Rural History in Europe

This book unravels how the agricultural sector and the rural world in Europe became more and more organised within capitalism in the years 1870-1940 and this with the aim of tackling the important challenges of the time. The focus is not so much on the myriad of individual farmers’ actions but on the collective efforts undertaken through the interplay between the state and the agricultural civil society.

A wide variety of actors from landowners associations farmers’ unions cooperatives scientific institutions and researchers to farmers themselves (or civil society) played a critical role in the process of drafting a policy agenda developing agricultural policies and were instrumental in implementing them in close relationship with the state. The result was a metamorphosis from mobilisation and representation of agrarian interests to a form of self-government or co-government of the agricultural sector at the national level which would only reach its highest point after the Second World War.

These issues are explored by established rural historians covering a period of seven decades (1870-1940). The papers provide a wide geographical perspective from the north of Europe to the Mediterranean.

To fully understand the changes in European animal husbandry during the long twentieth century it is necessary to examine all aspects of the food chain devoted to supplying proteins and fats to a growing population. Indeed the twentieth century saw great changes in animal husbandry - towards a market-oriented intensified and specialized production. This influenced and was influenced by policies trade aspects of animal and public health food supply issues aims in animal breeding development of production systems principles in feeding and impact of producer cooperatives.

Because it is not possible to apprehend all these global changes from a rural point of view this book aims to bring together many different expert perspectives in fields such as: agronomy veterinary medicine microbiology history of sciences economic and cultural history and sociology. Taking into account both national idiosyncrasies and changes from an international perspective the book gathers scientists from Italy Spain France England The Netherlands and Sweden.

The first part of the book will be devoted to the evolution of animal husbandry and commercialization from the end of the nineteenth century to the beginning of the twenty-first century. The second part of the book is devoted to the increasing medicalization of this sector with a special focus on the role of veterinarians and the on the increasing uses of antibiotics.

This book is situated at the crossroads of two recurring themes in rural history: agrarian contracts and property rights. Emphyteusis is at the heart of agrarian history in that it brings together agricultural history and the nature of social relations in traditional societies. Despite this many such contracts have been blithely ignored or unjustly dismissed either because they are hard to identify given the many variants that existed or because as a form of divided property they are generally perceived in a negative light.

Nevertheless emphyteusis is to be found everywhere even in regions which deny its existence and it is far from being obsolete. Rather it is flourishing prospering and long-lived particularly in urban areas. Emphyteusis has a long history and has played a central role sometimes misleading but always crucial in the process of agricultural development. It has held sway as a substitute when access to property has been impossible and as a source of conflicts has often revealed the nature of power relations between property owners on the one hand whether seigneurial or not and cultivators short-term and long-term tenants on the other. The different chapters in this volume illuminate these multiple facets and forms of this type of contract and imperfect property rights. Though the focus is on Mediterranean societies the questions raised have relevance far beyond this specific area.

This book is a collection of essays on social networks social capital and kinship in historical and contemporary rural societies. They span a wide range of European countries and historical situations from early modern Flanders and Italy to present-day Austria and Armenia. All the essays describe in detail how people on the countryside connected with one another in formal or informal relations. In doing so the authors use and critically discuss methods of historical interpretation social network analysis and econometrics. The book analyses these topics in three steps. First the authors address whether social relations can be of economic use. Secondly they examine the institutional conditions for such a conversion of social into economic capital reconstructing the often unexpected ways in which the economic and social spheres were connected both in ‘pre-modern’ and in ‘modern’ settings. Thirdly they show how political institutions were constructed out of social networks.

Georg Fertig is professor of economic and social history at Halle University in Germany. He has worked extensively on 18th and 19th-century historical demography and agrarian history.

The agrarian policies of fascism have never before been studied from a comparative perspective. This volume offers an up-to-date overview as well as new insights drawn from eight case-studies on Italy Portugal Hungary Germany Austria Spain Japan and Vichy France. The consensus that emerges from them is that the  agricultural and rural policies of fascist regimes tended towards modernization and that many of them resembled initiatives pursued in the post-war decades and the Green Revolution When viewed in this perspective  the fascist era appears less as an aberration and more as an integral part in  the global process of agrarian “modernization” a process whose merits are now being called into question.

Starting from the hypothesis that states were crucial as agents of modernisation this book explores why how and with what results European states have striven to transform their agricultural sectors in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Modernising agriculture has increasingly meant emulating the new organisational models of manufacturing industry. But since agriculture continues to rely heavily on living resources (plants and animals) the results of modernising farming have often differed significantly from the manufacturing sector. Modernised agriculture in other words is something quite different than simply industrialised agriculture.

Ranging from the Iberian Peninsula to Hungary and from Greece to England the chapters of this book deal with four principal questions: Why have state elites and their civil society allies chosen to modernise agriculture? What have they understood by agricultural modernisation? What sort of power resources have they taken as necessary for effective modernisation? And what were the consequences of the pursuit of modernising policies for the farming population and for agriculture?

Peter Moser is director of the Archives of Rural History in Bern. His research interests centre on the interaction of industrial societies with their agricultural sectors.

Tony Varley lectures in political science and sociology at the National University of Ireland Galway. His research interests centre mainly on agrarian politics and rural social movements.

By exploring the fundamental issues of property rights and markets in land this book will offer important insights into long-term economic change in Europe. The essays gathered here provide a major consideration of the institutional constraints which can be employed by historians and other commentators in order to explain both the slowness or even absence of growth in certain areas of the European economy between the thirteenth and nineteenth centuries as well as the discrete experiences of countries within Europe in this broad period.

This is an issue of current interest not least because discussion of 'institutional determinism' has become a standard of explanations of historical and economic change; that said those promoting such approach have sometimes been criticised for generalising from an 'institutional' perspective rather than taking full account of the variety of potential causative explanations within particular historical contexts.

The present collection of essays will therefore explore the conditions which permitted the progress of agriculture in Europe and the emergence of capitalism in the countryside. The research presented in this volume helps to demonstrate that changes in the market (demand relative prices...) encouraged changes in property rights but certainly did not do so in ways that were consistent or that led inexorably towards individual and exclusive rights of the kind described by the nineteenth-century liberal paradigm.

Specialist of rural and economic history Gérard Béaur is Directeur de Recherches at CNRS and Directeur d’Etudes at EHESS (Paris France). He was Chair of the COST Action A35 Progressore and he is currently director of the GDRI (International Research Network CNRS) CRICEC (Crises and Changes in the European Countryside).

Phillipp Schofield is Professor of Medieval History and Head of the Department of History and Welsh History Aberystwyth University. His research interests focus on rural society in England in the high and late Middle Ages.

Jean-Michel Chevet is a French researcher in the Institut National de la Recherche Agronomique ADESS-UMR-5185. He is a specialist in the economic history of the countryside particularly of the development of the English and French growth and of the history of vine growing.

Maria-Teresa Pérez-Picazo was Professor of Economic History at the University of Murcie (Spain). Her principal work was on agrarian history and she focused particularly on the subject of water management in the modern period.

Agricultural production has been the basic and single most important factor for the well-being of mankind since the Neolithic revolution. Insufficient agricultural output has led to deficient means of subsistence and sometimes even starvation while rich harvests brought about plenty and prosperity. Continuous increases in agricultural output have transformed whole societies and continents bringing about radical changes in people’s lives and economic prospects.

This book is focused on measuring and explaining agricultural growth in Europe. For most countries statistics on agricultural production are either non-existing or shaky for the period up to the end of the nineteenth century. Consequently researchers dealing with historical farming have been forced to put a lot of effort into reconstructing reliable data on inputs and outputs. The last decades have seen major progress and new approaches to quantify and explain agricultural development have been adopted. The book is the result of these efforts and it encompasses estimations and explanations of European historical agriculture over time from the ninth to the twentieth century and over space from the Iberian Peninsula to Scandinavia and from the British Isles to Russia.

Mats Olsson and Patrick Svensson are associate professors in Economic History at Lund University. Their major research area is the agricultural transformation of Sweden and its social and demographic consequences covering the manorial system peasant production and labour productivity social mobility and preindustrial land and capital markets.

It goes without saying that agriculture is a form of colonisation of nature by society. In the course of history the articulation of natural and societal features gave rise to a wide variety of agrosystems within the boundaries of Europe which were embedded in supra-regional political and economic contexts at least from the High Middle Ages onwards. By following an integrative approach this volume defines agrosystems as production systems based on the ecological and socioeconomic relations involved in the reproduction of rural societies at multiple levels. The authors explore the articulation of natural and societal factors through the prism of labour relations. The structural and practical organization of labour is seen as the crucial link between rural production and reproduction. Accordingly the contributions focus on the rural household as the basic unit of production and reproduction in different temporal and spatial contexts. Therefore the question arises if the changes in ecosystems and social systems have so fundamentally altered European agriculture up to now that peasant family farming will disappear (if it is no longer sustained by state intervention).

Rural societies are conventionally thought to be bound by tradition and resistant to change. But from the 18th century onwards many countries began to see the countryside as the basis of national prosperity with a healthy and increasing population and rising agricultural output fostering general economic growth. It became an objective of the State to encourage the trend but also to exert social control on this major part of the population in order to civilize the rude peasantry and acquire their electoral support.

This book deals with the various aspects of rural life in which the State intervened: economic matters such as property rights and market regulations; social questions from moral concerns to demographic policy; and the key issue of rural education.

From Sweden to the Iberian Peninsula the United Kingdom to Hungary and from the eighteenth century to the twentieth using both broad surveys and in-depth studies with an extensive introduction written from a comparative perspective an international group of historians (brought together by the COST network A35) for the first time examine the rural concerns of the state both economic and social in a comparative European context.

Nadine Vivier is professor of social and economic history at the University of Maine (France). She has worked extensively on rural societies from 1750 to 2000 in France and in Europe.