Spanish Confiscations: Economic & Social Consequences
The Confiscation in Spain
Repossessing measures adopted by different liberal governments throughout the century found their concretion in Royal Decrees, laws, orders, etc.
Effects of Confiscation
The confiscation, by decoupling lands from their owners, broke the existing legal organization, making them suitable to be sold, alienated, or divided. With the introduction of private property and a free market in the area, a new stage opened in Spanish agriculture. However, the results were as diverse as the different objectives pursued by the repossession process. These results were as follows:
Economic Effects
- It favored a considerable expansion of cultivated area and agricultural production. However, the latter was often caused by extending crops onto wasteland rather than through mechanization or fertilizer use.
- This expansion was often accompanied by a negative effect: deforestation. Buyers who purchased small batches of woodland (monte) converted them into farmland or sought immediate profit from selling timber and wood, cutting down trees indiscriminately. This damage was so severe that the need to prevent it was stressed by 1855.
- It enhanced the concentration of land in a few hands. The most powerful families kept their assets intact: their lands were disentailed (desvinculadas) but not expropriated. That is, even if affected by the repossession purposes, they were excluded from public sale. This shaped the map of large estates (latifundios) in Andalusia, La Mancha, and Extremadura.
- The expected financial results were also limited. Funds, whether cash or public debt bonds, arrived slowly and were often devalued.
Social Effects
- It failed to create a large landowning middle class but did contribute to replacing the manorial (señorial) rural social structure, inherited from the Old Regime, with a capitalist structure.
- The main beneficiaries were not the former land workers but small and medium local buyers who formed the core of a modest landowning middle class. The most significant effects were the consolidation of the urban middle classes, the main purchasers of rural properties, who became wealthier and diversified their assets.
- The transfer of old city property impoverished city councils, depriving them of economic independence. It also impoverished peasants settled on land unsuitable for cultivation as private property, while depriving them of the small, long-standing benefits obtained from the use of common lands.
Political Effects
- A base was created that adhered to the liberal cause, as the fate of their fortunes was linked to it. However, this process also generated more enemies, particularly among those connected to the Church, escalating tensions between the Church and the liberal state, whose relations were broken for a decade.
- In short, the opportunity to create a landowning middle class, which could have been a balancing factor in the new society, was missed. The failure to consolidate this class also meant failing to create a sector that could stimulate market demand and boost investment in the country and other economic sectors.