DOI: 10.3886/e210123v1
title: INEQUALITY, WELFARE, POLARIZATION AND SOCIAL MOBILITY IN SPAIN, 1750-1900. DATASET RESPUESTAS GENERALES FROM ENSENADA CADASTRE (Andalusia, Extremadura, Murcia and Castile La Mancha)

description: At the beginning of the eighteenth century, Spain was a backward and
politically weakened economy with respect to her European competitors. However,
it still remained its American colonies maintaining its status as world power.
The balance of the Bourbon politics during the eighteenth century is ambiguous.
From a centripetal point of view, the reformist and centralist role of the
enlightened state is reinforced looking for a higher administrative efficiency.
In opposition to this point of view, we find a more peripheral view that
highlights the lack of efficiency of the Bourbon state whose policies represent
the origin of proto-national pressure groups – very homogeneous territorially –
that conditioned the failure of the liberal state during the nineteenth
century. After the Napoleonic Wars, Spain carried out important reforms that
encouraged substantial changes in its institutions. From an economic point of
view, the country experienced high growth rates that increased agrarian
productivity and wages, improved terms of trade and made possible a significant
growth of the industrial sector. It is within this transition to a nation-state
and industrial society where this project is focused, studying globally the
relationships that took place between inequality, welfare, polarisation and
social mobility between 1750 and 1900. 

 

The hypothesis of this project maintains that the growth and
modernisation process of the Spanish economy, during its transition towards a
market economy, was accompanied by an increase in inequality, social
polarisation and social mobility. At the same time, we will analyse how the
starting conditions at local level could have been important factors to explain
this process. Until now, in spite of the advances in the research concerning
the evolution of inequality/welfare in Spain during the eighteenth and nineteenth
centuries, there is no integrated analysis of all these dimensions.

 

This project attempts to combine the historical work of compilation and
analysis of primary archival sources from the eighteenth and nineteenth
centuries with the economic, econometric and spatially geo-referenced analysis.
We will use the information from the Ensenada Cadastre (c. 1750) using
information like names, occupations and incomes from heads of households, the
information from parish and civil records for the period 1840-1870 with
information of names and occupations and the records of personal taxes for the
period 1869-70 with information of names and incomes. Using this information,
we can obtain three cross sectional analyses for a group of locations that
allow a diachronic comparison in the different dimensions of personal and
regional inequality and polarisation. We will also use the extensive local
information of the General Answers of the Ensenada Cadastre to analyse the
causes of the different evolution in the long term of the measures for regional
and local welfare. Finally, we will carry out a prosopographic analysis of a subsample of households
identifying in parish records the descendants of the heads of households from
the eighteenth century and the evolution of their families until we link them
with the records of the nineteenth century. This will allow us to establish
more precise hypotheses about the dynamics of households during the three
periods. 

<br>
description: Data collection related to education, health and charity items correspond to 3,088 cities, towns and villages in Southern Spain.<br>
description: Respuestas Generales (General Answers) of
the Ensenada Cadastre to analyse the measures for regional and local welfare -education, health and charity- in South Spain (Andalusia, Extremadura, Murcia and Castile La Mancha).<br>.