Land tenure inequality, harvests, and rural conflict ; evidence from Southern Spain in the 1930s

This paper analyses rural conflict in one of the most volatile areas of interwar Europe, the latifundia regions of the South of Spain. The historical and economics literature argues that rural conflict was a bottom-up, spontaneous response of landless peasants to unemployment, bad harvests, land ownership inequality, changes in property rights, and the lack of enforcement of pro-worker legislation. A second generation of historical studies has focused on democratization and concomitant changes in collective bargaining and labor market institutions. Was conflict caused by structural factors like poverty, inequality or unemployment or was conflict an endogenous response to political change? This paper analyzes the pattern of conflict in in three Andalusian provinces (Córdoba, Jaén and Seville) in the early 1930s to argue that the timing and geographical distribution of conflict is consistent with a wave of mobilization linked to greater political opportunities favored by lower repression, pro-worker institutional change, and labor market intervention. Time-series and cross-sectional variation in levels of rural conflict suggest conflict was not a spontaneous response to dismal living standards and inequality. Rather, it emerged in large, fast growing towns of Andalusia and was mediated by the strategic interaction of authorities and experienced rural unions. The instances of rural conflict analyzed here suggest it is very difficult for new democratic governments in agrarian societies to stave rural conflict off with labor-friendly intervention. It is often argued that conflict precedes political and institutional change, but it is shown here that conflict can emerge abruptly as a response to those changes.