IberLAND’s PI Manuel Bastias Saavedra co-organized with Rosa Congost and Gérard Béaur the panels ‘Property rights and social groups in context: overcoming the individual-commons dichotomy’ I & II, which took place on September 11th, 2023 in Cluj-Napoca for the Sixth Biennial Conference of the Rural History Organisation.
In Panel I, Manuel Bastias Saavedra presented the paper ‘Beyond Private and Common. Ownership Regimes in the Iberian World (1500-1850)’ whereas PhD Researcher Alina Rodríguez Sánchez presented the paper titled ‘“Never before sowed, plowed or cultivated:” Connections between land uses and possession in early modern Spanish America.’ Both panels, including all papers, were commented and discussed by José Miguel Lana. The presentations on both panels pinpointed the engrained analytical frameworks in historiography which tend to oversimplify or assume without further questioning the categories of communal and individual property, by ignoring all the different variables involved in access to land, such as type of land, group adscription, local political rivalries. Through the presentations on specific, local cases, as well as broader reflections on method, there was a consensus on the need to highlight more categories of analysis, whether use, class, or status.
We appreciate the audience’s engagement, as well as the contributions of our fellow panelists William Renström and Manuel Rios.
