De la apropiación del usufructo a la privatización de la superficie: Las tierras concejiles en la Baja Extremadura (1750-1850)

Abstract

This work attempts an in-depth analysis of the utilization of publicly-owned rural land, using the case of the lands held by the municipalities of south-eastern Extremadura between 1750 and 1850. Both the methods of exploitation before the liberal agrarian reforms and the processes of privatization developed under the auspices of the local and provincial authorities in the first half of the nineteenth century are considered. The hypothesis is that, behind the reluctance of the villages to accept the general disentailment of 1855, there was the vested interest of a powerful rural oligarchy which intended, by whatever means, to prevent outside investors from intervening in the auctions of the pasture land upon which the oligarchy’s aspirations as graziers had depended since the abolition of the privileges of the “Honrado Concejo de la Mesta”.