Regina Grafe - Distant Tyranny. Markets, Power, and Backwardness in Spain, 1650-1800 (Princeton University Press, 2012), 215-218
Two Spains
Rafael Dobado has argued that population density in the late eighteenth century was highly correlated with regional levels of economic well-being in Spain in the later nineteenth century, for which more reliable estimates are available. 3 Population density is therefore one of the better indicators for economic growth in an era in which population statistics are a lot more reliable than estimates of income. In 1787 about 160 people lived in every square kilometer in Spain’s coastal regions, but only about 75 in the interior. 4 The difference is strikingly large and as figure 8.1 suggests, it only increased over time. The shift from the interior to the coastal regions and to Madrid was still modest in the eighteenth century, but it accelerated in the nineteenth and continued in the twentieth.
In fact, the trend had begun much earlier. In the late sixteenth century the central Castilian regions, that is, Castille-Leon and Castille-La Mancha, accounted for 46 percent of the population of the Spanish territories, while Catalonia and Valencia accounted for about 10 percent. By the mid nineteenth century they were home to 27 and 19 percent of the total population, respectively. 5 The question thus remains why within a general pattern of slow market integration some regions patently fared worse than others. In other words, what explains the center-periphery divide in Spain, the economic, political, social, and cultural cleavage that has been the central feature of Spanish history and historiography?
Much of the Spanish historiography of the early modern period has developed around the notion of the “Two Spains.” In economic history this has been most elegantly elaborated by Ringrose, who has argued in Madrid and the Spanish Economy that the rise of the bureaucratic capital of the Crown’s making stifled growth elsewhere in central Spain. 6 The consequence was the emergence of two fundamentally different Spains. One Spain comprised Madrid and the Castilian interior, the historic territories of Leon, Old and New Castile, and Estremadura on the Portuguese borders. The other covered much of the coastal regions, in particular the northern Cantabrian coast, including the Basque Provinces and Navarra, the Mediterranean coast with the former reign of Aragon, Murcia, and Andalusia. Essentially the divide was between the “center” and the “periphery.”
Ringrose had not invented the idea of Two Spains. It became popular in the second half of the nineteenth century among Spanish commentators from Ramiro de Maeztu y Whitney (1875–1936) to Marcelino Menéndez Pelayo (1856–1912). 7 Since the twentieth century, it has generally been used to describe the conflict between liberal and reactionary forces that opened up after 1808 and persisted throughout the Civil War and dictatorship of the twentieth century. Ringrose simply traced the idea back to what he saw as its regional origins. In this, he was in good company. José Ortega y Gasset, Spain’s most influential writer of the early twentieth century, argued in Invertebrate Spain (1922) that it would be
an insult to historical intelligence to assume that when a superior national unit had been formed out of smaller nuclei, the latter cease to exist as actively differentiated elements. This erroneous idea would, for example, lead to the idea that when Castile reduces to a national Spanish unit Aragon, Catalonia and the Basque Country, these lose their character as distinct peoples [pueblos] and become part of the whole. 8
Not so, Ortega y Gasset exclaimed. While the unification might contain their centrifugal tendencies, it would not break the force of their independence. If the central organ disappeared, the nation would revert to its constituent parts. Disintegration in Spain was thus the corollary of the decadence at the center, in Castile. According to Ringrose, Ortega y Gasset, and many others the decline had started as early as the 1580s and had never ceased. 9 Here were the supposed origins of a division between a conservative, inward-looking interior Spain and an outward-looking, culturally, socially, and economically more advanced coastal Spain.
This narrative mirrors national historiographies in many places. The notion of commercially minded, more tolerant port towns and backward hinterlands has been part of histories written from Hamburg to Boston and from Canton/Guangzhou to Buenos Aires. It appeals as much to cultural historians as to hard-nosed economists, who have argued that Europe’s growth in the early modern period was largely “Atlantic,” though the latter have a hard time accounting for the poor economic performance of thoroughly Atlantic Spain. 10
From this point of departure, it was a relatively short step from the Spanish declension narratives of the sixteenth to early eighteenth centuries to the chronologically second half of the Two Spains story, that is, the role of the coastal areas in eventually pulling a recalcitrant hinterland into the modern age. In Spain, Europe, and the “Spanish Miracle,” 1700–1900, Ringrose took his interpretation into the early nineteenth century and argued that the outward orientation of the coastal regions—exemplified by the early (by Spanish standards) industrialization in Catalonia, the Basque Country, and parts of Andalusia—eventually led Spain out of backwardness. 11 By seeking integration with regions outside the Peninsula, they overcame the nefarious influence of a centralist bureaucracy that, in the later eighteenth century, contributed only slowly to this drive by opening up the Americas trades, for example. Again Ringrose was building on a long tradition of late nineteenth and early twentieth-century writers. The young, still liberal Maeztu warned against separatism of the coastal regions. Having spent part of his youth in Havana and returning to Spain just before the U.S. occupation of Cuba, he had witnessed the dismemberment of Spain firsthand. However, he also called for “another” (more modern) Spain that could only be created under the direction of the open- and industriously minded Basques and Catalans. 12
Notas
4 Ibid., 108–9.
5 Pérez Moreda, “El Legado demográfico,” 131.
7 Juliá, Historias de las dos Españas; Alvarez Junco, Mater Dolorosa, 383ff.
9 There is an endless, self-referential literature on Spanish decline. See, e.g., Elliott, “Decline of Spain,” and Kamen, “The Decline of Spain.” It is interesting to note that in the 1920s the possible loss of Catalonia or the Basque Country simply looked like a logical continuation of the loss first of the European, then of most of the American territories, and finally of Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines. For Ortega y Gasset evidently the latter had been just as much part of what he considered Spain as Catalonia; they were all part of the same entity rather than colonies of the Peninsula or even Castile.
10 Acemoglu, Johnson, and Robinson, “Rise of Europe.” Spain’s poor economic record is— once more—explained away by its supposed institutional exceptionalism.
No hay comentarios:
Publicar un comentario