Lordships

This page provides a dataset about ancien-regime Spain collected for the paper “Delegating governmental authority to private actors: Lordships, state capacity and development” (forthcoming in Explorations in Economic History).

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The dataset includes institutional, demographic, and labor-occupational variables of all population entities covered by the Floridablanca Census of 1787 (INE). The data are provided aggregated by current municipalities. The dataset further includes a large array of climatic and geographic variables for Spain as well as additional institutional and historical variables.

Table	Content (variables)
Floridablanca 1787 Census	Jurisdictional status, historical regions (intendencias), locality category, total population, population in collective households, population classified by job occupation
Geographic and climatic dataset	Surface area, altitude, ruggedness, distance to the coast, distance to Madrid, distance to the provincial capital, distance to a major river, temperature, rainfall, soil quality, aridity, latitude, longitude
Additional institutional and historical data	Head of judicial district in 1834, Civil Guard Barrack in 1853, Post office in 1830, Post office in 1878, (Royal) Salt administration, Distance to Modern Era roads, Distance to pre-medieval settlements, Distance to Roman Roads

Please cite the data as: Oto-Peralías, Daniel (2025). “Delegating governmental authority to private actors: Lordships, state capacity and development”. Explorations in Economic History, forthcoming. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.eeh.2025.101737