The transition to capitalism in Catalonia

Abstract

Robert Brenner left a passing claim that Catalonia had experienced an agrarian transition to capitalism in parallel to England; a claim that has been dismissed by Catalan historians and forgotten by his followers. The purpose of this chapter is to revisit the question of the Catalan transition while teasing out its broader implications for the Transition Debate. It is argued that the Catalan transition demonstrates the distinct importance of changing subjectivities around production and labor, showing that capitalist production ought to be socially constructed. Contra Brenner’s claims, this chapter argues that pre-capitalist social property relations persisted in Catalan agriculture throughout the period of transition. Instead, the locus of the capitalist breakthrough will be rather situated in the proto-industrial textile sector that thrived in the eighteenth century. Here, the clothiers, the section of the guild in charge of organizing the production process, began to style themselves as “manufacturers” and to subordinate their weaving workforce in an explicit attempt to produce more competitively. This gave rise to a pocket of competitive producers that successfully weathered the crisis of the turn of the nineteenth century and laid the foundations for Catalonia’s early industrialization, an anomaly in the entirety of the Mediterranean Basin.