ABSTRACT
It is the central theme of this book that the Spanish Civil War was not one but many wars. The contention underlying this chapter is that the agrarian conflict which had been endemic for centuries and which became chronic during the Second Republic should be seen as the most crucial of those several component confrontations within the civil war which broke out in 1936. This is not to dismiss other areas of conflict between Catholics and anti-clericals, regionalists and centralists, especially military ones, or between industrial workers and employers. Even less does it imply that the complex interactions between religion, ideology and economic interest which are discussed in other chapters can be reduced to one single motive force. Clearly, Navarrese Carlists or Basque Nationalists were impelled to take up the positions that they did by causes other than the social antagonisms of Andalusia and Extremadura. However, no single area of social or ideological confrontation during the 1930s matched in scope or impact the agrarian problem.
