Rural electrification in Spain: territorial expansion and effects on the agricultural sector (c. 1900–c. 2000)
Metadata
Show full item recordAuthor
Garrues Irurzun, JoseanEditorial
Cambridge University Press
Date
2022-11-28Referencia bibliográfica
Garrués-Irurzun, J., & Iriarte-Goñi, I. (2022). Rural electrification in Spain: Territorial expansion and effects on the agricultural sector (c. 1900–c. 2000). Rural History, 1-19. doi:[10.1017/S0956793322000218]
Sponsorship
Spanish Government PGC2018-096640-B-I00Abstract
Rural electrification is closely linked one way or another to rural development, and enables the understanding
of the complexity of social and economic development paths. The objective of this work is to analyse
rural electrification in a European peripherical country like Spain throughout the twentieth century, contributing
to the international debate on the issue. The article studies the territorial expansion of electricity
in the Spanish countryside, tracing different phases and explaining the delay in the construction of a
national network. It also analyses the relationship that arose in the long term between electrification
and the evolution of the agricultural sector. The article concludes that, in the Spanish case, rural electrification
played a modest role in agricultural change until the 1980s and was, to a great extent, the consequence,
rather than the cause, of the modernisation of the sector to these years.