Farewell to the peasant republic: the demise of
traditional economies in marginal Europe (1850-1990)
FERNANDO COLLANTES *
Abstract: Between 1850 and 1990, upland communities in Switzerland, France, Italy
and Spain witnessed the demise of traditional peasant economies and the emergence
of a new type of rural economy whose firm stucture and patterns of labour
organization were more similar to those common in industrial societies. Evolution
was the result of an institutional selection process activated by changes brought about
by industrialization in the economic environment of upland communities. But,
beyond these similarities, substantial differences can be found in the paths that led to
evolution. The Alpine path was based on the early creation and consolidation of
employment firms in industry and services, and entailed relatively low occupational
gaps as compared to national averages. The path followed by Mediterranean uplands
was much more dismal –considerable gaps in economic structure and living
standards caused an acute demographic crisis during the second half of the twentieth
century. A non-Kuznetsian pattern of structural change was then a by-product of
depopulation.
Key words: marginal Europe, rural economic history, rural depopulation, evolutionary
economics, upland communities
Prepared for the Economic History Society Annual Conference 2005
(Leicester, UK, April 9-11, 2005)
Academic Session I/D: ‘Economic Geography: Routes, Regions and Boundaries’
(Nicholas Crafts, chair)
*
Assistant Lecturer in Economic History and Institutions at the University of Zaragoza (Spain).
Postal address: Departamento de Estructura e Historia Económica y Economía Pública, Facultad de
Ciencias Económicas y Empresariales, Gran Vía 4, 50005 Zaragoza (Spain). Electronic address:
collantf@unizar.es.
I gratefully acknowledge the comments and suggestions made on earlier versions by Philip
Brown, Jonathan Liebowitz, Luigi Lorenzetti, Jon Mathieu, Patrick Svensson, Nadine Vivier, and the
participants at the research seminar at the Istituto di Storia delle Alpi (Lugano, Swizterland, 2004) and the
29th Meeting of the Social Science History Association (Chicago, 2004).
Sidney Pollard has argued that several marginal European regions (particularly,
uplands and mountains) were temporarily at the forefront of technological and
economic change during the early modern period and even during the first stage of
(English) industrialization.1 But, what happened after 1850? Pier Paolo Viazzo pointed
out sixteen years ago now that 1850 had become a frontier for the division of scholarly
labour on upland communities –historians had focused mainly on the period prior to it
and anthropologists, geographers and sociologists had focused on the following period.2
In the last couple of decades, anthropologists like Viazzo have certainly crossed the
mid-nineteenth century boundary to do research on early modern historical
demography, but the main historiographical events have remained focused on the period
before industrialization. Therefore, most of what we know about the breakdown of
traditional rural economies and the emergence of a new type of rural economy (more
similar to the one we find today in the European countryside) during the nineteenth and
twentieth centuries is not a result of research efforts in economic history.
This article tackles the issue from an evolutionary theoretical standpoint. Among
the many meanings that such a term has had in the history of economic thought, the
article goes in the institutionalist tradition that started from Thorstein Veblen in the late
nineteenth century and has got Geoffrey Hodgson as its main reference in the present
day.3 From this standpoint, the demise of traditional rural economies can be seen as the
result of an institutional selection process in which firms are the basic unit of analysis.
Section I provides an outline of such a theoretical approach and tries to build some
bridges between evolutionary meta-tools and the geographical and historical specificity
of the case under study. Section II gives a comparative overview of rural transformation
in the Swiss, French, Italian and Spanish uplands, a group of regions whose population
was around nine million in 1850. International comparison has not been frequent in a
scholarly background comprised of a vast amount of individual case studies, but it is
illuminating in more than one aspect. Alongside similarity in final outcomes, different
patterns appear when it comes to both chronology and the combination of mechanisms
leading to the demise of traditional economies. Results fit Nicholas Crafts’ exploration
in Europan patterns of comparative development and his conclusion that structural
change in late industrializers was of a different kind than the one in early
1
Pollard, Marginal Europe, pp. 266-7.
Viazzo, Upland communities.
3
Veblen, ‘Why is economics not...?’; Hodgson, Economics and Evolution; ibid., Evolution and
Institutions; ibid., How economics forgot history.
2
1
industrializers.4 Path differences are further examined in section III, on the
transformation of the Alps, and section IV, on the Mediterranean uplands. Alpine
transformation was the result of a relatively early and genuine economic change, but the
Mediterranean way to rural modernity depended crucially on the acute demographic
crisis that took place after the Second World War. These different patterns suggest that
social costs of economic change were not the same everywhere in marginal Europe and
that industrialization left heterogeneous legacies for rural development in the twentyfirst century. Section V concludes.
I
Veblen proposed in 1898 that economics should become an evolutionary science
engaged in providing accounts of the cumulative sequence of institutions dealing with
the material means of life. Given its inter-generational continuity, institutions could play
a role in social science more or less similar to the one played by genes in biology.
Furthermore, the concept of institution could contribute to the building of specific links
between agency and structure, as well as to the escape from the individualistic-holistic
methodological dichotomy.5 However, the meaning of terms such as evolution or
evolutionism has not remained the same all along in the history of economic thought. A
taxonomy proposed by Hodgson separates the ontogenetic perspective of evolution that
can be found in the works of Adam Smith, Alfred Marshall or Joseph Schumpeter from
the phylogenetic accounts by Robert Malthus, Veblen or Friedrich Hayek. Ontogenic
accounts focus on the evolution of a particular organism from a set of given and
unchanging genes. In an involving way, phylogenetic accounts also consider the
cumulative evolution of the gene-pool for a whole population.6 Schumpeter expressed
this distinction in a simple way when he wrote that it is one thing to study how a dog’s
organism works (how the dog is born, grows up and eventually dies) and another
different thing is to study how things such as dogs ever came into existence.7
4
Crafts, ‘Patterns of development’. Based on different arguments, Alexander Gerschenkron,
Economic backwardness, of course had already stressed that late industrializations were different to early
ones.
5
Veblen, ‘Why is economics not...?’. See also Hodgson, ‘Evolution of Thorstein Veblen’s
evolutionary economics’; and ibid., ‘Approach of institutional economics’, p. 172.
6
Hodgson, ‘Theories of economic evolution’; ibid., Evolution and institutions, pp. 130-1.
7
Schumpeter, Business cycles.
2
Ontogeny has so far been prevalent in the historiography on marginal Europe.
Fernand Braudel saw upland communities as peasant republics whose local institutions
stood for a remarkable degree of political autonomy from state power. Both markets and
economic links with the lowlands were of peripheral relevance, as peasants struggled to
achieve self-subsistence by labouring small family farms that had to face very adverse
geographical conditions. The Malthusian ghost of overpopulation in relation to a rigidly
constraint set of natural resources appeared from time to time and peasant migration had
then to act as a safety valve for the mountain economy. Mountains became then ‘human
factories’ whose living products were enjoyed by the lowlands.8
The Braudelian model has been extensively revised and criticized in the last two
decades. According to more recent research, political autonomy in the mountains was in
fact closely linked to the expansion of state power in early modern Europe and upland
communities were not so closed from an economic point of view. The economic
strategy by peasants was comprised of much more than just self-consumption from
family farms –peasants were involved in several markets for commodities (such as, for
instance, livestock and livestock products from the family farm), services (transport and
petty trade) and factors (labour to be seasonally used in the lowlands during periods of
temporary migration) that connected them to the lowlands. Under certain favourable
conditions, marginal areas could also witness trends towards farm specialization by
peasants and Boserupian dynamics of agricultural intensification led by population
growth. Finally, peasant mobility was incorporated to complex family strategies in the
way of Richard Wall’s adaptive family economy. For certain social groups, migration
could even become a strategy of accumulation.9
In spite of these very substantial differences, most revisionist work shares with
Braudel a common concern for the ontogenetic facets of upland economic evolution.
Debates are held about the functioning of peasant economies in a pre-industrial
environment where Kuznetsian change has not begun yet. Around the mountains most
population remains employed in agriculture, urbanization rates remain low, migration
pull-effect by cities remains restricted (at least when it comes to definitive migration),
and the small size of urban markets for agrarian products prevents rural producers from
8
Braudel, Méditerranée, ch. I. I.
Mathieu, Storia delle Alpi; Viazzo, Upland communities; Fontaine, Histoire du colportage;
Domínguez, ‘Reserva etnográfica’; Pollard, Marginal Europe, pp. 87-141; Albera and Corti, ‘Movimenti
migratori’; Lorenzetti, Économie et migrations; Boserup, Conditions of agricultural growth; Wall,
‘Work’; Siddle, ‘Migration as a strategy’.
9
3
shifting to higher degrees of specialization. Revisionists have shown that this is a setting
in which evolutionary processes can be found at work, but their evolutionary accounts
have been mainly ontogenetic –we have learnt more and more about the way in which
the dog’s organism (read traditional economy) actually worked and developed, but the
issue of how and why there ceased to be things such as dogs remains out of scope.
There certainly ceased to be dogs –traditional economies broke down and the
emergence of modern rural economies brought about firm structures and patterns of
labour organization more similar to the ones common in industrial societies. Firm
structure in traditional economies was dominated by peasant family units pooling
resources in an adaptive way. Around three out of every four families in marginal
Europe were peasant families owning (or having access to) a small farm, usually not
bigger than five hectares. Small urban markets and high transport costs prevented these
farms from full specialization before industrialization, and peasant families were
engaged in a complex strategy of multi-activity. Family was the main institution for
labour allocation, not only because 80-90 per cent of farm labour was unpaid family
labour but also because it played a very influential part in the organization of intrafamily division of off-farm labour and prevented individual behaviour in labour or other
markets (related, for instance, to temporary migration) from distorting family resourcepool maximization. On the contrary, firm structure in modern rural economies is
dominated by employment firms. Alongside local government expansion, this accounts
for the rise of specialized and individual economic strategies, most of them based on
earning a wage in manufacturing, construction or service sectors. As a result, modern
rural households remain important organizations but can no longer qualify as firms.10
Which were the mechanisms driving this sequence? Geographers and
anthropologists approaching this topic in a phylogenetic style have usually favoured a
top-bottom approach to social change and chosen political forces as the engine of
evolution, with a particular focus on the transition from local peasant republics to statelevel political systems that supposedly provoked the crisis of peasant economies by
means of policies concerning common lands, forests, electric industry and construction
of dams, and tourism regulations.11 On the contrary, this article favours an economic
Collantes, ‘Marginal peasant communities’, elaborates this premises. Theoretical basis is
Hodgson’s taxonomy of firms and other organizations; see Evolution and institutions, pp. 232-41.
11
See for instance Rosenberg, Mondo negoziato, pp. 117-41, 180-1, 190-4, 219-21; and Cuesta,
Despoblación del Sobrarbe. Clearances were at the centre of similar interpretations for the Scottish
10
4
approach that sees the evolutionary sequence under study mostly as a result of ordinary
functioning by market economies. Such an evolutionary sequence seems in fact broadly
consistent with Adam Smith’s assertion that specialization depends on the extent of the
market and multi-activity is thus to be found in backward countries.12 But evolutionary
theory is much weaker on the mechanisms of evolution than at higher levels of
abstraction. Veblen, for instance, provided meta-theoretical fundamentals but was not
very successful at lower levels such as this one.13 Later on some of his most influential
followers gave way to the version of institutionalism that is commonly criticized –a
‘naïve’ empiricism lacking operational theoretical structures below the very highest
abstraction levels.14 Just one layer below the basic evolutionary propositions,
mechanisms of evolution have not been so far a major topic of systematic theoretical
discussion. As Hodgson suggests, this may have been due to the fact that an
institutionalist approach to such theoretical layers requires the incorporation of
remarkable doses of geographical and historical specificity. The way ahead may then be
the undertaking of specific studies structured by a limited number of evolutionary metaconcepts.15
The specific case of the demise of peasant economies and the emergence of a
modern rural economy can be interpreted as the result of an institutional selection
process activated by the changes brought about by industrialization in the economic
environment of upland communities. Firms are the basic units of analysis and the main
selection process entails the substitution of peasant family units by employment firms as
representative firms in the local economy. Theorists such as Alexander Chayanov
suggested that the mechanisms driving this evolutionary sequence had to do with those
economic areas shared by both types of firm and in which competition was possible in a
direct or an indirect way. This led him to highlight the role of commodity prices, capital
prices and land prices as the key variables in evolution –peasant family units would be
Highlands, but it is now clear ‘there was in any case no chance of survival of the traditional Highland
economy under modern conditions’; Pollard, Marginal Europe, p. 80.
12
Smith, Inquiry. Such an approach can be found in general views of European agriculture
during the early modern period and the first stages of industrialization; see Simpson, ‘European farmers’,
pp. 71, 79-80; also Horlings, ‘Pre-industrial economic growth’, p. 98.
13
Brette, ‘Thorstein Veblen’s theory’, p. 465-6; Rutherford, ‘Veblen’s evolutionary programme’,
pp. 464, 467; Hodgson, ‘Evolution of Thorstein Veblen’s evolutionary economics’, p. 427.
14
Rutherford, ‘Veblen’s evolutionary programme’, pp. 465, 472-6.
15
Hodgson, How economics forgot history; ibid., ‘Approach of institutional economics’, p. 168.
The ‘need to be specific about... selection mechanisms’ is underlined in Hodgson, Evolution and
institutions, p. 195. Samuels, ‘Present state’, p. 579, argues from within that institutionalism should be
more focused on the development of substantive areas than on ceremonial, exclusivist stands.
5
in trouble when price competition with employment firms became too heavy and/or
when the operation of employment firms led to excessively high prices for capital or
land.16 Historical analysis of marginal Europe suggests on the contrary that the main
evolution mechanism had to do with labour. In a sensible argument, Chayanov stressed
that wage was not an economic variable shared by peasant units and employment firms,
but he thus overlooked that living standards were indeed a shared economic variable
and that they were therefore able to activate institutional selection processes. Whenever
it allowed for clearly higher living standards, the emergence of work opportunities in
employment firms could pull peasants out and lead to the demise of peasant economies,
as it actually did.
In its turn, the emergence of work opportunities in employment firms was
closely linked to the industrialization processes taking place in the regions and countries
to which upland communities belonged. Growth in leading regions led to what Gunnar
Myrdal called backwash and spread effects in relation to marginal areas. 17 Backwash
effects on traditional manufacturing (which was unable to sustain competition with
modern industry) and spread effects in terms of greater possibilities for farm
specialization (following the expansion of urban demand and the reduction of transport
costs) are two instances of mechanisms driving ontogenetic evolution in peasant
communities. But this was not the only possible kind of backwash and spread effects. If
leading to higher living standards, availability of work opportunities in urban
employment firms created backwash effects in demographic terms –peasants could
benefit from labour market arbitrage by leaving their home districts and their family
farms. Alongside these rural-urban labour flows, capital flows in the opposite sense
were equally relevant.18 Urban-rural capital flows were usually the result of business
initiatives attracted by some kind of strategic resource to be found in the mountains.
Hydroelectric potential, availability of space in the vicinity of congested industrial
poles, and snow and slope conditions for mass tourism may well be three of the most
significant examples. Together with local initiatives, these investments provided the
conditions for peasants to leave the farm, achieve higher living standards, and still stay
in their home districts. Whatever the relative weight of labour and capital flows as
alternative mechanisms for evolution, final outcome was the abandonment of peasant
Chayanov, ‘Theory of non-capitalist economic systems’.
Myrdal, Economic theory, ch. 3.
18
On the pre-industrial history of such flows to marginal areas, see Pollard, Marginal Europe,
pp. 140-1.
16
17
6
life and the demise of traditional economies due to their incapacity to sustain
competition for labour in the arena of living standards.19
II
‘Yet margins, in the end, remained margins’, Pollard concludes in order to stress
the short-lived character of economic lead by several marginal European areas up to the
first stage of industrialization.20 The generalization of liberal institutions made things
even more difficult because it meant the cancellation of a traditional advantage by
marginal areas –their greater institutional flexibility as compared to a general setting of
restrictions to market functioning, economic freedom, and technological change.
Moreover, locational fundamentals were not optimal at all, and geographical handicaps
became increasingly problematic.21 Potential for agricultural growth had always been
seriously diminished as a consequence of climate and soil conditions, but the spread of
agricultural intensification in the lowlands and the difficulties met by the uplands to
follow the same path at the same speed led to considerable gaps. 22 Furthermore,
problems related to access to markets became particularly acute in comparative
perspective when modern transport systems spread more rapidly in the lowlands.
Finally, low population densities (around 30 inhabitants per square kilometre in the
mid-nineteenth century, a figure highly conditioned by environmental constraints) made
it difficult for marginal areas to enter virtuous circles of economic agglomeration in the
style of the ones depicted by ‘new economic geography’ models.23
It is therefore hardly surprising that margins remained margins after 1850, with
market societies becoming a general feature in Europe, agrarian systems becoming more
and more intensive, and new economic geography patterns emerging as the share of
increasing-returns sectors in the whole of the economy became more and more relevant.
In most cases, margins became in fact more marginal than ever before. A good
indication of this is given by the decreasing share of upland population in the total
population of the corresponding countries. Alpine share in total Swiss population fell
See Collantes, ‘Marginal peasant communities’, for discussion and illustrations.
Pollard, Marginal Europe, p. 268.
21
See Davis and Weinstein, ‘Bones, bombs, and break points’, pp. 1284-5, about locational
fundamentals as strong, long-run influences on economic growth.
22
Mathieu, Storia delle Alpi, pp. 29-141; Collantes, Declive demográfico, chs. 3-4.
23
Krugman, ‘Increasing returns’; Fujita et al., Spatial economy.
19
20
7
from 19 to 15 per cent between 1850 and 1990, and this was the region with the best
demographic results.24 In other countries, such as France (from 11 to 4 per cent between
1850 and 1975), Italy (from 21 to 11 per cent between 1850 and 1991) and Spain (from
27 to 8 per cent between 1860 and 1991), many upland districts lost population in
absolute terms and this led to a remarkable fall in marginal population shares.25
Conventional wisdom seems to concede that mountain regions were left out of
industrial changes and that industrialization and the subsequent trend towards market
integration led to the crisis of traditional rural manufacturing and therefore relegated
marginal Europe to a subordinated role as a supplier of foodstuffs and raw materials.26
Such arguments can also be found as historical assumptions in the mountain policy
released by the European Economic Community in 1975, whose main instrument were
compensatory payments made to upland farmers.27 Similar assumptions were implicit to
EEC’s redefinition of rural development in the late 1980’s, when industry and services
were said to be the future of the countryside.28 Trying either to sustain mountain
farming, or to transform rural communities into non-farming communities, EEC held
anyway a ‘peasantist’ vision of what marginal Europe was in the late twentieth century.
But such views identify marginalization with absence of change (or at least
phylogenetic change) and underestimate the capacity of industrialization to reduce by
means of several mechanisms the degree of geographical specificity prevailing in its
working space. By 1990 none of the marginal regions in Switzerland, France, Italy or
Spain could be said to remain a peasant economy in the previously proposed terms.
Table 1 shows a chronology of rural transformation based on the decrease of percentage
shares of agrarian employment according to census data. Up to a certain threshold of
specialization and division of labour, this kind of data overestimates labour input in
agriculture because multi-activity strategies were at work.29 Such a problem is what
makes census data promising for measuring peasant share in rural society. Inversely, the
24
Office Féderal de la Statistique, Eidgenössische. Swiss Alps here include the following
cantons: Uri, Schwyz, Glarus, Nidwalden, Obwalden, Appenzell (A.Rh. and I.Rh.), Graubünden, Valais
and Ticino.
25
Estienne, ‘Évolution de la population’, p. 396; Agnoletti, ‘Bosques e industria’, p. 406;
Collantes, Declive demográfico.
26
These are arguments by Bairoch, Victoires, vol. I, pp. 630-1; and McNeill, Mountains, p. 271.
See also Dunaway, ‘Incorporation of Mountain Ecosystems’, pp. 360-5, about the U.S. Appalachia.
27
For a critical review of this policy, see Bazin, ‘Bilan de la PAC’; and Bazin and Barjolle,
‘Politique de la montagne’.
28
OECD’s approach was similar; see OECD, What future...?, pp. 8, 58.
29
See for instance O’Brien and Prados de la Escosura, ‘Agricultural productivity’, pp. 516-7,
529.
8
share of census-type non-agrarian workers may provide some quantitative clues about
the weight of the kind of specialized economic strategies common in modern rural
economies.30
Table 1. Patterns of rural transformation: when did peasant share in the working
population fell below 50 and 25 per cent?
Below 50 per cent
1870-1913
1913-1950
1950-1973
1973-1990
Swiss Alps
French Alps
Italian Alps
Massif Central
Appenines
Spanish Pyrenees
Cordillera Cantábrica
Cordillera Bética
Spanish interior ranges
Swiss Alps
French Alps
Italian Alps
Massif Central
Appenines
Spanish Pyrenees
Below 25 per cent
Source: Collantes, ‘Marginal peasant communities’.
During the 1850-1990 period, all of the considered marginal regions witnessed a
double process comprising the demise of peasant economies and the emergence of
modern rural economies. Indications of change can already be detected for the Swiss
Alps in the decades before the First World War, and a similar comment can be made for
the French and the Italian Alps by 1945. During the 1950-1973 phase, the Alps
consolidated their way to rural modernity while the Massif Central in France, the
Apennines in Italy and the Spanish Pyrenees began to move away from their traditional
peasant morphology. By 1990, the share of census-type agrarian workers had fallen
below 25 per cent in the latter regions and transformation was clearly underway in the
three other upland regions in Spain (Cordillera Cantábrica in the north, inland ranges,
and Cordillera Bética in the south) too. Peasant family units and family farms had
ceased to be representative institutions of the rural economy everywhere in marginal
Europe.31
How to interpret these chronological differences? Once we see rural evolution as
the result of institutional selection processes activated by changes in the economic
environment of upland communities, it can be expected that the space-time patterns of
30
See Mathieu, Storia delle Alpi, p. 45.
A similar trend has been found for other developed countries; see Effland, ‘Rural does not
equal agriculture’, for the United States.
31
9
demise of traditional economies are not too different from the space-time patterns of
industrialization in the European regions and countries. It is thus normal to find much
earlier transformations in the Swiss Alps than in the Spanish uplands. This could even
suggest that marginal areas have a common history once we control for time lags.
However, a substantial part of the history was not common at all.
Table 2. National features when peasant share fell below 50 per cent in the uplands
Upland region
Swiss Alps
French Alps
Italian Alps
Massif Central
Spanish Pyrenees
Appenines
Cordillera Cantábrica
Spanish interior ranges
Cordillera Bética
Country
Year a
Switzerland
France
Italy
France
Spain
Italy
Spain
Spain
Spain
1888
1946
1951
1970
1970
1971
1981
1981
1991
GDP per
Agrarian
Occupational
inhabitant b employment
gap c
(%)
2,817
3,819
3,658
11,558
7,291
9,598
9,424
9,424
12,410
42
36
42
16
25
16
15
15
11
–7
–10
3
–30
–20
–20
–27
–26
–28
Notes: a First census year in which peasant share was below 50 per cent in the uplands
b Geary-Khamis 1990 dollars
c Difference in percentage shares of non-agrarian employment –uplands vs. national average.
Sources: Maddison, Monitoring the world economy; Mitchell, International Historical Statistics;
Collantes, ‘Marginal peasant communities’.
Table 2 reports some country-level features when peasant share in marginal
regions fell below 50 per cent for the first time. Data show that early rural
transformations, such as those in the Alps, took place at levels of national GDP per
inhabitant that were substantially lower than those required for late rural
transformations, such as the ones in the Massif Central, the Apennines and the Spanish
uplands. This fits Crafts’ finding that late industrializers had comparatively high shares
of labour force in agriculture at fixed levels of GDP per inhabitant.32 There are also
revealing contrasts if we compare the occupational gaps between uplands and national
averages. It is true that occupational change in the Swiss and French Alps was a lagged
one if compared to Swiss and French averages. But gaps were not higher than 10 per
cent by the time peasant share in the Alps was falling below 50 per cent. It seems that
gaps did not even exist in the case of the Italian Alps at that point in evolution. On the
32
Crafts, ‘Patterns of development’, pp. 446-7.
10
contrary, occupational gaps reached 20-30 per cent in the other, non-Alpine cases. Let
us take the extreme case of Cordillera Bética in Spain –by the time peasant share fell
below 50 per cent for the first time (as late as in 1990), Spain was already a country in
which the share of agriculture in employment was only 8 per cent. Big occupational
gaps can also be found for other mountains in southern Europe and for the Massif
Central and suggest that income gaps between uplands and their reference economic
environment were probably higher in these cases than in the case of the Alps. Crafts’
estimation of higher sectorial productivity gaps in late industrializers makes it very
plausible that income gaps were in southern Europe even higher than suggested by such
occupational gaps.33
Graph 1. Occupational gap and national GDP per inhabitant when peasant share
fell below 50 per cent
5
Italian Alps
Occupational gap:
uplands vs. national average
0
-5
Swiss Alps
French Alps
-10
-15
Spanish Pyrenees
-20
Appenines
Cordillera
Cantábrica /
Spanish interior
ranges
-25
-30
Cordillera Bética
Massif Central
-35
0
2000
4000
6000
8000
10000
12000
14000
GDP per inhabitant
To sum up, remarkable differences in national features at analogous moments in
rural evolution suggest that the history of such an evolution was not common to all
marginal areas, even if some of the outcomes eventually were. We can mark out at least
two different paths to rural modernity: an Alpine path featuring early change and small
disparity as compared to national references, and a Mediterranean path featuring
33
Crafts, ‘Patterns’, pp. 445-6.
11
opposite characteristics (graph 1). Sections III and IV deal with each of these two paths
and find additional, substantial contrasts.
III
By the end of the Second World War, while Mediterranean uplands remained
basically peasant economies, evolution had already been going on for several decades in
the Alps. The most advanced part was the Swiss one, where change was already evident
in the late nineteenth century. Alpine cantons such as Appenzell and Glarus were at the
forefront of the country’s first industrialization wave. These were the only marginal
areas in the sample that managed to do so, and their rise took place in a setting still
characterized by a low average ratio of fixed to variable costs and a low participation of
increasing-returns sectors in the whole of the economy. Seven other cantons with lower
industrialization levels and lower degrees of branch concentration (as compared to
Appenzell’s and Glarus’s focus on textile manufacturing) were also part of the Swiss
Alps and Appenzell and Glarus were therefore not fully representative, but the whole of
the region went through an early transition towards rural modernity (table 3). By 1910,
peasant share was only 40 per cent and wage workers were already one half of the
active population. This early transformation resembles the one found by E. A. Wrigley
for the nineteenth-century English countryside, when growth in local demand by
increasingly specialized and prosperous farmers provided the incentives for the creation
of new firms in industry and services. In the Swiss Alps, increasing cattle specialization
and the absence of too acute distribution disparities in the peasant community favoured
the transmission of this type of effect. So did the existence of strongly developed
commercial networks, a consequence of the Alps’ strategic geographical position in the
early modern European economy.34
Wrigley, ‘Men on the land’; Pollard, Marginal Europe, p. 203; Biucchi, ‘Revolución
industrial’, p. 280.
34
12
Table 3.
The transformation of the Swiss Alps
Swiss Alps
Non-agrarian employment (%)
1870
46
1910
60
1950
73
1970
88
1990
95
Wage workers (%)
1888
45
1910
50
1950
64
1970
79
1990
83
Mean number of homes per residental building
1860
1.38
1888
1.38
1910
1.46
1950
1.57
1970
1.84
1990
2.09
Population change (annual per cent rate)
1850-1900
0.4
1900-1950
0.5
1950-1990
0.9
Swiss average
Gap a
57
73
84
92
96
–11
–13
–11
–4
–1
57
63
75
85
86
–12
–13
–11
–6
–3
1.52
1.59
1.76
1.95
2.41
2.60
–9
–14
–17
–20
–24
–20
0.7
0.7
0.9
Note: a Non-agrarian employment and wage workers: difference between percentage shares; number of
homes per residential building: percentage gap between mean values.
Sources: Statistichen Bureau, Eidgenössische; Eidgenössisches Statistisches Amt, Eidgenössische... 1960;
ibid., Eidgenössische... 1970; Bundesamt für Statistik, Eidgenössische... 1980; ibid.,
Eidgenössische... 1990; Office Féderal de la Statistique, Eidgenössische.
Hydroelectric and tourism potentialities were developed during the twentieth
century. Tourism was probably more relevant in terms of employment, both direct and
indirectly created. British demand had already stimulated capital inflows for tourism in
the nineteenth century, but Swiss demand constraints were still too restrictive. It has
been estimated that the average Swiss family had in 1921 no more than 6 per cent of
income available for leisure activities. By 1971 this percentage had risen to more than
20 per cent and new, bigger tourism firms had definitively consolidated the evolution of
the Swiss Alps.35 Alongside employment firms and wage-based individual economic
strategies, the Swiss Alps converged in terms of settlement patterns as remote villages
were gradually left behind and population tended to concentrate in small towns located
Data taken from Fritzsche, ‘Switzerland’, p. 49. It is probable that holiday time increased as
well; see the argument by Weiss, ‘Tourism in America’, p. 320.
35
13
on the valley floors. The diminished significance of the traditional peasant residential
model can be told from the increase in the number of homes per residential building, a
variable that tends to one in situations of extreme rurality.36
The demise of traditional economy in the Alps was thus the result of increasing
availability of modern work opportunities inside of the region. Because such
opportunities were available not too late in comparison to the country’s leading regions,
depopulation did not play an important part as a mechanism for evolution. In fact, Swiss
Alpine population grew from 0.5 million in 1850 to more than 1.0 million in 1990 –
undoubtedly, a very positive population result for a marginal area in this period. Is this
representative of the Alpine path to rural modernity? Broadly yes, but some
qualifications are needed. Structural change was not so early in the French and Italian
Alps,
which
were
correspondingly
surrounded
by
not
so
early
national
industrializations. Partly because of this, industrial structure in the French and Italian
Alps was more dominated by capital goods production and employment firms whose
origins were urban-rural capital flows. The exploitation of hydroelectric potential
created incentives for new employment firms to arrive. Such new firms usually
belonged to energy-intensive sectors such as chemical industry and metalworking.
However, if the demise of traditional economies could be said to be under way during
the inter-war period, peasant migration had also had to do with that. Population in the
French Alps decreased all along the century between circa 1850 and 1950.
Depopulation took place before the Second World War in the western Italian Alps too.
In short, the French and the western Italian Alps were not as successful as the Swiss
Alps in creating internal migration basins.
However, the incorporation of the period after 1945 gives way to a more
homogeneous long-run Alpine path to rural modernity. Industrial growth went on in the
French and Italian Alps in the decades following the Second World War. At least in the
Italian case, it seems clear that location favoured the geographical spread of growth
following congestion peaks in the country’s main industrial poles due to higher prices
Tissot, Naissance d’une industrie touristique; Heiss, ‘Saisons sans fin?’; Mathieu, ‘Mountains
in urban development’; Elsasser and Leibundgut, ‘Contribution d’activités touristiques’, pp. 259-60;
Billet and Rougier, ‘Évolution récente’, pp. 9, 14-19; Brondel, ‘Fuentes de energía’, pp. 278-9, 292;
Gaudard, ‘Chances et les risques’, pp. 53-6. See some parallelisms with the Austrian and German Alps in
Herbin and Remmer, ‘Évolution démographique’, pp. 24-25, 31-33, 40; and Good, ‘Uneven
development’. On the historical uses of building evidence, see Barnwell, ‘Extra dimension?’.
36
14
for non-tradeable factors.37 The Italian Alps were thus able to do what economic
geographers call to ‘borrow size’ from the leading agglomerations.38 From the 1970’s
onwards, many of these Alpine industrial firms went into generic manufacturing trouble
(not only in the Italian part, but also in the French and Swiss ones), but tourism boom
was by then the new major force driving evolution. Living standards substantially
improved in France, Italy and Western Europe as a whole during the 1950-1973 golden
age of growth, which created the demand conditions for the development of mass
tourism in the mountains. In its turn, mass tourism established linkages with other
service branches (such as retailing) and with building activity as a consequence of the
proliferation of second homes and post-industrial residential patterns. This was also the
time when demographic indicators ceased to decline. French Alpine population, for
instance, grew faster than the national average during the second half of the twentieth
century. Positive migration balances (appearing for the first time in centuries) were
responsible for this.39
To sum up, there was an Alpine path to rural modernity if we take a long-run
approach with a sufficiently wide geographical coverage. Early availability of work
opportunities in employment firms led to an early evolution of occupational structure
and labour organization patterns. Settlement patterns moved away from extremely rural
versions as well. Institutional selection processes unfolded inside of the Alps and
therefore depopulation was not very important as a mechanism for evolution. Rather
than that, it was limited to very specific time and space coordinates. However, this was
not a common story in marginal Europe, and not only because of chronological
contrasts.
See Ottaviano and Puga, ‘Agglomeration in the global economy’, pp. 719-24, for a theoretical
presentation.
38
Phelps et al., ‘Small firms’, pp. 614-6.
39
Reboud, ‘Région franco-italienne’, pp. 675-6, 685-8; Vincent, ‘Political economy’, pp. 251,
257-8; Thorez and Reparaz, ‘Population et le peuplement’, pp. 102-8; Meyzenq, ‘Population des Alpes du
Sud’, pp. 41-44, 51; Estienne, ‘Évolution de la population’, pp. 395-405; Rebours, ‘Versants aménagés’,
pp. 34-5; Merlo, ‘Agricoltura e integrazioni economiche’, p. 50; Giusti, ‘Dépeuplement des régions
montagneuses’, pp. 308-11; Negri, ‘Montagnes de Lombardie’, pp. 65-70, 75-6; Freschi, ‘Politique
d’aménagement’, pp. 34;-5, 46 Diry, ‘Moyennes montagnes’, pp. 23-24; Rosenberg, Mondo negoziato,
pp. 180-1, 189-94; Cafagna, ‘Revolución industrial’, p. 321; Mazzoleni and Negri, ‘Situación de la
montaña’, p. 28; Perini, ‘Fattori economici’, p. 332; Leibundgut, ‘Promoción del territorio montañoso’, p.
41; Dorfmann, ‘Régions de la montagne’, p. 21; Barruet et al., ‘Politique de la montagne’, p. 331;
Lecomte, ‘Tourisme de la neige’, pp. 12-4, 21; Barbier et al., ‘Tourisme dans une haute vallée’, pp. 3, 7,
10, 17; Mallet, ‘Agriculture et tourisme’, pp. 126-7; Richez, ‘Renovation rurale’, pp. 54-7, 63, 77-8;
Durbiano et al., ‘Transformations contemporaines’, pp. 121-2; Moustier, ‘Tourisme rural’, pp. 17-8.
There are some similarities between this trajectory and the one in the Scottish Highlands; see Gray,
‘Highland potato famine’; Devine, ‘Temporary migration’; Bryden, ‘Appraising a regional development
programme’; and Slee et al., ‘Economic impact’.
37
15
IV
By the end of the Second World War, the Mediterranean uplands remained
basically peasant economies. Of course, the Apennines, the Spanish uplands and the
Massif Central (which is included here following arguments in section II), all had gone
through changes for several decades before that, as a consequence of the start of
industrialization in their reference economic environments. At least since the midnineteenth century, peasant families had received a set of economic signs that favoured
a trend towards farm specialization. This was so both because of the rising prices and
expanding markets for high income-elasticity agricultural products and because of the
gradual loss of commercial viability of some of their traditional off-farm,
complementary activities. But that was all –lagged and slow industrialization in the
Mediterranean periphery restricted the magnitude of the capital inflows and labour
outflows capable to activate the demise of the peasant economy (and its adaptive family
units) and the selection of a modern rural economy (and its employment firms).
The Spanish Pyrenees were probably the closest region in southern marginal
Europe to seriously go through such a process before 1945. Hydroelectric potential was
very high for Spanish standards and this led to remarkable capital inflows and some
linkages towards energy-intensive manufacturing sectors. Moreover, proximity to
Spain’s two main industrial poles (Barcelona’s industrial district and the Basque
Country) led to an early transmission of demographic backwash effects and production
spread effects. In fact, population in the Spanish Pyrenees decreased during the second
half of the nineteenth century. However, industrial spurts remained very concentrated in
space and peasant communities remained prevailing by 1945 if we consider the region
as a whole. A similar argument could be raised for the Massif Central, the Apennines or
the Cordillera Cantábrica in northern Spain.
Trends toward phylogenetic change were even less noticeable in the uplands in
southern Spain and southern Italy. These areas were not greatly endowed with strategic
resources and were surrounded by extremely backward economic environments that
were not able to provide many chances of ‘borrowing size’ –income per caput in
southern Italy fell from 87 per cent of national average in 1871 to 53 in 1951, and
southern Spain was not in a much better position.40 Furthermore, high distance to
40
Esposto, ‘Estimating regional per capita income’, p. 596; Domínguez, Riqueza de las regiones,
p. 368.
16
northern industrial poles and massive illiteracy (literacy rates remained in the Cordillera
Bética below 25 per cent as late as by 1920) prevented peasant migration from
becoming more intense. In combination with mortality decline, the result was
population growth comparable to that of the Swiss Alps, but based on much weaker
economic structures.41
Table 4.
The transformation of the Spanish uplands
Spanish uplands
Non-agrarian employment (%)
1887
15
1950
18
1981
59
1991
72
Wage workers (%)
1981
54
1991
62
Mean number of dwellings per residential building
1900
1.13
1970
1.18
1991
1.33
Population change (annual per cent rate)
1850-1900
0.0
1900-1950
0.2
1950-1991
–1.2
Spanish average
Gap a
31
52
85
89
–16
–34
–26
–17
74
77
–20
–15
1.35
1.84
2.24
–17
–36
–40
0.4
0.8
0.8
Note:
a Non-agrarian employment and wage workers: difference between percentage shares; number of
dwellings per residential building: percentage gap between mean values.
Sources: Collantes, Declive demográfico; Dirección General del Instituto Geográfico y Estadístico,
Nomenclátor.
Yet, emergence of modern rural economies was a very fast process in the
Mediterranean uplands once it got started (table 4). The Swiss Alps needed eight
decades (between 1870 and 1950) to see their peasant share decrease from 54 to 27 per
cent. The Spanish uplands witnessed the fall from 75 to 25 per cent in hardly three or
four decades (from 1950/60 to 1990). A similar pattern can be found after comparing
the evolution of wage workers as a percentage of total active population. By 1975,
change was also consolidated in the Apennines and the Massif Central. However, the
mechanisms leading to the demise of peasant economies were different to the ones in
the Alpine path. Genuine, productive changes took place, but migration was a crucial
41
Tino, ‘Montagna meridionale’, p. 706; Collantes, Declive demográfico, ch. 3.
17
mechanism, as estimations for the Apennines and the Spanish uplands show.42 In the
1960’s, while growth gathered spectacular momentum in the Italian and Spanish
economies as a whole, depopulation took place in the Apennines and the Spanish
uplands at annual rates of 1.2 and 1.8 per cent respectively, which meant three and four
times the depopulation rates in the French Alps (the Alpine area with the worst
population results) during the nineteenth century. In extreme cases, such as the interior
ranges in Spain, depopulation took place at 3.0 per cent rates for the 1960’s and nearly
2.0 for the 1950-1991 period as a whole, during which population fell from nearly
600,000 to little more than 300,000.43 Depopulation was also an important part of the
story in the Massif Central even before 1945, given its secular position at the bottom of
regional income rankings in France.44
Therefore, Mediterranean uplands went through a non-Kuznetsian variant of
structural change that could be labelled as ‘degenerate’ –per caput indicators and
percentages converged towards national references, but the size of rural economy
greatly diminished.45 In the terms used by Eric Jones, indications of intensive growth
corresponded in fact to failure to achieve even extensive growth. 46 Why did the
Mediterranean uplands not follow the Alpine path to rural modernity? In the first place,
because geographical endowment was not good enough. Mediterranean mountains
include a larger share of middle-height mountains, and humidity indexes are lower than
those in the Alps. Furthermore, strategic resources for energy industry are not abundant.
These elements are particularly clear for the case of the Spanish interior uplands, the
Cordillera Bética and the southern Apennines. Geography handicapped the chances of
southern marginal Europe to successfully compete with other marginal areas for
external capitals looking for investment opportunities in industry and services.
See Collantes, ‘Marginal peasant communities’.
Depopulation figures are even higher for several districts in the region; see Collantes and
Pinilla, ‘Extreme depopulation’.
44
Pollard, Marginal Europe, p. 52; Bazin, ‘Intégration marchande’, pp. 71-2; Söderberg,
‘Regional economic disparity’, pp. 278-80; Désert, ‘Vers le surpeuplement?’, p. 69; Rieutort, ‘Moyennes
montagnes’, pp. 67-8; Massullo, ‘Mobilità territoriale’, p. 151; McNeill, Mountains, pp. 181, 186. A
similar pattern can be found in the Portuguese and Greek uplands; see Castro and Belo, ‘Perspective pour
les agriculteurs’, p. 120; and McNeill, Mountains, pp. 172-5.
45
See Hodgson, ‘Institutional rigidities’, p. 88, on ‘degenerate’ economic change. Kuznets,
Modern economic growth, ch.1, stresses that population increase is a necessary component of modern
economic growth. Hunt, ‘Industrialization and regional inequality’, reports similarly ‘degenerated’
patterns for the Scottish Highlands during demographic decline in the nineteenth century.
46
Jones, Growth recurring.
42
43
18
Hydroelectric potential was not very high, and many of the basic conditions for mass
tourism (such as abundant snow and steep slopes) were lacking.47
Table 5. Upland vs.national average gaps in items related to living standards
during the second half of the twentieth century
Item
Gap (%)
Switzerland
Income per head
1970
1990
Access to retail services a
c. 1960
1975
1990
Access to financial services b
c. 1960
1990
Road availability c
c. 1960
c. 2000
Spain
–14
–16
–29
–14
–24
–28
–25
–57
–61
–72
–3
–10
–52
–54
–45
–33
–54
–58
Notes: a Composite index of retail firms per head and retail firms per square kilometre.
b Composite index of banking offices per head and banking offices per square kilometre.
c Road metres per square kilometre. Only national and cantonal/regional roads considered.
Sources: Eidgenössischen Statistischen Amt, Statistisches Jahrbuch, p. 444; ibid., IV. Eidgenössische;
ibid., Eidgenössische Betriebszählung; Bundesamt für Statistik, Statistisches Jahrbuch, p. 4;
ibid., Betriebszählung; ibid., Kantone und Städte, p. 203; Collantes, Declive demográfico.
But geography was not it all –historical context should be taken into account as
well. Echoing Alexander Gerschenkron, relative backwardness in the Mediterranean
countries had some specific consequences. Because it restricted the magnitude of capital
inflows and labour outflows capable of leading to the demise of peasant economies,
economic backwardness made a contribution to rural transformation taking place almost
entirely during the second half of the twentieth century, a more problematic phase for
rural change than the 1850-1950 during which Alpine transformation started and
reached an advanced point. During the 1950-1973 phase, Mediterranean upland
communities were exposed to national growth rates above 5.0 per cent, which was five
times the growth rates in Swizterland, France or Italy when Alpine transformation
started. This created a demographic backwash effect much more powerful than in the
Mazzoleni and Negri, ‘Situación de la montaña’, pp. 28-30; Merlo, ‘Agricoltura’, p. 52-3;
Diry, ‘Moyennes montagnes’, p. 19.
47
19
case of the Alps. Furthermore, several other items related to living standards reveal
greater relative gaps for the Mediterranean uplands than for the Alps during the second
half of the twentieth century (table 5).48 Of course, this must be added to the
occupational gaps examined in section II and their very probable consequences in terms
of income gaps.
The Mediterranean path to rural modernity was therefore more dismal and
probably entailed higher social costs. Rural depopulation was a costly mechanism not
only in terms of the migration costs borne by peasants. More importantly, costs included
destructuring of rural society and distorsions in demographic structures. As table 6
shows, demographic structures diverged significantly in the cases of the Swiss Alps and
the Spanish uplands. Whereas population in the Swiss Alps, a genuinely diversified and
steadily growing region, had a standard composition in terms of age and sex in the late
twentieth century, Spanish upland population was remarkably aged and showed high
male-female ratios for the unmarried. This was due to the selective character of
migration –it was mainly adults and young people, as well as women that migrated. 49
Ageing and sex unbalance led to negative rates of natural variation and thus feedbacked
the problem of depopulation. In the 1990’s, negative rates of natural variation accounted
in fact for 80 per cent of depopulation, four times the contribution by migration. But,
above all, ageing and sex unbalance restricted the opportunities for future rural
development. Do aged populations have less ‘ability to deal with disequilibria’, as
quoted from Theodor Schultz, and less ability to create disequilibria, as Schumpeter
would have approached to it?50 A negative answer seems counter-intuitive.51 Actually,
analysis about the effects of the LEADER Initiative on different European regions show
an inverse connection between the level of social destructuring in the countryside and
the degree of success of the programme. Therefore, rural development in the twentyfirst century seems to be linked to the path-dependent sequence generated during
industrialization. History matters, and this is not good news for the Mediterranean
uplands.
48
Pollard, Marginal Europe, p. 84, argues that the analytical relevance of rural shortcomings
when it comes to place-related facilities belongs quite specifically to the twentieth century.
49
A detailed analysis of rural-urban migration and the role of gender in inter-war England can be
found in Todd, ‘Young women’; see also Danbom, ‘Rural girls’ for related issues.
50
Schultz, ‘Value of the Ability’.
51
See for instance Maddox, ‘Private and social costs’, pp. 396-400.
20
Table 6.
The evolution of demographic structures
Population over 64 /
Population under 15
1887
1980
1990
Male-female ratio
(unmarried population)
1887
1980
1990
Swiss Alps
Swiss average
0.20
0.18
0.63
0.72
0.80
0.85
0.96
1.00
1.08
1.08
1.11
1.12
Spanish uplands
Spanish average
0.14
0.14
0.73
0.41
1.15
0.47
0.99
1.03
1.34
1.08
1.40
1.10
Sources: Eidgenössisches Statistisches Amt, Eidgenössische... 1970; Bundesamt für Statistik,
Eidgenössische... 1980; Collantes, Declive demográfico.
V
What happened in marginal Europe after 1850? Marginality tended to get
reinforced as a consequence of both the increasing burden of geography and the
direction of institutional change at state levels. Geography hampered the chances of
moving towards agricultural intensification as fast as the lowlands and restricted upland
communities’ growth potential for both Smithian-type growth (based on deeper
divisions of labour) and the type of growth depicted by new economic geography
models (based on increasing returns and agglomeration). Liberal revolutions and
reforms in European states tended to cancel a traditional growth source during the early
modern period –margins’ greater institutional flexibility. An indicator of increasing
economic marginality is the decreasing share of upland communities in total population
in Switzerland, France, Italy and Spain, the four countries selected for this study.
Another indicator is the lagged pattern of change shown by these communities in terms
of occupational and settlement structures.
Increasing marginality, however, does not imply absence of evolution. Speed
and chronology change, but upland communities in the four countries witnessed the
demise of traditional economies. These were originally peasant communities whose
basic cells were adaptive family economies that combined the results from a small farm
(in which only a very small fraction of labour was wage labour) with off-farm,
complementary income sources. By the end of the twentieth century, rural firm structure
was dominated by employment firms in industry and services, and complex family
21
strategies involving multi-activity had been replaced by more individual and specialized
strategies as market replaced family as the main institution for labour allocation.
Alongside convergence with the usual patterns in industrial societies when it comes to
firm structure and labour organization, extremely rural settlements were left behind and
upland population tended to concentrate in small towns on the valley floors. Variety
became thus the fuel of evolution.52 Scholars such as Hodgson have argued that
capitalism is an increasingly complex system, but the case study here presented suggests
that increasing complexity may be a net result that does not exclude the presence of
specific evolutionary sequences leading to greater degrees of structural homogeneity in
certain ontological domains.53 The demise of peasant economies and emergence of
modern rural economies was one of such sequences and it was activated by changes
brought about by industrialization in the economic environment of upland communities.
The article has also provided a specific exploration in the mechanisms of
evolution. In contrast to scholars stressing political events and decissions as the engine
of rural evolution, the article has highlighted the role of evolving economic structures.
This does not mean that politics did not matter –it means that the role of politics may be
analysed in relation to its capacity to shape the relevant economic structures rather than
as an external, non-economic element exerting an unmediated, top-bottom impact on
long-run social change. For instance, political structures seem to have greatly influenced
at least one relevant element in the argument here, namely urbanization patterns.54
Further research may clarify the precise links between political structures and the spacetime patterns of backwash and spread effects felt by upland communities during
industrialization. By now this article has just argued that Chayanov’s theoretical
discussion about the demise of peasant families and selection of employment firms as a
result of changes in the economic variables shared by both institutions missed the point
that living standards were among the latter. Evolution in marginal Europe was in fact
mainly driven by the capacity of employment firms to provide living standards higher
than those usual in peasant families.
Yet, probably because not all European industrializations were similar, as
Gerschenkron argued first and Crafts re-elaborated later, there was not one single path
towards rural modernity. At least two different paths have been found in this article for
52
Hodgson, Evolution and Institutions, p. 80.
Hodgson, ‘Capitalism, complexity’.
54
Mathieu, ‘Mountains in urban development’.
53
22
the Alps and the Mediterranean uplands, depending on relative weights of the different
mechanisms involved in evolution. Alpine transformation was clearly under way before
1945 and its initial stages took place in an environmental context of approximately
3,000 (1990) dollars of national GDP per inhabitant and occupational gaps below 10 per
cent between the uplands and the corresponding national averages. Gradual
consolidation of employment firms in industry and services led thus to a Kuznetsian
type of structural change.
The Mediterranean path towards rural modernity was more dismal. Southern
Europe’s economic backwardness restricted the magnitude of urban-rural capital flows,
a major force driving the emergence of employment firms in industry and services in the
Alps. Moreover, geography prevented these uplands from being able to follow the
Alpine path –these were mountains with much lower potential for hydroelectric industry
or mass tourism. Transformation of the Apennines, the Spanish uplands, or even the
Massif Central in France took place only in the second half of the twentieth century,
when reference countries had levels of GDP per inhabitant usually above 9,000 dollars
and much more diversified occupational structures. Occupational gaps of 20-30 per cent
suggest that uplands faced in the Mediterranean region considerable gaps in living
standards as compared to national averages. Income data and some other
complementary indicators seem to confirm such a conclusion, though additional, more
extensive comparative research is still needed on this topic. As a consequence of such
gaps, the mountains of the Mediterranean went through an acute demographic crisis
during the second half of the twentieth century. Because depopulation was mainly the
result of peasant migration, it worked as an evolution mechanism and helped to shape a
non-Kuznetsian path of ‘degenerate’ structural change. Social destructuring and ageing
were then the sad companions of rural modernity in marginal southern Europe.
Economic evolution by means of institutional selection was under such conditions
anything but Panglossian.
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