This book observes and analyses the ways of life and the social and economic strategies of the farmers from La Selva del Camp, in the Camp de Tarragona, in the 18th, 19th and 20th centuries. Throughout these centuries, the farmers and the agrarian economies in general were subject to a process of progressive
dependence on the market economy, which obliged them to create the mechanisms they needed to adapt to new situations. To ensure their social reproduction, farmers exploited the resources of their families and, in this way, forms of inheritance and marriage were strategically used to regulate the
continuity of the group and the family heritage of each generation. As the land, the work force and the work instruments become more sophisticated and become part of the market logic, farmers are obliged to seek new means, this time from outside the family environment, which enable them to continue with their economic activity and maintain their position as a social group that, even now, identifies the
Catalan agrarian society. The diversity of economic activity and borrowing have proved to be recurring strategies among farmers to get over the difficult times, both in the 18th century and now. Another external factor, consubstantial to current agrarian reality, is agrarian associationism, which arises in the last quarter of the 19th century in order to cope with a period of social and economic crisis. It proved not to be a solution and, in fact, has led to the current situation of a drastic reduction in the size of farms which are having increasingly greater difficulties in ensuring continuity.