ABSTRACT
Agrarian power in the modern period in Badajoz lay in a pattern of landownership that was strongly influenced by the sale of rural property resulting from a series of liberalization measures introduced by governments from the 1830s onwards. These encouraged land speculation by allowing a fully free market and disentailing church and municipal holdings. This commerce exacerbated an existing inequality in the distribution of land while shifting the concentration of ownership into new hands.2 More exact information about the narrow stratum of large landowners is available for the twentieth century from the cadastral survey begun in 1906 and completed, as far as southern Spain was concerned, by 1930. The picture was one in which just 1.74 per cent of all those who owned rural property-some 1,576 persons —possessed 61.94 per cent of total available land. Within the ranks of major
landowners, nobles continued to account for between a sixth and an eighth of the total, retaining many of the largest individual ownerships in the province. But the overwhelming beneficiaries of land transfers were persons of bourgeois origins, many of whom were attracted into ownership for the first time by the prestige and rising material value attached to land.3
