This monograph makes a clean contribution to a longstanding yet faraway from exhausted debate in regards to the transition to capitalism in Europe. The paintings investigates key elements of this alteration: the adjustments at the land, the origins of the commercial revolution, the trendy upward push of inhabitants and the expansion of markets. It does so from a brand new viewpoint, in spite of the fact that, by way of concentrating on a space of southern Europe, Catalonia. Catalonia's curiosity as a space for examine lies in its precocity inside of a southern eu context, as one of many few areas at the eu outer edge to industrialise in similar methods and even as components of northern Europe. inhabitants development used to be equally rapid.

The learn engages significantly with a number of vital debates in monetary and social historical past, akin to the transition to agrarian capitalism, even if sharecropping will be seen as a backwards type of agricultural construction, theories of proto-industrialisation and theories of inhabitants switch. It additionally questions claims that the extended family of north-western Europe was once a superb version for industralisation than the extra nuclear family buildings generic in southern Europe. not just may well the be as dynamic because the extended family whilst required yet, extra importantly, recognition has to be paid to different associations and elements that can have conditioned relatives kinds and decision-making processes.

The procedure taken by means of this paintings is a micro-study of 1 neighborhood, Igualada, a huge proto-industrial centre but additionally positioned in the viticultural zone. It grew speedily over the eighteenth century from round 1,700 population in 1717 to 4,900 in 1787 and round 7,700 via 1830. merely on the micro-level is it possible for anyone research to reconstruct networks of relationships and styles of decision-making on the family point. on the center of the ebook, accordingly, is a family members reconstitution of 8,700 households, supplemented through a large physique of extra resources, resembling landholding contracts, tax documents, manorial surveys, inventories, marriage contracts and letters.