Most of the Catalan vineyards were cultivated by means of sharecropping contracts that granted the sharecropper ownership rights over the land. This paper maintains that the “bundle of rights” view of property is not the most appropriate for analysing situations of this kind. It shows that, from around 1900 onwards, sharecroppers’ rights became insecure, which gave rise to a series of dysfunctions that resulted in the contract no longer being optimal. It concludes that the removal of the inefficiencies arising from shared ownership was a sufficient reason to justify the agrarian reform that the Catalan Parliament sought to introduce in 1934.

This article presents three new annual indices of industrial output for Andalusia, Catalonia and the Basque Country between 1830 and 1975. The comparative analysis, the first to include the Basque Country, allows to specify the main tendencies of growth and structural change in the regions studied, two of them pioneers of the Spanish industrialization, Andalusia clearly left behind. The analysis highlights as well the changes operated in the composition of their respective industrial products and, with them, the different regional paths, going from specialization to the manufacturing diversification, followed during the 19th and 20th centuries.

This article verifies the existence of three different and complementary geographies in the 1790–1830 period, a stage in the Catalan industrialization process that has deserved little attention among historians. The first one, of manual spinning by means of an improved jenny –locally named bergadana– in inner Catalonia; a second one of improved water-frame spinning in Manresa and the surrounding villages; and, finally, a third one of wood mule-jenny in Barcelona and some towns of the seaside district of the Maresme. These three areas were characterized by using distinctive power sources and producing different types of thread; they also had different wage levels; but they were complementary until the 1830's when the introduction of new mechanical instruments required important and innovative organization changes. The article ends with two analitical case studies: Salient as a typical example of manual spinning, and Manresa as a case of water frame spinning.