alliances. We argue that the Balearic Islands differ from the patterns observed in other regions such as Valencia during the same period because the low initial inequality, diversified agriculture, small-scale manufacturing and access to external markets allowed the benefits of economic development to be better distributed among the local population, reaching broader sectors of society. Therefore, this paper shows that growth and globalisation do not always translate into higher inequality and increasing pauperisation, as their effects depend crucially on local structures and initial inequality levels that shape the access to new opportunities.