Spain’s First Environmental Campaign: Free Market Liberalism Under Challenge

ABSTRACT

In February 1888, the workforce at the British-owned Rio Tinto mines went on strike seeking better wages and conditions. As part of their struggle, the miners joined an alliance of local landowners and communities to oppose the company’s open-air calcination operations. These threw vast quantities of poisonous sulphur dioxide into the atmosphere, severely damaging the health of workers and local communities. This paper suggests the strike, the first such environmental action in Spain, was an example of broad-based political resistance to the application of free market ideology to the process of industrialization. It builds on Karl Polanyi’s theory that the unconstrained operation of free markets in the fields of land, labour and finance, advocated by radical economic liberalism, results in existential threats to the social fabric of nations. This leads groups with widely different interests to unite and press for state intervention to curtail the freedom of markets, in the wider interest of society’s survival. The Rio Tinto strike which ended with the massacre of a defenceless crowd of protesters and strikers, provides a good example of Polanyi’s proposition, as well as illuminating a tragic and often over-looked event in the history of environmental studies.

KEYWORDS:

• Environment
• community campaigning
• Spain
• Rio Tinto
• neoliberalism

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. Some have argued the strike was the first environmental action in the world. However, there is evidence of a growing concern over the wider effects of production methods elsewhere. For example, in the same year, 1888, women workers at the Bryant and May factory in East London gained widespread community support in the so-called Matchgirls strike against low wages, arbitrary treatment and the dangerous effects of phosphorus on health (Beaver 1985).

2. There are a number of reactions (often partially completed) involved in the calcination and processing of copper pyrites, notably: 2FeCuS₂+3O₂→ 2FeO+2CuS+2SO₂: 2 Cu₂S+3 O₂ → 2 Cu₂O+2 SO_2; FeS + Cu₂S →FeO + Cu₂O; H₂O + SO₂→ H₂SO₄; H₂SO₄ + Cu₂S→CuSO₄; Fe + CuSO₄→Cu + FeSO₄.

3. Rio Tinto’s justification for its freedom to impose environmental costs on the surrounding communities centred on the 7, 400 jobs the company had created and its discretionary compensation scheme for damage to property. Its financial case was that the total value of the mines, railways, land and ore was over two hundred times greater than the total property value of the surrounding towns and countryside and that, as a result, the company paid seven times more taxes than the towns affected by the pollution (García and Pérez 2020, 4).

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Nick Sharman

Nick Sharman is a Research Fellow at the University of Nottingham where his subject is the economic and political relationship between Britain and Spain in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. He is currently researching the impact of British economic thinking on the development of liberalism in nineteenth century Spain. His recent publications include Britain’s Informal Empire in Spain, 1830-1950: Free Trade, Protectionism and Military Power (London: Palgrave Macmillan 2021) and ‘Liberal Protectionism in Nineteenth Century Spain: An Alternative Route to Economic Modernization’, Bulletin for Spanish and Portuguese Historical Studies (December 2022)