El Nivel de vida en la Espana rural, siglos XVIII-XX (review)

Most of the contributions to El Nivel de vida are pure economic history: Of the sixteen authors, eleven are economic historians, two are economists, and the other three work within the idiom of economic history, regardless of training. As a result, unquantifiable factors that contribute to a population's standard of living are shunted aside or paid mere lip service by certain authors in favor of the usual fare—painstaking wage-and-price indexes based on partial data and methodologically heroic attempts to measure non-wage income and expenses, caloric consumption, and the like. Despite these limitations, El Nivel de vida provides solid conclusions about rural Spain in the contemporary era as well as a surprise for the "optimists" in the standard-of-living debate, namely, that capitalism benefited most Spanish peasants even in the medium term.

All of the authors jettison the idea that Spanish agriculture experienced a "long siesta" during the contemporary era, leaving Spain underdeveloped and ripe for revolution. Instead, when Madrid seized Church and community landholdings and passed other legislation in the nineteenth century to create a free market in land and labor, it had a profound impact on land use and the standard of living of most Spaniards.

Initially, the results were negative. The standard of living declined from 1840 to 1870 as land prices and rents increased, while wages and consumption deteriorated. As various contributions make clear, this crisis was reflected in higher infant mortality, greater exploitation of child labor, fewer educational opportunities—especially for girls—and a decline in physical stature among rural people.

Nevertheless, this sharp crisis ended by the 1870s, and the standard of living improved thereafter as rural capitalism replaced subsistence farming. As summed up by Rafael Domínguez Martín in his bold contribution to the collection, rural inhabitants, far from experiencing the spread of capitalism in the countryside as a disaster, quickly learned how to take advantage of the new opportunities that it afforded to increase their landholdings and their standard of living. Convincing evidence in favor of this conclusion is also provided by Alberto Sanz Gimeno and Diego Ramiro Fariñas, who show a decline in childhood mortality linked to better nutrition after 1870, and by Carrión and Juan José Pérez Castejón, who demonstrate a recovery in average height among rural men after about 1880.