Conflictividad rural en el monte comunal gerundense: pueblos y mansos ante el Estado interventor en la segunda mitad del siglo XIX

This paper presents a summary of the conflicts arising from the intervention of the Liberal State upon the commons in the northeast Catalonian villages (sales of common property and central administrative management over remaining ones). The paper starts with the assumption that there is no contradiction between internal differentiation of rural communities and the common interest in protecting collective properly. Facing the threat of overload carring capacity and increasing unequal access lo natural resources, one interesting outcome of the struggle in the highlands between villages and forests engineers (agents of the central governing administration) was the introduction of protective rules for community inhabitants (for example, preferential prices for them in the grazing auction sales) aiming a slow adaptation to the at expanding market system In the lowlands fight was between scarce "public woods" and the dominant private forests. We support the hypothesis that grazing and forest were integrated into the scattered country houses (mansus); this would explain the individualistic use of woodland in the low/ands before the Liberal period.