"Concealing large amounts of consideration": population and wealth in Madoz’s dictionary. The case of Burgos (1845-1850)

Abstract

Pascual Madoz’s famous geographical dictionary is a monumental work of over eleven thousand pages in which the population and wealth of the different localities referenced are consistently under-reported. Madoz himself was acutely aware of the problem, which had its origins in a combination of unreliable sources (such as the 1842 Matrícula Catastral) and intentional misrepresentation by many of his local informants, and consequently offered alternative figures for some localities. Despite all this, the issue has never been specifically addressed by Spanish historiography, and these errors have been reproduced uncritically since the date of publication. Using the province of Burgos as our reference point, and contrasting Madoz’s figures with those gleaned from more reliable sources, in this paper we attempt to illustrate and quantify the outrageous scale of under-reporting.