IMC 2011: Sessions
Session 821: Managing Common Wealth: Redistributing Resources and Engineering Class-Aggregating Practices in 15th-Century Urban Castile
Tuesday 12 July 2011, 16.30-18.00
| Sponsor: | Facultad de Ciencias de la Educación y Humanidades, Universidad de Castilla-La Mancha |
|---|---|
| Organiser: | José Antonio Jara Fuente, Facultad de Ciencias de la Educación y Humanidades, Universidad de Castilla-La Mancha |
| Moderator/Chair: | Manuela Santos Silva, Faculdade de Letras, Universidade de Lisboa |
| Paper 821-a | Slicing the Communal Pie?: Managing Urban Resources and Sharing Their Benefits - Financiers and Businessmen in Cuenca in the Late Middle Ages (Language: English) Index terms: Economics - Urban, Political Thought, Social History |
| Paper 821-b | The Wealth of Giving: Clientelism and Distribution of Resources in 15th-Century Valladolid (Language: English) Index terms: Economics - Urban, Political Thought, Social History |
| Paper 821-c | Seigneurial Taxation, Redistribution of Rents, and Political Power in Urban Castile: The Dominions of the Infante Fernando de Antequera and His Lineage, 1376-1435 (Language: English) Index terms: Economics - Urban, Political Thought, Social History |
| Abstract | Studies on the management of urban wealth in the Middle Ages have usually focused their attention on the self-interested socio-economic practices developed and implemented by the town's domination core. In order to exploit the urban economic subsystem in their own benefit, large areas of these subsystems would have been alienated from communal exploitation by these ruling elites. This view is specially shared among Iberian scholars. Nevertheless, and notwithstanding the general validity of this approach, underneath these practices lay much more than the simple and crude predation of communal resources. On the one hand, urban elites learnt to promote cooperative policies in order to peacefully benefit from their cities and towns' economic resources. These cooperative policies reduced conflict inside urban dominant classes by simply diminishing the extent and depth of intra-class competition. On the other hand, urban elites and especially their ruling segments learnt also to incorporate a more or less ample representation of the subjugated people to the profit of these resources; in this manner, class conflict was attenuated and social peace was enforced. Thus the aim of this session is to analyse these processes of 'urban common wealth inter-class cooperative management' in the Castilian urban world, especially considering three representative areas: a city linked to the royal court, Valladolid; a representative of the large towns to the south of the Duero, Cuenca; and an urban seigneurial area, the dominions of the infante Fernando de Antequera. |