“There’s also the issue of the large-scale internal migrations that have taken place in Spain over the past century and a half. The population of 2015 Madrid was not primarily descended from the people who lived in Madrid in 1860 or 1877, but as long as I exclude Madrid and maybe Catalonia - the two main destinations of Spanish internal migrations - I can confidently compare regions such as the Canary Islands or Galicia in the late 19th century with the same regions in 2015.”
I think a fair comparison is still not really possible given Murcia, Extremadura and Andalucia sent a lot of people to other regions either brain-draining them or more fairly also send their least desirable members to Cataluña and Madrid which would have maybe seen a lowering given this (but you exclude them already).
You are right about Madrid and Catalonia. Comparisons against their 21st-century populations are tricky, and in the case of Madrid maybe I should have simply excluded it from every map (I didn't include it when calculating the correlations).
I don't think the brain-drain or least-desirable shares of the Andalusian/Murcian migrant population were big. Most Southerners were attracted by industrial work during the great wave of migration (maybe not after the 1980s), and found that kind of work in Madrid and Barcelona mainly. It's not the kind of work that should have attracted many people from the aforementioned two groups.
“There’s also the issue of the large-scale internal migrations that have taken place in Spain over the past century and a half. The population of 2015 Madrid was not primarily descended from the people who lived in Madrid in 1860 or 1877, but as long as I exclude Madrid and maybe Catalonia - the two main destinations of Spanish internal migrations - I can confidently compare regions such as the Canary Islands or Galicia in the late 19th century with the same regions in 2015.”
I think a fair comparison is still not really possible given Murcia, Extremadura and Andalucia sent a lot of people to other regions either brain-draining them or more fairly also send their least desirable members to Cataluña and Madrid which would have maybe seen a lowering given this (but you exclude them already).
You are right about Madrid and Catalonia. Comparisons against their 21st-century populations are tricky, and in the case of Madrid maybe I should have simply excluded it from every map (I didn't include it when calculating the correlations).
I don't think the brain-drain or least-desirable shares of the Andalusian/Murcian migrant population were big. Most Southerners were attracted by industrial work during the great wave of migration (maybe not after the 1980s), and found that kind of work in Madrid and Barcelona mainly. It's not the kind of work that should have attracted many people from the aforementioned two groups.