During the past 20 years, a new generation of Spanish scholars has generated an impressive historical bibliography unprecedented in quality. Strongly influenced by the annales school and other foreign models, these historians have tapped seldom-used archival sources to document a rich variety of socioeconomic studies. Consistent with the resurgent regionalism of post-Franco Spain, many of these have been local studies, usually published by local or regional government agencies.
This book is an excellent example of the work of younger post-Franco scholars. Originally a doctoral thesis at the University of Navarre (1992), it relates the history of two-and-a-half centuries of rural society in Navarre’s Lumbier-Aoiz Valley, a rural zone astride the Irati River some 23 kilometers east-southeast of Pamplona.
Ana Zabalza Seguín organizes her book into three parts. The first provides an overview of the zone’s demographic and geographical setting and agropastoral development; the second deals with community membership and family land-use strategies; and a short final section analyzes the tensions and social changes brought about by individuals discontented with communitarian restrictions. This is a carefully written work that provides fascinating details of how rural communities functioned. Zabalza Seguín’s basic concern is to understand how the people of that area, faced with the complex problems of family relations, emigration, and immigration, decided who would have access to the local natural resources.
The bibliography is not extensive, but it includes a useful selection of specialized works. Zabalza Seguín relied on documents far more than printed works, and her sources come from royal, municipal, and notarial archives. The appendix contains a sample of documents dealing with land rights for agropastoral purposes.
The book has several irritating minor shortcomings. Typical of scholarly works published in Spain, it lacks an alphabetical index, obliging a reader on the track of very specific information to read more of the book than really desired. No credit is given for the photographic illustrations, nor are they even identified. The cover illustration (an exceedingly handsome and appropriate one) is identified without proper credit. And the maps have no credits whatever, although several are plainly reproduced from published sources. One wishes that the publisher had paid more heed to the etiquette of citations, to say nothing of copyrights, even for this noncommercial item.
These flaws, however, do not detract from Zabalza Seguín’s scholarly achievement in this deft treatment of a complex subject. This book will prove useful to scholars interested in preindustrial rural society in Spain. Latin Americanists also will want to consult it to investigate institutional backgrounds and to gain new information about the relationship between property rights and emigration.
