Vine-growing in Catalonia: the main agricultural change underlying the earliest industrialization in Mediterranean Europe (1720-1939)

Abstract

We present a model of vine-growing specialization that explains the key agricultural change carried out before and throughout the Catalan industrialization. The results confirm the role played by a Smithian market-pull force exerted from the Atlantic demand, together with the Boserupian population-push on land-use intensification. They jointly put in motion a process of opening and closing of an inner frontier of vineyard planting, whose local impact was conditioned by the agro-ecological endowments as well as to the different levels and trends of income inequality. Vineyard planting gave rise to less inequality up to the 1820s, but it grew again afterwards.