· 2026
Labourers and Landowners in Southern Spain
- 75citations
- 2026year
Short summary
Landowners in Southern Spain's latifundia system face a dilemma: profit-seeking suggests becoming rentiers, but maintaining social legitimacy requires owner-operation, creating inherent tensions with labourers.
AI-generated from the title and abstract; the full text is not read.
Key points
- Latifundia systems in underdeveloped agrarian economies create inherent tensions between landowners and labourers.
- Landowners are pressured to choose between maximizing profit (as rentiers) and maintaining social legitimacy (through owner-operation).
- Labourers view society through a lens of conflict between working and landowning classes.
- The analysis critically examines the works of Pitt-Rivers, Hobsbawm, and Warriner concerning land reform and Andalusian society.
AI-generated from the title and abstract; the full text is not read.
Abstract
Latifundia are a characteristic feature of many underdeveloped agrarian economies. At the time when land reform was a burning issue for most of these countries, Labourers and Landowners in Southern Spain (originally published in 1971), a penetrating sociological and economic analysis of the Spanish experience was particularly opportune. The book examines the tensions within wage-labour latifundism and describes the value-systems of both labourers and landowners. Profit-minded landowners should prefer to become rentier landlords, but this would threaten the legitimacy of their position, which requires owner-operation. The labourers’ behaviour conforms with their image of society: ‘we who work’ are in conflict with the landowning classes, but nevertheless ‘we the poor must work’. Published originally in Spanish, this English edition has been rearranged and includes a new final chapter discussing Pitt-Rivers’ and Hobsbawm’s works on Andalusia, as well as dissecting Warriner’s Land Reform in Principle and Practice.
The authors' abstract, as published at the source., 2026 · DOI ↗
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Field: Economics and Econometrics
Economics and EconometricsEconomics, Econometrics and Finance