The Second Republic sparked considerable enthusiasm concerning the possibilities that a large-scale permanent redistribution of landed property could resolve the social problems in southern Spain. Yet, as this chapter argues, land reform failed because there was insufficient uncultivated land that could be brought under the plough, and labour-intensive agriculture was not feasible under dry-farming conditions. Indeed, cereal cultivation was becoming increasingly capital intensive, especially on the heavy, fertile Campiña soils. The slow and limited progress of settlements under the 1932 Reform Law contrasts with the land invasions in the spring of 1936, which resulted in over a hundred thousand peasants receiving almost immediately over half a million hectares. However they failed to solve the overriding problem of insufficient land and, because weak state capacity implied that land settlements could not be implemented impartially, they simply changed which authority decided who was to benefit, and who was to be excluded.

This book has argued that it was weak state capacity and the absence of competitive mass political parties that the Second Republic inherited which severely limited the possibilities of its success. As Juan Linz has noted, weak state capacity can create problems of efficacy, or the ability of governments to find adequate solutions to resolve basic demands, as well as a lack of effectiveness in policy implementation. Land reform is an excellent example because it failed to resolve the problems of the landless, leading to frustration among a large section of rural society, while providing a platform for an even larger group to organize against the Republic.

Unlike most Western European countries, Spain’s landed elites and Church hierarchy remained politically and economically strong before the Great Depression. Spanish farm lobbies therefore continued to reflect the interests of large landowners and cereal farmers, whose demand for higher tariffs led to an expansion in wheat cultivation, despite the country’s weak competitive advantage. By contrast, family farmers, despite representing around a third of the electorate, were politically under-represented, which would have important consequences for the democratic experiment during the Second Republic. Neither the landed elites nor the Church hierarchy were required to participate in mass political parties before 1931, which limited their interest in organizing village-level cooperatives into federations, and at the same time helped them to preserve their traditional powers. Catalonia was the exception, as regional political demands required the landed elites to participate in mass politics, and explains the success of local farm cooperatives and rural associations.

Chapter 1 provides the background for a discussion of Chinese economic thought in the Qing period, introducing its most important ideas, terminology, and tropes. In this context, it stresses the unique centrality of economic issues in Qing politics. It also illustrates how dismissing imperial tropes related to the notion of “nurturing” and “pacifying the people” (yangmin and anmin) as mere empty rhetoric prevents historians from fully understanding important political and economic objectives of the Chinese imperial government. This chapter also examines two important debates on the role of the state in the economy of the empire, the Debate on Salt and Iron (81 BCE) and the controversy surrounding Wang Anshi’s New Policies (1069–76). It further analyses the pro-market trends that accompanied the commercial growth of the Song dynasty – the beginning of a process of commercialization that was to come to maturation in the late Ming and early Qing periods.

Although traditional Spanish farming was slowly being replaced by a modern, scientific agriculture dependent on industrial inputs, productivity remained low and living standards for many were poor and precarious during the first third of the twentieth century. Social problems were contained while surplus farm labour could easily find employment in the cities, but the limits of traditional agriculture to create employment became brutally exposed during the 1930s Depression. Unlike Northern Europe, the use of dry-farming techniques were required over much of the country, which created major obstacles to increasing output by employing more labour. The growing possibilities for mechanization by the interwar period offered benefits to the large cereal farms, but threatened to make small farmers, with their highly fragmented holdings, uncompetitive. Technological change also threatened to eliminate a significant source of seasonal employment for landless labourers, and force marginal cereal producers to sell their land.

This book explores the evolution of Chinese economic thought from the late Ming and Qing periods (1500s–1911) through the first two decades of the Republic (1912–1930s). It focuses on the debates over the two closely related ideas of market and consumption in order to understand Chinese officials’ and intellectuals’ perceptions of their roles in the economy of the empire – or, after 1912, in that of the Republic. The results of this study challenge the chronological and spatial narrative of global economic modernization in two main ways. First, the study locates in China, rather than in Europe, the earliest formulations of the ideas of a self-regulating market and consumption-driven economy. This point is not intended to initiate a competition regarding who was first to generate theories that were to play a crucial role in the development of economic liberalism in eighteenth-century Europe, but to emphasize the ability of regions other than Western Europe to think about the economy in innovative ways in response to changing circumstances. Second, this study challenges the neoliberal narrative of economic modernization as a march toward increased reliance on an unregulated market. This highly ideologized narrative of developmental determinism mythologizes the power of the unregulated market as the main engine for economic development regardless of historical and geopolitical circumstances. China offers a case against this form of determinism. As discussed in Chapter 3, starting from the 1800s China’s particular geopolitical and historical circumstances appeared to most Chinese officials and intellectuals to require a retreat from earlier pro-market policies and inspired them to attempt the realization of a hybrid system that combined reliance on market forces with targeted state intervention as the most efficient model for addressing China’s specific needs.

Chapter 2 focuses on the expansion of pro-market trends and how it came to influence Qing policies. It also discusses the economic developments that inspired the rise of pro-luxury consumption ideas from the late Ming period to the early nineteenth century. In this context it examines the writings of a variety of scholars and intellectuals including Lu Ji (1515–52) and Tang Zhen (1630–1704), the two most prominent pro-luxury advocates.This chapters also illustrate the elasticity of the Confucian discourse on the economy and its ability to adapt to actual changes in the economy of the empire, challenging the notion that Confucian ideology led to intellectual immobility.