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

Abstract

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.