Hunting in the 18th century:: Class society, regulatory mentality

Despite its innovative claims, the social policy of the Spanish Enlightenment was substantially a sequel to the mental attitudes of the previous centuries, as regulatios regarding hunting and fishing practices reveal. These laws tended, on the one hand, to control firmly a traditional activity, and, on the other hand, aimed at homogenizing this practice in the whole territories of the monarchy and limit its extent to the aristocracy. Thus, a mere episode becomes a further step taken by absolutism in order to shape a strongly directed class society. Besides, hunting and fishing regulations became an ideological output aiming at the defence of class society and aristocratic consciousness.