The Catalan peasantry: Sociability, politicisation, mobilisation and citizenship (1870-1939)

Abstract

Long-term research and communication are combined in this text in a series of individual units that band together to provide an overall picture. The text analyses the configuration and vicissitudes of the peasantry during the period in which capitalist social relations were being forged in the Catalan countryside (1870-1939), conflicts were raging over the distribution of the agricultural surplus and the peasants’ ‘moral economy’ was being radically questioned by agrarian capitalism. It also describes how Catalan peasants became a social group with an identity of its own through sociability, politicisation and mobilisation, which made the peasants citizens, first de facto and then de jure, in a long, complex process that involved various forms of association and sociability around the political cultures of republicanism, anarchism, socialism and Catholicism.