The Peasant Mode of Production in its Iberian Labyrinth: from the Fifth to the Eighth Century

This article proposes to interpret the impact that the use of the concept of the peasant mode of production, as theorised by Chris Wickham, has had on Iberian historical writing on the early Middle Ages. To that end, studies on different regions of the peninsula (from Galicia to Aragon, and from the Algarve to the Cantabrian zone), published by historians and archaeologists over the last few years, will be analysed in what follows. The objective of this article is to make sense of the historiographical dynamics underpinning a complex concept which has, with few exceptions, been employed more as a useful interpretative shortcut made necessary by the lack of empirical evidence, than as a research strategy in its own right, operative within the broader Marxist framework for which it was originally devised.