Cáñamo gentil. Una indagación sobre los condicionantes del cambio técnico en la agricultura

Abstract

Thanks to hemp, farming in certain Spanish enclaves was very dynamic in the late 18th century. As well as giving rise to intensified relationships among its cultivators and the market, this textile plant required abundant cultural work and large-scale use of fertilisers, allowed the traditional rotations to be improved and its presence gave rise to increased yields of wheat and the other crops that followed it. When the crisis set in from the 1870s onwards, some of the production areas replaced it slowly, being apparently unable to keep up the dynamism it had displayed before and went on giving their best irrigated land over to a "ruinous" product that prolonged their agony thanks to tariffs. Using the case of hemp as a source of data from which to draw new conclusions and make new judgements, in this paper we deal with issues such as the environmental factors conditioning agrarian change, the relation between farming methods and agricultural dynamism, the effects of tariffs on productive reorientation, or the stimuli and obstacles playing a role in the expansion of mechanisation.