Rural Change and Royal Finances in Spain at the End of the Old Regime by Richard Herr offers a comprehensive examination of the social, economic, and political transformations that reshaped Spain’s countryside in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Through a meticulous study of the disentailment (desamortización) of ecclesiastical and communal properties under Carlos IV, Herr demonstrates how the monarchy’s fiscal crisis intersected with agrarian reform, bringing long-entrenched property regimes into upheaval. Drawing on parish records, cadastral surveys, and local archives, the book reconstructs the lived realities of rural communities, showing how demographic pressures, rising grain prices, and state interventions shaped agricultural practice, land tenure, and peasant livelihoods.

Herr situates Spain’s experience within broader European debates on enlightened reform, tracing the intellectual legacy of figures such as Campomanes and Jovellanos while analyzing the political fragility of the Bourbon monarchy on the eve of Napoleonic invasion. The study balances close portraits of individual towns in provinces like Jaén and Salamanca with wide-ranging assessments of national policy, revealing both the promise and limits of agrarian modernization. At once a fiscal history, a study of rural society, and a meditation on the fate of enlightened absolutism, the book illuminates how conflicts over land, taxation, and subsistence foreshadowed Spain’s nineteenth-century struggles with liberalism, conservatism, and uneven economic development.

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1989.