.
* Equipo Madrid de estudios históricos. Universidad autónoma de Madrid.
1 Advertencias para el exercicio de la plaza de alcalde de casa y corte, según están en un libro antiguo de la Sala, que es el que cita el señor Matheu, por anotaciones del señor Elezárraga, con las notas marginales con que se halla hasta el presente año de 1745. Capítulo 35. Archivo histórico nacional (hereafter A. H. N.), Consejos, libro 1.420.
2 For their evolution, see P. Clark y B. Lepetit (ed.), Capital cities and their Hinterlands in early modern Europe, Aldershot, 1996.
3 See W. Kula, Recherches comparatives sur la formation de la classe ouvrière,
in Second ICEM, Paris-The Hague, 1960, p. 510-523. For the crucial role of migration in the growth of preindustrial cities, see J. De Vries, La urbanización europea, 1500-1800, Barcelona, 1987, p. 258-322 and J. M. López García, Las ciudades europeas en la transición al capitalismo : ¿ urbanización o urbanizaciones ?, in Historia urbana, 2, 1993, p. 71-83, p. 72.
ÁNGEL ALLOZA APARICIO, JOSÉ MIGUEL LÓPEZ GARCÍA ET JOSÉ LUIS DE PABLO GAFAS*
PREVENTION AND REPRESSION : FOOD SUPPLY AND PUBLIC ORDER IN EARLY MODERN MADRID
Magistrates should be most concerned about and take measures regarding bread shortages. These are frequent in the winter periods of rain and snow, and especially pronounced in the months of April, May and June during years of poor harvests. To remedy this magistrates and constables are assigned to the entire area of Madrid... 1.
The demographical expansion which affected early modern European capital cities became a permanent source of worry for their authorities. Thanks to this constant population growth, interrupted only in a few cases during the seventeenth century crisis, capital cities were transformed into the principal markets of Western Europe at the end of the Ancien Régime2. The origin of the expansion of these cities was linked to the presence of the central apparatus of absolutist states; the engine of growth itself was based upon the migration of huge numbers of starving peasants from the countryside3. Until the early decades of the eighteenth century, the existing supply of manpower in these cities could absorb a large part of the newcomers.
