Chapter 4 illustrates the developments of the trends originated in the late Qing in support for state intervention on the economic and how they came to influence the political thought of the 1920s and 1930s. These trends led to economic solutions that tended to marginalize the market, including Jiang Jieshi’s New Life Movement (1935) – a fascist vision of frugal modernity – and various projects of economic cooperation (the Cooperative Society Movement). This period witnessed an intensification of the tension between treaty-port consumerist trends and economic decline in the rural hinterland, as well as that between the nation-building perspective of the state – which focused on developing the country as a whole – and the treaty port-based view of consumerist modernity. In addition, an escalating sense of crisis and need of decisive action to save the nation from the mounting threat from Japanese expansionist imperialism brought to a special admiration of fascist models of “controlled economy” (tongzhi jingji) such as Italy, Germany, and Japan.

This chapter looks at the nature and extent of collective action in rural areas, and the difficulties associated with creating credit and producer cooperatives. It shows that the traditional village economy provided a wide variety of public goods, and the persistence of the pósitos, or village grain banks, suggests an ability to organize and resolve problems of collective action that extended over most of the country, and not just the North, as assumed in much of the literature. However, although the village pósito met the needs of a traditional, organic-based farming system, it was inadequate for an agriculture that was becoming increasingly dependent on industrial inputs. In particular, it was the inability to create an organizational structure that could extend collective action from the village to the regional and national levels, and attract savings from a wide geographic area to meet the growing needs of the small farmers that helps explain the persistence of paternalist relations in the countryside. The chapter finishes by providing a background to the changing nature of Spain’s farm organizations over the half century prior to the Second Republic.

This chapter challenges contemporary beliefs that latifundios were inefficient by showing that farmers were quick to respond to changes in factor and commodity prices. Land ownership in southern Spain was heavily concentrated, both on the rich cereal lands of the Guadalquivir valley, as well as the huge dehesas found in the less populated upland regions. Contemporaries believed that large numbers of landless workers lived in extreme poverty at the same time as absentee landowners left significant areas of fertile land abandoned, or under-cultivated. In fact, large farms by the late 1920s were especially suitable for extensive cereals and livestock given the growing possibilities for reducing labour costs through mechanization, and there were difficulties to extend labour-intensive olive and vine cultivation. The chapter also shows that the living standards of rural workers improved over time, although they were vulnerable to economic downturns because of the erosion of traditional safety nets, and the failure of the state to create new ones. Finally, it examines why large landowners were often uninterested in extending state capacity.

This chapter examines how different political groups organized the rural sector during the Second Republic. Socialism remained heavily influenced by orthodox Marxism, and their policies centred almost exclusively on improving the living standards of the landless labourers, a group that represented just 5 per cent of Spain’s active population. Both large and small family farmers had to pay higher wagers at a time of weak farm prices and technical difficulties to increasing farm output.The legislation of the first republican-socialist coalition governments of 1931 and 1932 threatened traditional property rights and religious privileges, finally drawing both the Church and rural elites into mass party competitive politics. While a small but influential sector never accepted either the 1931 Constitution or a democratic republic, a new conservative party (CEDA) attracted support from across the country in defence of property rights, the Church, and Spain’s political unity. By 1933, it claimed around 800,000 members. The chapter ends by showing how the significant regional land-tenure regimes helped develop strong regional political movements in Galicia and Catalonia.