Agricultural History Review, Volume 69 Part 1 (2021), pp. 73–96

This article evaluates the role of family ties and social networks in mobilizing financial resources for land purchase and conveying information about migration destinations in nineteenth-century Estonia. It complements the existing body of literature on the non-institutionalized forms of borrowing and providing information in environments where markets were inefficient by extending the geographical scope to the eastern part of Europe. The study helps us to understand how peasants who had only recently started to pay money rent instead of labour dues and marketed a small portion of farm products could manage to purchase a farm, which normally meant paying 25–30 times the annual rent as a purchase price. Besides growing flax and becoming tenants prior to the purchase, it was family and communal networks that proved crucial to their success. Family members and relatives provided larger credit than non-family members, but larger social networks facilitated access to information. 

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