In his 1984 Land and Society in Golden Age Castile, David Vassberg described an Iberian tradition of presura that conferred private land rights on the basis of use rather than ownership, which he found to be rather less well developed in Spain than previously assumed. This had obvious, significant implications for the great hacienda, land, and labor debate and for the debate over the sixteenth-century agrarian origins of the capitalist world system, yet Vassberg’s insights had little effect on these scholarly enterprises. Now Vassberg again offers a little gem of deceptive simplicity.
Vassberg’s Village and the Outside World succeeds despite his purpose in writing it, to challenge the “myth of the immobile village,” which his own sources revealed to be a straw man (p. 1). He accepts the conventional view of the Spanish village as a patria chica typified by autonomy, solidarity, economic protectionism, and prejudice against outsiders. But he rejects the conventional wisdom, à la Fernand Braudel, that “migration was an unsettling element in early modern society” (p. 174). Instead, Vassberg finds that migration in early modern Spain was “a basic and essential component of socioeconomic structure [and not] . . . a reaction to economic difficulty or other problems.” Urban areas, moreover, did not stimulate rural change but “acted as a kind of safety valve” that “enabled village communities to maintain their traditional modes of behavior long after they had lost their economic or demographic utility” (pp. 174-75). The traditional economy was also shored up by the steady acquisition of rural properties by the urban bourgeoisie, investments that came at the expense of capitalist development (p. 164).
In presenting his case, Vassberg deploys a rich array of secondary and primary sources, particularly censuses (padrones de vecindad), material from the Chancillerias of Valladolid and Granada, lawsuits, and literary evidence. His chapters explore individual mobility in Golden Age Castile by peeking into the world of itinerants— merchants, carters, muleteers, and shepherds. He also looks at regional and long-distance marketing of specialized village artisanal production arising from local control of limited forest resources (cart and wheelmaking, charcoal burning, lumbering, and so on); mundane migratory farm work; the surprising prevalence of life-cycle service by adolescents who went away for periods of domestic employment before returning to assume the responsibilities of adult citizens; and the impact of military service, both voluntary and forced.
Latin Americanists may be disappointed by the short shrift Vassberg gives to transatlantic migration. While noting that “networks of friendship, kin, and business associates” (p. 85) closely connected Spain to its colonies and further encouraged migration, he says nothing of how the socioeconomic structure of mobility allowed peninsular nephews to dominate colonial commerce at the expense of creole sons. I wish more thought and analysis had been given to the functional economic roles played by migrants as outsiders in their new settings. But these are small criticisms of a fine study of the intersection of culture and economy in Iberian village life.
