Crisis de las solidaridades tradicionales y nuevas formas de asociación y resistencia campesina en la Cataluña Occidental (1750-1920)

This paper seeks to analyse peasant solidarities and their crisis at the end of the Ancien Régime. The `Cofradía de Labradores" [Brotherhood of Labourers], which represented nearly all the peasantry of Lleida in the 18th century- is used to analyse how they defended the common land and fought against tithes. These conflicts reveal how difficult it was for the yeomen of Lleida to obtain the necessary income to reproduce the family unit. We study pathways of the peasant and the landowner towards the social and economic development in relation to land distribution in the liberal land reform.Given the failure of the “peasant pathway”, we turn to the origin of the associationism, both the association initiated by the yeomen originally based on tithes to provide mutual and that focused on introducing improvements to techniques and production. As in the rest of Catalonia, , these experiments in the western plain area were more relevant in the crisis at the end of the 19th century and in the subsequent period.